Ralph Fevre

I found it quite peculiar that a work with this title should be entirely silent on the role of labour unions, collective bargaining and legislation in the labour market. As far as I can tell the author considers wage negotiations to be the preserve of some other academic discipline than sociology. I'm not sure which discipline that would be, or why sociology wouldn't be equipped to analyze collective bargaining.

The first chapter of this book, which deals with the definition of labour markets, is not bad as a brief introduction. But after that the author time and again steers his thoughts toward various "values": industrial values, economic values, organizational values, technical values, polity values and so on. The disutility of this value-based approach becomes obvious when the analysis grinds to a halt and eventually diverges into multiple, equally boring threads without a clear unifying perspective.

The author of this book also relies very much on previously published research. In many places this book reads like an extended review paper where the author's own opinions are purposefully hidden between the lines. For some reason the author also feels a peculiar need to give methodological advice on the sociological study of labour markets, even though he doesn't seem to be at all well-equipped for such a task. All in all this book was a waste of time and I regret the fact that its title persuaded me to buy it.… (mehr)