Peter Fairbrother

Meagan Tyler

This book brings together perspectives from sociology, political science, gender studies, and history to produce new ways of analysing wildfire preparedness and policy in Australia. Drawing on data from hundreds of interviews with residents, volunteers and emergency services professionals living and working in wildfire-prone areas, the authors focus on issues of power and inequality, the contested nature of community and the relationship between citizens and the state. The book questions not only existing policy approaches, but also the central concepts on which they are founded. In doing so, the aim is to create a more conceptually robust and academically contextualised discussion about the limitations of current wildfire policy approaches in Australia and to provide further evidence of the need for disaster studies to engage with a variety of social science approaches. Wildfire and Power: Policy and Practice will be of most interest to higher degree by research students, other academics and policy makers examining the evolving patterns and politics of work, employment, management and industrial relations as well as those involved in emergency and disaster management service delivery. It would be most suited to academic and public libraries as well as organisations in the field of emergency and disaster management.

Policy and Practice

Wildfire and Power

Simon Clarke

Michael Burawoy

Pavel Krotov

Questioning the common belief that Russia is in transition to capitalism, this book looks behind the political and ideological debates to focus on the development of the real lives of the workers. It includes an analysis of the role of trade unions in the former Soviet system.

Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in Russia

What about the Workers?

Vadim Borisov

This major new book surveys the development of the new workers' movement in Russia under perestroika to understand how it connected with the workers at shop floor level and the national and local political authorities to whom it addressed its demands, and whose development it sought to influence. Drawing on a unique programme of collaborative research on Russian industrial relations from 1987 to 1995, the authors use a series of case studies to explain the gulf between the thousands of tiny independent groups, often based in a single enterprise or even a single shop, and regional and national organizations without a grassroots base. Extensive interviews with participants, tape and video recordings, as well as substantial documentary material are used in case studies of the 1989 miners' strike in Kuzbass, the Kuzbass regional council of workers' committees, the independent miners' union in Kuzbass, Sotsprof in Moscow and the Federation of Air Traffic Controllers' Unions. An extensive introduction puts these studies into context.

The Workers' Movement in Russia

Al Rainnie

Globalisation, State and Labour combines a new theoretical approach with comparative analysis – ensuring that it will be of vital interest to anyone concerned with the globalization debate, the future of the state, and organized labour. It shows how although the world is undergoing enormous changes involving politics, the economy and society, the position and place of the state, and the significance of state policy in this process, is heavily contested. Presenting a timely opportunity to review and re-assess the modern state with regards to labour, the essays included in this text, written by leading researchers in the area, develop a new theoretical framework that puts work, workers and their organizations at the heart of analyzing state restructuring. Using major studies from four countries (UK, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand), the contributors challenge many preconceptions regarding globalization and labour organization - including the notions that the state is being marginalized by the processes of globalization, and that the trade unions are becoming irrelevant.

Globalisation, State and Labour

Christian Lévesque

Marc-Antonin Hennebert

Transnational trade union action has expanded significantly over the last few decades and has taken a variety of shapes and trajectories. This book is concerned with understanding the spatial extension of trade union action, and in particular the development of new forms of collective mobilization, network-building, and forms of regulation that bridge local and transnational issues. Through the work of leading international specialists, this collection of essays examines the process and dynamic of transnational trade union action and provides analytical and conceptual tools to understand these developments. The research presented here emphasizes that the direction of transnational solidarity remains contested, subject to experimentation and negotiation, and includes studies of often overlooked developments in transition and developing countries with original analyses from the European Union and NAFTA areas. Providing a fresh examination of transnational solidarity, this volume offers neither a romantic or overly optimistic narrative of a borderless unionism, nor does it fall into a fatalistic or pessimistic account of international union solidarity. Through original research conducted at different levels, this book disentangles the processes and dynamics of institution building and challenges the conventional national based forms of unionism that prevailed in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Peter Fairbrother

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