This article maps the major changes taking place in academic work within the broader context of the neoliberalisation of universities. Recognising the great variability in the form and pace of neoliberalisation across institutions and national contexts, the article identifies a set of features and indicators to aid in the comparative assessment of the extent and effect of neoliberal processes at different institutions. The authors use conceptual tools from labour process theory to highlight the ways that neoliberalisation has resulted in academic work that is fragmented, deskilled, intensified, and made subject to greater levels of surveillance, hierarchy, and precarity. In doing so, the authors also demonstrate the importance of combining political economy and Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism, to highlight the way that external structural conditions and subjective processes combine to create new labour processes to which participants find themselves consenting and actively reproducing.

This article considers a range of legal issues that arise when family and domestic violence impacts upon the workplace. It examines the available data on the costs of family and domestic violence to employers and the community. It discusses the potential for employers to be affected by Australian State and Territory criminal and related laws that are intended to protect a person from family and domestic violence. Recent cases of discrimination arising from family and domestic violence are considered with some speculations as to other possible forms of liability for employers concerning work health and safety and workers compensation laws. The Australian Fair Work Commission’s determination of unpaid family domestic violence leave is also examined, as is the adoption of paid leave by some State and Territory governments and larger Australian employers. The article concludes with some reflections and speculations on how current laws may affect employers and what actions can be taken by employers to adopt supportive measures to protect employees.

Wage theft – the nonpayment of employees’ wages and benefits by employers – is a violation of national, state, and local labour standards, yet it is prevalent in the low-wage labour market of the United States. Building upon the recent increase in attention to the wage theft problem through advocacy, policy, and research efforts, we contextualise the problem within the country’s deregulated neoliberal labour market. We then propose a conceptual framework to demonstrate how the problem occurs when the price of labour standards violation is low due to lax enforcement, and there is a high price of compliance due to ambiguous and increasingly outdated labour standards. We further evaluate extant federal, state, and local policy initiatives designed to curb wage theft by modernising outdated labour standards and strengthening their enforcement. Finally, we propose future research agendas, such as examining the effects of fissured employment relationships and the enforcement efforts of state and local anti-wage theft laws, to guide the development of effective policy interventions.

This article analyses from a Keynesian approach the effect of wage devaluation on the Spanish labour market during the Great Recession post-2008. It challenges the pro-flexibility literature, which attributes to labour relations reforms the prevention of larger job destruction in the recession and a larger reduction in unemployment during the subsequent expansion. Instead, we examine the role of wage devaluation in the operation of Okun’s law and gross domestic product, using an extended version of the Bhaduri–Marglin model. We find that wage devaluation has not significantly modified Okun’s law and that through its impact on income distribution, the unemployment rate rose by 1.9 percentage points. We therefore provide evidence for the negative effect of wage devaluation on gross domestic product and the positive effect on the unemployment rate.

There is a substantial body of research that recognises the importance of analysing regional characteristics in employment and labour relations that occur in a given geographical context. However, this phenomenon has been scarcely studied from a spatial approach. This article uses a spatio-temporal panel data model to examine the spatial interactions between the gender employment gap and, some labour and socioeconomic characteristics of 727 municipalities of Andalusia, Spain, for the period 2012–2016. The results show that due to spatial diffusion mechanisms, a spatial spillover effect occurs in both the gender gap in employment and in some of the labour and socioeconomic characteristics considered. These findings may be extended to other geographic areas and can be of use for the implementation of regional policies aimed at narrowing the gender employment gap.

This article critically challenges the findings and assumptions of mainstream job polarisation literature. Based on the European Working Conditions Survey data and on the Job Demand-Control model, which allows for capturing the organisational dimension of jobs, we examine the patterns and evolution of occupations in 22 European countries from 2005 to 2015. Instead of pervasive job polarisation, we observe a near-pervasive trend of upgrading job quality, suggesting that job polarisation may be caused by the undervaluation/devaluation of jobs low in the occupational hierarchy – not by computerisation-driven changes in work tasks. Indeed, only the former can explain the decrease in the number of low-quality jobs while the number of low-paid jobs increases. After documenting the relevance of firm-level organisational choices, we suggest that counteracting job polarisation requires, beyond meso-level collective bargaining, a public intervention that promotes participatory decision-making in firms.

This extended Review Article assesses the changing role of the corporation in history, using the 2018 book by Oxford scholar Colin Mayer entitled ‘Prosperity’ as a basis for the analysis. This is a traditional review article centred around the Mayer book, but as we end we take our argument, albeit tentatively, to other related issues, beyond the Mayer argument. The corporation may be viewed in a positive sense as a creator of wealth and ‘prosperity’ for society in general, or as in a negative sense as generating ‘prosperity’ only for the few, shareholders and executives at the expense of the many, including workers, customers and future generations. Colin Mayer’s book visits both sides of this ‘prosperity’ equation and the title of the book derives from this recognition. Our argument is that even within the limits of contemporary neo-liberal global capitalism, corporations could be a force for more sustainable and balanced economic growth, as well as for social and environmental good. This requires a clarification of its ‘purpose’ as well as changes in the composition of its decision-making structures and revised mandates of its boards and sub-committees such as its remuneration committees that often have been given the power alone to determine executive pay. But we argue (albeit only suggestively) in the final section that the nature and variety of capitalism itself may have to be addressed alongside firm level changes for the long-term good and sustainability of a more equal society. Mayer shows that since its birth in Roman times, as an agency for promoting public works and the public good, the corporation has taken on many different roles, with varying purpose. Only in the last 50 years has the Milton Friedman doctrine, that companies should have only one role, of maximizing shareholder wealth, become the dominant explanation for the purpose of the corporation. We are not confident that corporations will voluntarily move in these progressive directions, especially given the continuing stranglehold of neo-liberal globalization. A push for broader social and economic change from below through struggle may be essential.