By bringing together and critically engaging with accounts of certain themes in business and labour history, and utilizing original research, this book aims to widen understanding of industrial society and provide a background to further study and research in the area management and labour relations history.

Love's Labour's Lost - William Shakespeare (with notes and glossary)

Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I. It follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to forswear the company of women for three years of study and fasting, and their subsequent infatuation with the Princess of Aquitaine and her ladies. In an untraditional ending for a comedy, the play closes with the death of the Princess's father, and all weddings are delayed for a year. The play draws on themes of masculine love and desire, reckoning and rationalization, and reality versus fantasy.

London Labour and the London Poor

By turns alarming, touching, and funny, the pages of London Labour and the London Poor exposed a previously hidden world to view. Henry Mayhew conducted hundreds of interviews that provided a first-hand account of costermongers and street-sellers, of sewer-scavengers and chimney-sweeps, an intimate and detailed portrait that offered unprecedented insight into their day-to-day struggle for survival.

The Economist (Intelligence Unit) - Still making it, An analysis of manufacturing labour costs in China (2014)

The Economist claims it "is not a chronicle of economics." Rather, it aims "to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress." It takes an editorial stance which is supportive of free trade, globalisation, government health and education spending, as well as other, more limited forms of governmental intervention. It targets highly educated readers and claims an audience containing many influential executives and policy-makers.

Grounding Globalization: Labour in the age of insecurity

Winner of the 2009 Distinguished Scholarly Monograph Prize, awarded by the American Sociological Association Labor and Labor Movements section∗ Claims have been made on the emergence of a new labour internationalism in response to the growing insecurity created by globalization. However, when persons face conditions of insecurity they often turn inwards. The book contains a warning and a sign of hope. Some workers become fatalistic, even xenophobic.