Service and Employment Relationships

Abstract

This article attempts to interpret the links between changes in employment, productive organisations and work content using the notion of the service relationship. Although this notion has been built on an analysis of service industries, it is a useful means of studying the various changes (and their links) that are occurring in both the manufacturing and service industries. Important shifts in employment relationships (job insecurity, externalisation etc.) are characteristics of the deep changes taking place both in the nature of both productive organisations and work, and of the difficulty of fitting these changes into the social and legal frameworks which currently govern employment relationships.