The adaptation of lean techniques in public services is viewed as an innovative managerialist response to government demands for more efficient services amidst large reductions in public spending. This paper explores workers' experiences of the impact of lean on work organisation and control and provides new insights into developments within contemporary back office clerical work. Bob Carter (rcarter@dmu.ac.uk) is Professor of Organisational Change Management at De Montfort University. His research interests are in labour process analysis, restructuring the public sector, class relations and trade union organising strategies. Andy Danford (corresponding author: andrew.danford@uwe.ac.uk) is Professor of Employment Relations at the University of the West of England. His research interests include labour process analysis of lean production and the high performance workplace and union organizing strategies. Debra Howcroft (Debra.howcroft@mbs.ac.uk) is Professor of Technology and Organisations at the University of Manchester and visiting Professor at Luleå University of Technology. Her research interests are concerned with the drivers and consequences of socio-economic restructuring in a global context. Helen Richardson (H.Richardson@ salford.ac.uk) is a Reader at the University of Salford. Her research interests encompass technology, work and organisation including issues of gender, the ICT labour market and the global location of service work. Andrew Smith (A.Smith14@Bradford.ac.uk) is a Lecturer in Human Resource Management and Employment Relations at the University of Bradford. His current research focuses on change in the public sector. Phil Taylor (philip.taylor@strath.ac.uk) is Professor of Work and Employment Studies at the University of Strathclyde and has researched and published extensively on call centres, offshoring, occupational health and safety, the labour process and trade union organising. New Technology, Work and Employment 26:2

Occupational health and safety (OHS) is under-researched in the sociology of work and employment. This deficit is most pronounced for white-collar occupations. Despite growing awareness of the significance of psychosocial conditions -notably stress -and musculoskeletal disorders, white-collar work is considered by conventional OHS discourse to be 'safe'.

This paper presents the case that research on gender and information systems (IS), from both quantitative and qualitative traditions, is problematic as the concept of gender continues to remain under-theorised. This will be elaborated upon with a critique of some recent qualitative and quantitative research papers that have been published in key IS journals within a ten-year period.

In this journal, Chen and Hirschheim have provided a historical analysis of positivist and interpretivist research paradigms and methodologies in the 10 years following the much cited work of Orlikowski and Baroudi. In this paper, we investigate the mysterious case of the missing paradigm -that of the critical approach to information systems (IS) research. We take Chen and Hirschheim's survey as our starting point and aim to fill the gap left by the absence of the critical paradigm in their analysis and make some criticisms of their method. Recent years have seen the growth of IS research that consciously adopts a critical perspective. This paper charts the development of critical IS research over the period of 1991-2001, adding some comments on more recent developments. We conclude by critically reflecting on the current development of critical research in the field of IS.

This article explores a neglected aspect of IT-enabled service work: the back office. The fieldwork study reveals how back office service work has been identified as suitable for ongoing reorganization and reconfiguration as firms respond to the pressures of contemporary capitalism. The article focuses on standardization as a means of facilitating organizational restructuring into shared service centres as highly skilled back office work is reframed as routine service work. Standardization is the vehicle that drives the commodification of the labour process as tasks are fragmented, quantified and traded in the global sourcing of services, allowing work to be lifted out of traditional organizational structures and placed elsewhere, or outsourced to other service providers. The study shows how this ongoing process is fraught with contradictions, problematically rendering people and place ancillary.