The shifting nature of employment practice towards the use of more precarious work forms has caused a crisis in classical labour law and engendered a new wave of regulation. This timely book deftly uses this crisis as an opportunity to explore the notion of precariousness or vulnerability in employment relationships. Its logical structure situates vulnerability in its developmental context before moving on to examine the goals of the regulation of labour law for vulnerability, its current status in the law and case studies of vulnerability such as temporary agency work and domestic work.'While vulnerability is a concept often mentioned in labour law and employment policy discourse, its precise meaning can remain elusive. This book provides rigorous theoretical analysis and contains fresh insights to aid our understanding of vulnerability. It is a stimulating contribution to the debate on how legal regulation responds to the changing characteristics of today's labour market.' -Mark Bell, The University of Dublin, Ireland 'The concept of vulnerability is crucial for understanding the characteristics of employment relationships and the purpose of labour law, but has not been deeply examined by labour lawyers so far. In this original and valuable contribution, Lisa Rodgers develops a theoretical account of vulnerability that advances our understanding of the field, exposing some shortcomings of existing theories and laws along the way.

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When miscommunications occur in conversation, participants have access to both speech-and language-based cues to clarify the miscommunicated talk. This article investigates what changes occur in prosodic speech patterns between initial and repeated talk in a brief free and unstructured conversation between an adult bilateral cochlear implantee and his chosen familiar communication partner, his wife, conducted in a clinical setting. The 23-minute conversation between the two participants included 37 self-repetitions of one or more words by the familiar communication partner. Most instances were repetitionas-repair sequences. Each of the 37 instances was subjected to acoustic analysis to identify frequency, loudness, and duration of word tokens in both the initial and repeated talk as well as pause length between tokens. Data suggest that loudness, pitch, and duration are commonly all increased in the prominent words repeated by the communication partner by contrast with the initial utterance. Repeated sequences included more pauses, but not longer ones, than the initial utterances. Prosodic patterns of repetition were influenced by the turn(s) preceding the repeated talk and the co-occurrence of prosodic and lexical elements in the repair/repetition turn. The success of the repeated talk in resolving miscommunications for this dyad suggests that prosodic speech cues in conjunction with lexical cues are effective repair strategies.

In this article it is argued that the COVID-19 crisis offers an important opportunity for engagement and reflection on the operation and effectiveness of laws regarding the workplace in the UK and beyond. The crisis underscores the temporality and partiality of labour law measures, and the need for a reimagining of that law based on more sustainable principles. I argue that this reimagination should coalesce around a human-centric approach to law, and the recognition of the need for deep and varied institutional support for workers. It is argued that these principles have been adopted historically in the context of health and safety law, but have not always been well applied, particularly in the context of the pandemic. In any event, the adoption of these principles and the greater integration of health and safety and labour law would encourage states to better promote worker agency and resilience and hence move towards meeting the aspirations of vulnerability theory.

In 1989 the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards (ACHS) embarked on a programme to develop acute health care clinical indicators in conjunction with the Australian medical colleges. Through a carefully structured stepwise process this collaboration established a 'World first' in 1993 with the introduction of the first set of indicators into the ACHS Accreditation programme. The programme remains unique in the formal involvement of providers in the development process and in the scope of the clinical areas covered in acute health care. From the year 2000 there will be 18 sets (and over 200 indicators) from which health care organisations (HCOs) can choose to monitor the major services they provide. There remains no compulsion to address a specific number of indicators. The growth of the programme has been considerable with more than half of the nations' acute HCOs reporting their clinical indicator data (twice yearly) and it provides a reflection of the care given for the majority of patient separations in acute care. This reporting process allows HCOs to receive feedback on the aggregate results together with comparative peer group information for each indicator they address. In addition to numerous publications in peer reviewed journals an annual aggregate report, 'the Measurement of Care in Australian Hospitals' is published. It reports both qualitative and quantitative data on all indicator sets for the preceding year. Validity of the indicators is strengthened each year with a review process and reliability and reproducibility of the data can now be demonstrated. The clinical response to the indicators has been overwhelming and there is now documented evidence of numerous actions taken by HCOs to improve both the processes and the outcomes of patient care. The nation wide database can be expected to reflect trends in care over the next few years. The process of indicator refinement, however, will continue and it is likely that a reduction in the total number of indicators will occur with a core group of the more 'robust' indicators remaining. Further directions in indicator development are likely to be in the area of multidisciplinary care and in the assessment of longer-term outcomes. In addition to measures of the quality of care, hopefully, in time, health care providers will also take part in the establishment of measures of the appropriateness of that care.