Employment in Britain

The employment structure in Britain has been changing rapidly over the last two decades, with the growing importance of non-manual work, the expansion of the service sector, the rapid spread of new technology, the increase in women's employment and the re-emergence of mass unemployment. These developments have altered fundamentally the research agenda of the sociology of employment. At the same time, there has been a major shift in the theoretical approaches to the employment relationship. There has been a movement away from the "closed system" assumptions of traditional industrial sociology and a growing awareness of the central importance of the values and beliefs of employers and employees, the pattern of industrial relations and the structure of the labour market.