Once upon a time, there was an idealistic novice journal editor who planned on offering readers a provocative, or at least interesting, Editorial with each issue. It did not seem too difficult given the shifts and upheavals in the current world of social science research, especially for a multidisciplinary journal. Indeed, it seems to me that we, as journal editors, have a responsibility to provide commentary for at least two reasons.
The first is that many editors experience our (multiple) disciplines perhaps a little differently, as readers of articles submitted to the journal, be they rough diamonds, carefully crafted solid pieces of work, or sparkling gems of lively scholarship. Not always wholly bound up in teaching, academic administration, activism, departments, research groups, faculties, university politics, or grant applications, journal editors can see the scholarship of our disciplines from a curious angle. We learn what researchers believe is appropriate for our multiple disciplines, and our journal’s place in those disciplines. So, given that we also have a (quite small) soapbox called the journal Editorial to introduce each issue, it behoves us to share that gained knowledge and some of those perspectives, with colleagues who are buried in the mountains of daily work demands in modern universities and other institutions.
The second reason for stimulating or interesting editorials is that we scholars and researchers all need discussions/questions/goads/conversations – and those started by editors might be useful in provoking new perspectives. In the minutiae of demanding daily work, we have all become atomised, individualised, and focused on prioritising endless demands made of us as teachers, researchers, and academic administrators. And of course, there is no profit in discussion or debate, so it is not appreciated, much less enabled in the modern corporatised university. Yet precisely because the pressures of work keep us task-focused, we become less ideas-focused – there is less and less time to allow ideas to wash through. One bulwark against such individualisation is to build the notion and the practice of community, participating, even asynchronously, in epistemic communities, or broader collegial scholarly communities, for discussion, debate, and new perspectives. Once upon a time, faculty common rooms (and, dare I say, even bars) generated debate and discussion and new ideas – (sadly not measurable, so perhaps they did not exist?). Academics were spurred into looking at old truths and favourite ideas in different ways – in an open, informal, and (mostly) collegial environment. They were places where half ideas emerged, and the seeds of new doubts were planted. New knowledge developed out of arguments, discussions, and (sometimes fierce) debates. What we need in these times of universities-as-corporations are goads and challenges that will generate just such debates (See e.g. Connell Reference Connell2019; Forsyth Reference Forsyth2014). In the absence of common rooms, tearooms (and bars), perhaps the occasional editorial might stimulate an idea – a new approach, or the need to (dis)agree furiously but thoughtfully.
That was the justification for the novice editor’s proposed editorials in The ELRR (and other journals) – that they might provoke/stir/goad and in so doing build community and collegiality.
However, our September issue (35(3)) is already late and the slides of my summer holiday will be boring (getting right focus is such a challenge … ) and mostly irrelevant for social science scholars, so this editorial will mostly offer a quick review of some of the marvellous material in this issue of The ELRR 35(2) of 2024.
Dr Tanya Carney
But first, I would like to briefly share with you reflections on a wonderful colleague and longtime participant in this journal who died recently. Dr Tanya Carney had been the journal’s Assistant Editor for some years, and before that, she had been a researcher and co-author, including with our previous (now Emerita) Editor, Dr Anne Junor. Tanya was late to an academic career and like many a single parent, needed time to finish her BA (HonsI) and then PhD. And – also like many a junior academic – once she finished her PhD, she worked as a contract researcher. Tanya was respected by her colleagues for her unstinting collegiality, her thoroughness, and her great expertise in both statistics and cogent writing.
Tanya was diagnosed with myeloma in 2018, and in the subsequent six years, she worked 2–3 part-time jobs in between treatments and massive health issues. For The ELRR, she not only worked as an Associate Editor shepherding articles through the review process, but she was also the journal’s Assistant Editor, copy-editing and proofreading articles and book reviews, double-checking statistics, setting up the journal template, and picking up on flawed logic or incorrect tables – and more. She also developed the most excellent colour-coded run sheets for each journal issue, showing the progress of every article from submission to rejection or revision, and then acceptance – a surprisingly long and tortuous process but wonderfully simplified by Tanya’s run sheets. She was almost always the most cheerful and least demanding person in a room. I suspect many academic journals are held together by Tanya Carneys – scholars doing it tough in one way or another, but always committed to the ideals of sustaining and disseminating scholarship.
For Tanya, doing research itself was a source of great delight but often just a dream. It is very difficult to do new research when drug treatments are challenging. She even said recently that doing research was ‘just like a drug – it is just wonderful to be in the middle of researching new materials and integrating new ideas’. In Tanya’s case, it was especially for research which was based on rigorous statistical analysis and which also took ‘rights-, equality- or justice-based approaches to economic or social policy, employment relations or labour studies’. Indeed, Tanya was involved in coming up with precisely those ideals which are core to The ELRR, just as they are set out on the journal home page (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-economic-and-labour-relations-review). These were ideals by which Tanya lived and held strongly. Tanya Carney died the day before her 52nd birthday on 24 September 2024. We will miss her hugely. This issue of ELRR is dedicated to Tanya Carney PhD - collegial scholar.
The long-awaited 35(3) September 2024 issue
The first half of this issue comprises a very special Themed Collection – ‘The economics of OHS’ – eight wonderful articles including an outstanding original article from the two Guest Editors, Professor Michael Quinlan and Professor Michael Belzer. It offers deep insights into the importance of researching safety and health in the workplace and beyond. I commend the introduction and the remaining seven articles, which are discussed in that introductory article.
The articles in the latter half of this issue highlight the frequent tendency toward inequality in labour markets, taken from a range of scholarly perspectives. Almost all demonstrate the power of employers and the importance of employer perceptions in processes of recruiting and employing workers – whether they are in Canada, Australia, India, China, Türkiye, or Spain. The first two articles direct their research even more closely, evaluating employment barriers and possibilities for Indigenous workers. The first of these is Stevens and Connelly’s ‘Not a good fit? The roles of aesthetic labour, gender, race, Indigeneity, and citizenship in food service employment’. These scholars take the constructed notion of ‘fit’, together with labour market segmentation theory, as important for explaining why and how employers exclude marginalised populations, such as Canada’s Indigenous people, from higher paying, more secure jobs. As these authors conclude, ‘the hope that education and experience might lift individuals out of poverty and underemployment is betrayed by culturally-defined notions of fit’. Provocative scholarship indeed!
Employers and employment practices are at the heart of analysis from Eva, Hunter, Boyd, Bodle, Foley and Harris in ‘Closing the employment gap: estimations of indigenous employment in Indigenous and non-Indigenous owned businesses in Australia’. In this article, the authors show that differences in business characteristics per se cannot explain why, despite progressive policies, non-Indigenous-owned businesses trail Indigenous businesses in terms of employment and effectiveness for Indigenous workers. Using regression analyses and Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions, the authors demonstrate that divergent Indigenous employment outcomes highlight the crucial need to incorporate Indigenous-led approaches to organisational governance, human resource management (HRM), and workplace & recruitment practice in Australian organisations, if some parity of access and equity is to be achieved.
Shifting to the subcontinent, the next article is ‘ Decent work deficit in India: deterioration and determinants’ from Moktan and Chakrabarty. In a lively and rigorous analysis, the authors explore the determinants of decent work in India. The authors find a greater extent of decent work could be achieved through good governance and more effective consideration of citizens’ needs, rather than a blinkered focus on economic growth and business flexibility. Noting the deteriorating quality of jobs in India, the authors promote a range of countervailing policy options, including a greater emphasis on the important role of civil society and politics.
The next article deals with an important structural labour market determinant in China, the Hukou system. Though an ancient system of registration, it was formally established in the 1950s to limit movement between rural and urban areas. In ‘Labour market segmentation, self-employment and Hukou reform’, Huang and Ke analyse elements of the China Family Panel Studies dataset to evaluate the needs and responses of rural-urban migrants after the 2014 changes to the Hukou system. Limited by access to many jobs, the primary gain for the migrant workers is through self-employment. For them, and for a better construction industry, the authors emphasise the importance of ‘addressing the skill gap and providing educational opportunities for urban migrants’.
In Türkiye, Gultekin, Hisarciklilar, and Yusufi apply rigorous statistical and regression analyses using 2002–2020 Household Labour Force Survey data to highlight the needs of a highly segmented labour market in their article ‘ Multiple faces of labour market segmentation within the Turkish construction industry’. The authors’ research focussed on the burgeoning but difficult construction industry in Türkiye, where low labour standards and pay, and prevalence of temporary employment, economic hardships, work accidents, and a lack of vocational training have been worsened by a series of earthquakes and an extremely high number of refugees desperate for work. Yet Türkiye’s proneness to seismic activity, on the one hand, and the national importance given to raising standards of living across the board, on the other, highlight the urgent need for policies to ensure decent working conditions and provision of vocational education, even under such confronting conditions in the construction industry.
In the final scholarly and provocative article in this issue, R elationship between Minimum Wage and Employment: A synthetic control method approach, Arnadillo, Fuenmayor, and Granell draw on a robust and integrated array of analytical tools to evaluate the impact that a significant increase in the minimum wage (MW) in Spain had on employment levels and the labour market more generally. In exploring the relationship between a significant MW increase and employment levels, the authors make skilful use of a synthetic control method approach. They set out to provide empirical evidence on the effect on employment that was directly attributable to the major increase in the MW in Spain in 2019. In so doing, they demonstrate clearly that the increase in the MW in 2019 had few, if any, direct negative effects, despite major changes in Europe and the broad effect of the pandemic. It is so good to see a lively and clear presentation alongside grand use of thorough economic testing.
The two final items in this issue are two interesting book reviews: one a biography, the other an autobiography. Dabscheck pays lively homage to the subject in his review of the massive biography of a former, longstanding High Court judge, titled Sir Gerard Brennan: The Law’s Good Servant by Jeff FitzGerald. In his inimitable style, Dabscheck traces the career and explores the influences on Sir Gerard Brennan as a lawyer and a judge. In the last book review in this issue, Michael O’Donnell offers a crisp and thoughtful review of the autobiography of ‘one of Australia’s most prominent industrial relations scholars, Russell Lansbury’. In his review of Crossing Boundaries: Work and Industrial Relations in Perspective, O’Donnell deftly discusses the story of Lansbury’s experience of an academic discipline and the ideals of that august scholar, one who played a leading role in the industrial relations academy for decades.
Book reviews are always deeply appreciated by readers, if not by higher education measuring systems. The ELRR is always on the lookout for more book reviewers – any volunteers?
I hope the rest of the month is good for you – and you find some provoking ideas on the way!
Diana Kelly
September 2024
