Constructing markets for temporary labour: employment liberalization and the internationalization of the staffing industry

Abstract Temporary staffing has joined the ranks of the globalizing service industries. The largest agencies have now established a presence in more than sixty nations, where they are placing employees in temporary positions across a range of occupations, from clerical, cleaning and light industrial work through to accountancy, law and IT. The opening up of new occupational and geographical markets around the world has been driven by the imperative to sustain growth in sales volumes, in this business of tight margins and fierce competition. The most lucrative of the staffing industry's ‘emerging markets’ are found in the actively deregulating economies of the global North ‐ including Spain, Germany, Italy and Japan. While exploring how the staffing industry has been active in the construction of these markets, we argue that this fast‐growing business has become an important agent of labour market liberalization.     

The individual economic well-being of Native American men and women during the 1980s: A decade of moving backwards

The study examines whether the income opportunities of Native Americans over the 1980s improved in response to stronger aggregate job growth or deteriorated in response to declining wage and employment opportunities, particularly for the less-skilled. Using data from the 1980 and 1990 US Census on individuals aged 16–64, a methodology is presented to analyze the effect of changes in the income distributions of Native Americans and whites on the average Native American-white income ratio. Oaxaca-type decompositions are also used to yield insights into the role of economy-wide as opposed to Native American-specific effects on changes in income, hourly earnings and annual hours employed over the period. The study concludes that the economic circumstances of Native American men and women further deteriorated relative to whites over the decade, chiefly due to the declining valuation given to Native American human capital, particularly for men. An important finding of the study is the role of economy-wide vis-à-vis native-specific effects: almost all of the adverse movements in average hourly earnings against Native Americans can be attributed to changes in economy-wide hourly earnings structures (with the least-skilled being paid less), whereas the large fall in relative annual hours is due to changes specific to Native Americans.     

THEORY AND EXPERIMENTS ON SPATIAL COMPETITION

We present theoretical and experimental results on spatial competition between two firms. Firms choose locations simultaneously along a line representing a linear market. Identical consumers with non-increasing demand functions are uniformly distributed along this line. We solve for symmetric equilibrium payoffs in an infinitely repeated game for the case of linear demand and an arbitrary discount factor. The set of equilibriums found includes both competitive and collusive payoffs. In laboratory experiments in which the final period was unknown to the players in advance, we observed both competitive and collusive outcomes. Non-binding communication led to collusion.     

Variegated neoliberalization: geographies,modalities, pathways

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of ‘neoliberalism’ within three influential strands of heterodox political economy – the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market‐oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or ‘variegated’, character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post‐1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive ‘waves’ of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market‐oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or ‘rule regimes’, within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.     

NASH EQUILIBRIUM AND BUYER RATIONING RULES: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

Laboratory experiments compare the results of two different buyer rationing rules on Bertrand-Edgeworth duopoly markets. The two rationing rules, a value queue and a random queue, specify the ordering of buyers and generate different predictions under otherwise identical conditions. These experiments show market outcome can chane significantly with a change in the ordering of buyers. The direction of these changes agrees with the predictions of the stage-game Nash equilibrium. Thus, the single-shot Nash equilibrium is show to have predictive power even in repeated games.