Assembling Work: Remaking Factory Regimes in Japanese Multinationals in Britain »

Tony Elger has taught Sociology at the Universities of Aberdeen, Birmingham and Warwick. His main research interests are in the Sociology of Work and Employment and Comparative Labor Studies. He is currently the Director of the Center for Comparative Labor Studies. Chris Smith has taught Industrial Sociology, Industrial Relations and Organization Studies at the University of Aston, and held visiting positions in the Universities of Hong Kong, Sydney, Wollongong and Griffith. His main research interests are in the Sociology of Professions, Labor Process Theory, Comparative Work Organization, and Human Resource Management. He is currently Research Director in the School of Management and Director in two research Centers: Health Experts in Call Centers and the Centre for Workplace Research in Asia Pacific Societies.

Sociologists Elgar (U. of Warwick) and Smith (U. of London) augment the many studies of Japanese companies in Japan and of companies elsewhere adopting and adapting Japanese practices, by focusing on subsidiaries of Japanese companies in Britain. They draw particularly on labor process analyses of the indeterminacy of labor power and the active and contested construction of work regimes, and contemporary institutional analyses of the local and global context within which transnational firms operation. They are concerned with how the internal work and employment regimes relate both to wider corporate structures and policies and to local labor markets, local state policies, and national institutional arrangements. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR