Mothers, Extraordinary Labor, and Amacasual: Law and Politics of Nonstandard Employment in the South African Retail Sector

This article examines changing social meaning embodying legal categories of nonstandard employment within South African retailing between the 1950s and the postapartheid period. Using archival and interview material, the article shows how trade unions constructed part-time and casual employment through gendered, class, and racial meanings to produce two very different legal categories. Black workers' rights claims in the 1980s developed within these changing socio-legal parameters. The image of the full-time permanent worker became political agent, and in the postapartheid period, increasing numbers of casual workers became marginalized from the union. The relationship between rights and regulation gives us a more complex way of understanding worker politics.     

Variations in Regulatory Enforcement Styles

This paper examines intra- and inter-agency variations in the enforcement styles of three regulatory inspectorates in Great Britain. It is argued that the accommodative approach typically associated with regulatory enforcement is not a homogeneous and uniform concept, rather it embraces a range of strategies. These are described and a variety of organisational, social and political factors are considered as explanations of the variations which arise.     

Understanding the New Regulatory Governance: Business Perspectives

This article considers business understandings of two of the principal features of the new regulatory governance. First, it focus on attempts to place greater responsibility for risk regulation on business and asks how well equipped they are to manage this. Second, it examines the decentering of the state and considers how business organizations view the influence of nonstate actors on their business regulation. These issues are discussed with reference to data from two different research projects in the United Kingdom. The findings question the implicit assumptions the new regulatory governance makes about how well equipped businesses are to manage the risks they generate and how able nonstate influences are to influence the full range of businesses.     

Pathways to power: Women's representation in the 2014 European Parliament elections

The 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections produced a record proportion of women MEPs overall (37 per cent). Yet, these results vary widely across countries and parties. This article aims to explain these variations, evaluating not only who the elected representatives of the 8^th EP are, but also how they got there. Are the paths to the EP the same for women and men? Are there gender differences in terms of MEPs’ political experience? A unique dataset listing more than 700 elected MEPs and their background, party and country characteristics is used to empirically examine who makes it to the EP and through which route. The results of the analysis suggest no significant gender differences in the pathways to the EP. Yet, parties matter: more women were elected to the 8^th EP from left‐wing than from right‐wing or ‘new’ parties, and both men and (especially) women representing right‐wing parties tend to be politically more experienced than their fellow MEPs from other types of parties. Furthermore, it is found that men are more likely than women to be promoted straight from party office to the EP, suggesting that some pathways to the EP are less open to women than others.     

The Response of Business to Social Regulation in England and Wales: An Enforcement Perspective*

This paper considers business adaptation to legal regulation from an enforcement perspective. It is argued that regulatory agencies and business have a reflexive relationship in which there is a continual process of adaptation and readaptation by one party and then the other. This reflexivity and its implications are discussed with reference to socio-legal research into the regulation of occupational health and safety and environmental pollution in England and Wales.