Series Editors’ Preface

Summary

We are very pleased to launch this new book series, Understanding Work and Employment Relations, with Cécile Guillaume's monograph Organizing Women: Gender Equality Policies in French and British Trade Unions. This is the first book to be published within this series and we are delighted to have such a strong contribution as our starting point.

The purpose of this book series is to create a space for monographs and edited volumes highlighting the latest research and commentary in the academic field of employment relations. The series is associated with the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA), which marked 70 years of existence in 2020, and seeks to draw on the expertise of the membership of BUIRA and their contributions to its annual conference, as well as employment relations academics from around the world. Employment relations is a mature field of study and continues to be of relevance to academic and practitioner audiences alike. BUIRA has always been deliberately broad in scope as the field of employment relations has evolved and changed over time. BUIRA regards employment relations to be the study of the relation, control and governance of work and the employment relationship. It is the study of rules regarding job regulation and the ‘reward–effort bargain’. These issues remain relevant today, in an era where the standard employment relationship has become increasingly fragmented due to employers’ pursuit of labour flexibility and we see the continued expansion of the gig economy. Employment relations (and adjacent research areas including human resource management [HRM] and the sociology of work) is taught widely in universities around the world, most commonly in business and management schools and departments. The field of study is multidisciplinary, encompassing law, politics, history, geography, sociology and economics. HRM has a tendency to focus uncritically on management objectives, without exploring issues of work and employment in their wider socioeconomic context, and has its disciplinary roots in psychology, whereas employment relations retains a strong critical social science tradition. However, as scholars in this area we feel that there is a need for regular, up-to-date, research-focused books that reflect current work in the field and go further than more introductory texts.