ABSTRACT

Compared with other aspects of retailing and retail management, employment is under-researched. As Sparks (1987:239) has observed “employment in retailing has, historically, been one of the leastconsidered aspects of the distributive trades”. With the increasing awareness of the importance of services in general, and retailing in particular, to the UK economy, this situation has begun to change. Since the early work of Robinson & Wallace (1976) on pay and employment, significant studies have been undertaken of part-time working in retailing (NEDO 1988b), the employment characteristics of large stores (Sparks 1983) and, more recently, the training needs of the retail workforce (Robinson 1990, Jarvis & Prais 1989). With the population of working age set to experience profound structural changes, and the civilian labour force in the UK, as elsewhere, set to have a more diverse composition than it does at present, employment seems likely to emerge as a most important issue in contemporary retailing.