Previous Special Issues

Eight articles from different disciplines (work psychology, ergonomics, sociology of work, labour economics and management sciences) provide theoretical, methodological and empirical insights in their examination of the duality of technologies.

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In the same vein as current critical debates, the call for papers for this special issue aimed at renewing approaches to HRM by taking a more human approach to management (Taskin and Dietrich, 2016). In this issue, we wish to challenge the influences of organizational behaviour approaches and the instrumentalization of HRM. The perspective adopted focuses not only upon the critical analysis of current HRM practices, but also upon experiments relating to alternative approaches. Indeed, critical discourse must be supported by empirical studies that are anchored in the ‘field’, in the reality of work, close to the workers (including managers and senior leadership), and that realize not only the effects produced by traditional HRM (loss of meaning, dilution of the collective, distancing…), but also collective and individual strategies that are implemented in an attempt to reconstruct meaning and workplace communities. These studies should also focus on innovations aimed at a more pluralist HRM. That is, an HRM that directs its efforts towards the regulation of the employment relationship from an institutional complementarity perspective (state, union, business, community, etc.).

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In this issue we will explore these ‘new’ employment relationship boundaries. In response to criticism of research trends that focus too narrowly on so-called atypical jobs, which mask the fact that labour transformations ‘destabilize stables’ (Castel, 2009) or extend precariousness and risk to typical jobs (Vosko, 2007), it is necessary to study the characteristics associated with diversity in the employment relationship or, in other words, the effects stemming from the cohabitation of workers having different statuses and/or employers or parties giving the order in concrete work situations. Indeed, if solidarities arise in workplaces based on a common condition and a shared subordination (Castel, 2003), the coexistence of identical positions that have distinct employment statuses in the same work space clearly raises the question of the conditions for the emergence of these solidarities at work. Under the threat of unemployment and the precariousness of jobs, employees are driven to play a game of ‘competition between equals’, which contributes to the weakening of intra-categorical homogeneities. We see that it is a question of collective representation and class solidarity on the one hand, but on the other, and particularly in America, it is also about access to social protection.

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This special issue of Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations presents articles based on original research on fundamental changes to work and work arrangements that undermine workers’ health and safety, exacerbate health inequalities and pose major challenges to those who want to resist a 'race to the bottom' in working conditions and imagine and promote regulatory reforms to better protect workers and their health. The papers in this special issue not only make a contribution to knowledge about work intensification and employment precariousness and their impact on health and safety, but also shed light on further challenges presented by the current globalized work environment: the association of precariousness with international, regional and local employment-related mobility, both in developed and developing countries; the commuting difficulties faced by some workers in precarious employment; the non-standard work schedules resulting from work intensification pressures and the consequential health and work family balance difficulties; and the dilution of responsibility for health and safety and for workers’ compensation in international supply chains. One paper illustrates an old but still pervasive challenge: the production of a 'paradigm of doubt' which uses and even produces scientific uncertainty to obscure the effects of hazards to workers’ health, thus delaying the prevention and compensation of their negative effects on health

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