Book review: Stephen Hardy and Robert Upex. 2006. Employment law for business

8/16/2019 Book review: Stephen Hardy and Robert Upex. 2006. Employment law for business

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Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources

DOI: 10.1177/103841110704500308042007; 45; 380Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources

Andrew Frazerstudents ISBN 1 4129 0022 0; xvi + 144 pages; £22.99 (pbk); London: Sage

Book review: Stephen Hardy and Robert Upex. 2006. Employment law for business

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Stephen Hardy and Robert Upex. 2006.

Employment law for business students

ISBN 1 4129 0022 0; xvi + 144 pages; £22.99 (pbk); London: Sage

This short book, written by two academic lawyers, is intended to provide under-graduates in commerce and business studies with an accessible introduction toBritish labour law. British lecturers and students in labour law enjoy a wide choiceof texts, including several targeted at business students. What makes this oneworthy of publication?

There is no doubting the authority of the authors. Robert Upex, as a formerchair of UK industrial tribunals and a venerable author of employment law textsfor legal practitioners, is able to contribute a wealth of experience as well as schol-

arship. Stephen Hardy is a former law lecturer, now at the bar. They havepublished other texts, including a more detailed text titled Labour law (publishedby Oxford).

This book certainly has the virtue of brevity: at 138 pages of text, it does notover-complicate matters with discussion of obscure points. The style is discursivewith few textual embellishments, although the authors do use lists to summariselegislation and there are some diagrams. Each chapter has questions and problemswhich are designed to reinforce and test the information in a practical context.

All of the major topics in individual employment law are covered in separatechapters, including: status as an employee, formation and contents of the employ-ment contract, equal pay, discrimination, family rights (parental leave and flexibleworking arrangements), dismissal, redundancy, occupational health and safety. There

is a rather brief chapter on trade unions, collective bargaining, consultation and indus-trial action. The effects of the major UK legislation, such as the Employment Rights

Act 1996 and the Employment Relations Act 1999 (including the 2004 amendments), areincorporated into the account, while relevant European Union directives are alsonoted. There is also a separate chapter sketching the functions and procedure of theemployment tribunals and the remedies they may issue.

The book thus serves the purpose of providing a short introduction to UKlabour law for non-law students, and also provides a useful entrée for theforeigner. For any course which aims at a broader contextual or critical perspec-tive it would need to be supplemented. I would hope that any course on employ-ment law under a common law system, particularly one designed for businessstudents, will deal with topical issues in employment relations and HRM. At theleast, so many decisions of higher courts these days raise issues where changingpatterns of work come to challenge conventional legal relations and categories.

Thus in dealing with the status of the employee, still the fundamental startingpoint of labour law, courts everywhere have had to contend with casualisation,outsourcing, agency labour and temporary workers. In Dacas v Brook Street Bureau(2004) the English Court of Appeal toyed with the idea of finding that a workersupplied by a labour hire agency on a long-term basis was covered by an impliedemployment contract with the host firm, as a means of recognising the ongoingrelationship which had developed. In other cases, casual employees have beentreated by the English courts as covered by an employment contract only on each

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individual occasion of their engagement. In such ways the courts have sought to

come to terms with changing modes of work through the staid and creaking legalmechanism of contract. Hardy and Upex recount the cases, but do not go furtherin exploring the implications and shortcomings of such legal decisions. No doubtit was thought that anyone studying employment law as part of their businessstudies is interested primarily in getting a grasp of the legal principles in a brief and easily applied manner. Most business students (and many law students as well)would no doubt agree with that aim.

The challenges of teaching law to non-law students lie in disabusing them of the view that law is merely a collection of rules to be applied to any situation (whileavoiding the opposite trap that law is merely a jumble of arbitrary decisions), andof drawing the connections between business and legal studies. When it comes toemployment relations, it is not difficult to see how strong are the connections

between legal ideas and the social relations from which they emerge and whichthey help to govern. The connections with the organisational and structuralfeatures of working life are nowadays frequently recognised in the primary legaltexts themselves, by judges and legislators. The difficulty lies in doing so from aperspective which is informed by the disciplines of the social sciences and manage-ment studies.

Andrew Frazer, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Gary P. Latham. 2007.

Work motivation: History, theory, research, and practice

ISBN 0 7619 2017 X; 337 pages; £29.00; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

In his book, Work motivation: History, theory, research, and practice, Gary Lathamsynthesizes existing approaches to work motivation, drawing from a rich varietyof topics. The book is organized to enhance the development of work motivationtheory and suggests both new research avenues for motivation research andtheory-grounded solutions for organizations.

Latham provides clarity and insight to work motivation theories for the

benefit of both academics and practitioners. The book reflects his approach tousing theory to inform practice, and for practice to inform theory. Specifically, thebook a) highlights the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach tointegrate work motivation theories, and thereby enriching extant theories; b)emphasizes the role of volition in human behavior; c) integrates the cognitiveapproach to work motivation with more recent advances in motivation; d) incor-porates findings on conscious motivation with research on subconscious activationof goals; e) considers the role of emotions in motivation; and f) draws on findingsfrom clinical psychology.

The primary goal of this book is to provide graduate students and early careerscholars with a suite of research in the area of motivation at work. Latham’s

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Book review: Stephen Hardy and Robert Upex. 2006. Employment law for business