ABSTRACT
This chapter develops some of the issues introduced in Chapter 1 surrounding one of the most important sets of employment rules – pay and pay determination – but in the reverse order because pay is the outcome of the process of pay determination. As Rubery (1995: 640) observes, ‘Payment systems are a mechanism or a medium through which the employment relationship is constituted and codified . . . development of a new payment system may be seen as part of a reconstitution of power relations’. In particular we show how pay and reward systems constitute one of the central facets of a managerial cost-control approach, with a strong gender effect.1
