Contesting Recognition

This book explores the social and political significance of contemporary recognition contests in areas such as disability, race and ethnicity, nationalism, class and sexuality, drawing on accounts from Europe, the USA, Latin America, the Middle East and Australasia.

This book examines the meanings and significance of the UK Gender Recognition Act within the context of broader social, cultural, legal, political, theoretical and policy shifts concerning gender and sexual diversity, and addresses current debates about equality and diversity, citizenship and recognition across a range of disciplines.

Offers historical comparative and cross-national perspectives to the debates on the politics of recognition.

Several thousand new trade union recognition agreements have been signed since 1997, representing a major development within industrial relations in Britain. This has resulted from the interaction of union organizing efforts and the statutory union recognition provisions of the Employment Relations Act 1999. However for trade unions, recognition alone is not enough, a vital issue is whether, having gained union recognition, trade unions are now effectively delivering upon the promises and prospects of union recognition. These essays examine the substantive outcomes of these new agreements in regard to union representation and collective bargaining. In particular, they explore: the impact on terms and conditions of employment employers’ behaviour and strategy the nature of the union-management bargaining relationship the building of workplace unionism. While the collection focuses primarily on Britain, the germane issues are also looked at in the context of Australia, Canada and the U.S.A. Conceptually and theoretically, Union Recognition offers contributions which develop our understanding of the relationship between workplace and national unionisms and of mobilization theory.

This new book shows how citizenship, and its meaning and form, has become a vital site of contestation. It clearly demonstrates how whilst minority groups struggle to redefine the rights of citizenship in more pluralized forms, the responsibilities of citizenship are being reaffirmed by democratic governments concerned to maintain the common political culture underpinning the nation. In this context, one of the central questions confronting contemporary state and their citizens is how recognition of socio-cultural ‘differences’ can be integrated into a universal conception of citizenship that aims to secure equality for all. Equality policies have become a central aspect of contemporary European public policy. The ‘equality/difference’ debate has been a central concern of recent feminist theory. The need to recognize diversity amongst women, and to work with the concept of ‘intersectionality’ has become widespread amongst political theory. Meanwhile European states have each been negotiating the demands of ethnicity, disability, sexuality, religion, age and gender in ways shaped by their own institutional and cultural histories. This book was previously published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social & Political Philosophy (CRISPP).

CLOSING SPEECH: Edwin GRECH.

Walter Ong pioneered the study of how orality and literacy mutually enrich each other in the evolution of human consciousness, arguing that verbal communication moves from orality to literacy and on to what he has termed the "secondary orality" of radio and television. The original essays in this volume explore the implications of Ong's work across the diverse fields of cultural history, literary theory, theology, philosophy, and anthropology. These scholars maintain that Ong's view of orality not only changes our readings of ancient and medieval texts, but that it also changes our understanding of the differing epistemologies of oral and literate cultures and of the coexistence of the oral and literate within a given culture.

Comprehensive and clearly focused, this is a must-read text for students of employment relations. The accessible writing style is combined with a wealth of contemporary examples, allowing the reader to fully engage with the key critical debates surrounding each topic.