- Title
- The patterns of labour regulation in the Chengdu hotel industry
- Creator
- Liu, Ziheng
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This thesis reports on empirical research aimed at describing and explaining the pattern(s) of labour regulation in the hotel industry in Chengdu, a large city in western China. In terms of its intellectual foundations, the thesis has its roots in the institutionalist paradigm and the domain of industrial relations/employment relations. In particular, it seeks to build upon studies of the structures of collective bargaining. The review of the existing literature – especially in Chapter 2 – argues that despite their valuable contributions to empirical knowledge and their theoretical insights, studies in this tradition have tended to be excessively narrow in their descriptions and lacking in holistic explanation. The analysis offered in this thesis differs from these earlier studies in two main ways. First, a wider pattern of labour regulation is analysed using a descriptive framework that focuses on seven ‘dimensions’: the level, status, scope, parties and coverage as well as vertical and horizontal complexity of labour regulation. Second, this thesis adopts a more holistic explanatory framework. In broad terms, it is argued that contextual factors provide opportunities and constraints on the agency of the parties, but they cannot determine the processes and outcomes of labour regulation – it is only by understanding the ways in which context and agency work together that effective explanation can be delivered. The empirical application of these broad theoretical ideas to the Chengdu hotel industry comes through a two-level case study design, which is presented and justified in Chapter 3. The findings of the research, presented in Chapters 4–6, are firstly that there is no significant centralised regulation (in regulatory processes or standardised outcomes) at the industry level. This study found that the parties to labour regulation in the Chengdu hotel industry had not developed the organisational structures or regulatory processes that would be needed to introduce centralised regulation. Central to explaining patterns of labour regulation is the role of the state, which performs a dual role as a setter of context and as a party to labour regulation within the industry. These local agencies mostly did not intervene in ways that would have been required if more centralised regulation was to be achieved. The second main finding is that when the patterns of labour regulation at the enterprise/workplace level were explored in more detail, as reported in Chapter 6, it was observed that labour regulation was not completely decentralised or fragmented. Rather, hotels in three industry segments revealed similar patterns of labour regulation. There is evidence, then, of coordination producing some standardisation at a level between the industry and the individual hotel. The explanations offered for this segmented pattern of labour regulation focus on the interactions between contextual factors specific to the hotels in each segment (e.g. ownership, size, age and business model) and the strategic choices made by managers in these hotels.
- Subject
- employment relations; China; hotel industry; hospitality industry; labour regulation
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/${Handle}
- Identifier
- uon:34884
- Rights
- Copyright 2019 Ziheng Liu
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 282 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |