Réka Plugor | University of Leicester (original) (raw)

Papers by Réka Plugor

Work, Employment and Society, 2019

This article focuses on the interlinkages between the labour process and global value chains. It ... more This article focuses on the interlinkages between the labour process and global value chains. It draws on the renewed growth in UK apparel manufacturing, specifically within the fast fashion value chain, and asks how value chain requirements are translated into the labour process as well as how the latter enables quick response manufacturing. The case study shows how buyer-lead firms engender accelerated capital circuits of fast fashion which rely on an increased segmentation of manufacturers and workers, the elimination of unproductive spaces in the labour process, and a further rise in the informalisation and precarity of labour. The article demonstrates a strategic disconnection within the fast fashion value chain: upstream manufacturers are only able to satisfy lead firms’ economic and operational standards if they disconnect – informalise – labour from the latter’s ‘ethical’ standards.

This report for the Ethical Trading Initiative investigated value chain restructuring in the UK a... more This report for the Ethical Trading Initiative investigated value chain restructuring in the UK apparel industry. Accelerated by the rise of fast fashion, it found significant minimum wage violations and increasing precarity at work and in employment contracts. Public as well as private regulatory and enforcement systems and practices were found to be largely inefficient.

Erdélyi Társadalom, 2006

The study focuses on the city of Kolozsvár, an important city for both the Romanian and the Hunga... more The study focuses on the city of Kolozsvár, an important city for both the Romanian and the Hungarian elite, which is a university and a cultural center at the same time. This is the reason the historically defined competition that characterizes the relationship of the two elite groups appears as a symbolic conflict, at stake being the redistribution of the symbolic capital. The author used the techniques of mental mapping and interviews to unveil the symbolic competition for the urban space, while emphasizing its changing character

This analysis presents the leisure-time preferences of youngsters in Romania (Transylvanian regio... more This analysis presents the leisure-time preferences of youngsters in Romania (Transylvanian region) based on time series survey data collected at a regional youth festival. The main aim was to map out the leisure-time preferences and consumption patterns of Romanian youth and analyze if these differ based on socio-demographic factors (social status, gender, cohort, and so on.).

The fact that students engage in more than just their studies while at university has been acknow... more The fact that students engage in more than just their studies while at university has been acknowledged in previous education research, but it has not been included in the theoretical debates on education-to-work-transitions. In this thesis I argue that the lack of debates between educational researchers and youth transitions researchers and the narrow focus of existing studies on certain educational aspects cannot do justice to the complex experiences and perceptions of young people today, who, I believe, experience multiple status positions while at university. In this thesis I try to address this gap by focusing on the process of student transitions from education to work from a comparative and biographical perspective. I conducted 42 topical life history interviews with final year students in England and Romania about their reasons for opting to study at university, the processes of deciding what and where to study, the impressions and attitudes towards their studies, the activities they were engaged in, and their future (career) plans just before graduation. I conducted this exercise with an explicit aim to answer my main research question: What are the characteristics of student pathways through HE? To answer this question I relied on the main concepts from youth transitions and education-to-work transitions research – structure and agency – but I included in the analysis considerations about significant others and happenstance events, as well as perspectives about time and space. Overall, from a theoretical perspective, my research responded to calls for more holistic perspectives on youth and education-to-work transitions, while from a methodological perspective, I offered a thick description of narrative research conducted from multi-lingual and multi-ethnic perspectives on the lived experiences of students in two country and institutional contexts

The main findings of the evaluation are summarised below. The term 'initial incident' refers to t... more The main findings of the evaluation are summarised below. The term 'initial incident' refers to the police callout that leads to the addition of a case to the subject pool.  The intervention led to an increase in victim satisfaction with police services. Victims in the treatment group were 43% less likely to report being dissatisfied with the police handling of their case than victims in the control group.  The intervention led to a significant increase in willingness to report future incidents. The treatment group was 42% more likely than the control group to say that their willingness to report a future incident had increased.  The intervention resulted in victims being more likely to take actions to change their situation. Relative to the control group, victims in the treatment group were significantly more likely to report having visited their general practitioner, were more likely to have accessed a domestic violence support service and were 34% less likely to be currently in contact with the perpetrator.  The intervention was associated with greater victim stress in the short run. Relative to just before the initial incident, victims in the treatment group were 34% less likely to report improved stress levels and 48% more likely to report worsening stress levels than victims in the control group. Victims in the treatment group were also more likely to report a worsening of their quality of sleep and have poorer outcomes for life control and mental health. These findings are consistent with the increased willingness of victims to take actions to change their situation. Separating from an abusive partner or making other major life changes were expected to be stressful.  The intervention was associated with improved family life and quality of life overall. Despite the findings in relation to stress, measures of quality of family life and quality of life overall both significantly improved for the treatment group relative to the control group. Victims in the treatment group were 26% more likely than victims in the control group to report quality of life improvements.  The intervention led to an unexpected decrease in the provision of witness statements to police by victims. Victims in the treatment group were 21% less likely to provide a witness statement than victims in the control group. Consistent with this being Project 360 v attributable to the intervention, the decline was found only among victims who provided statements after the initial police visit.  The intervention was associated with fewer statements being retracted by victims. Of those who made a statement, victims in the treatment group were 27% less likely to retract than victims in the control group. Further, statements in the treatment group are more likely to be associate with an arrest than are statements in the control group.  The intervention was not associated with a notable change in repeat offences over a one-year period. There was no significant change in the number of instances of domestic violence recorded by police. However, we found weak evidence to suggest that the severity of future instances (as measured by risk assessment and arrests) was lower for the treatment group than for the control group. These results suggest that the Project 360 intervention had a positive effect on a number of victim outcomes and on the victims' perceptions of police handling of their cases. Based on the incremental costs incurred during the trial, we estimated a cost of £174 per victim engagement for the Project 360 intervention. The authors of this report make five recommendations based on the analysis for the design and implementation of second-responder programmes based on Project 360. Recommendation 1: A second responder programme, modelled around Project 360, should be rolled out as standard practice in police forces that would like to see improvements in the relationship between police and victims of domestic violence, particularly in cases categorised at standard and medium risk. Recommendation 2: The implementation of the intervention should ensure that victims are provided with the immediate opportunity to make a witness statement to police. This may take the form of engagement workers establishing immediately after an incident whether victims would like to make a statement and assisting victims with making such statement in as short a time period as possible. Recommendation 3: The intervention should be rolled out to repeat victims who have experienced fewer than three previous instances in a 365-day period. This would allow for police-victim relationships to be strengthened earlier in the cycle of domestic violence.

Ebben a tanulmányban röviden bemutatjuk Eliasnak egy „elveszett” kutatási projektjét, amelyet az ... more Ebben a tanulmányban röviden bemutatjuk Eliasnak egy „elveszett” kutatási projektjét, amelyet az 1960-as évek elején végzett Leicesterben a fi atal munkások munkahelyi szerepekhez és felnőtt helyzetekhez való alkalmazkodásáról: A Fiatal Munkások Alkalmazkodása a Munkahelyi Helyzetekhez és a Felnőtt Szerepekhez. Az elveszettnek hitt interjús ütemtervek felfedezése levéltári kutatással kiegészítve lehetőséget nyújtott arra, hogy összerakjuk a projekt hátterét és Elias ifj úságról alkotott elméleti megközelítését. Elméleti modelljének azt a részét vázoljuk fel, amely a sokk hipotézisre és a gyermekeknek a felnőtt világtól való elválasztására koncentrál

Health Services Management Research, 2020

Because of a perceived decline in staff morale, the UK National Health Service has begun to routi... more Because of a perceived decline in staff morale, the UK National Health Service has begun to routinely assess the extent to which commitment to the National Health Service may aid staff retention. While a number of studies have investigated the role of employee commitment in relation to staff turnover, no research to date has empirically tested if staff commitment to the NHS could protect job satisfaction from the effects of high job demands, and if this varies according to age. Using latent variable path analysis, this novel study examined this question among a national sample of Healthcare Professionals Allied to Medicine in the National Health Service. The results indicate that the negative effects of high job demands on job satisfaction were fully mediated by commitment to the National Health Service, but age mattered. Among the over 45s and over 55s, commitment to the National Health Service acted as an effective buffer against the negative effects of job demands on job satisfac...

Young People in the Labour Market, 2017

Industrial Relations Journal, 2016

Fast fashion's emphasis on quick response production and supply chain management is at the basis ... more Fast fashion's emphasis on quick response production and supply chain management is at the basis of renewed growth in UK apparel manufacturing. This article shows how increasing pressure from lead firms has resulted in manufacturers maintaining profit levels, mainly through informal subcontracting and informal employment, as opposed to increasing productivity. The precipitous decline of UK apparel manufacturing over the last four decades largely confirmed expectations about competitive advantage in a free trade environment. A labour intensive industry, UK apparel manufacturing was suffering from a long-recognised productivity deficit compared to its European competitors (e.g. Lane and Probert 2009, 45; Walsh 1991) and was poorly placed to meet the challenges that emerged in the 1970s from SouthEast Asia; challenges that have grown since through the emergence of new sourcing locations and the phasing out of the multi-fibre agreement (MFA) in 2004. The decline started in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1990s. Over the period 1996-2014, real turnover 1 suffered a 52 percent decline as the number of jobs fell by 82 percent 2. However, the recent counterintuitive reversal in the industry's fortunes throws up a range of questions as to the underlying competitiveness of apparel manufacturing in the UK: while UK wide figures mask regional divergence, regional statistics point to considerable growth in London and the East Midlands of 75 and 52 percent (2008-13), respectively, with the East Midlands as the UK's largest sourcing hub accounting for almost a third of the industry's real turnover in 2013. This phenomenon has been examined under the rubric of 'reshoring' manufacturing production which, according to government sources, is based on four "key factors that have prompted companies to move production [back to the UK, NH&RP]: to improve quality; to shorten lead times; to improve delivery performance and strengthen the supply chain; [and to] reduce labour costs." (Prime Minister's Office 2014) The Prime Minister himself has spoken of the seamstresses in the Midlands and the good news of garment production being brought back onshore (HC Deb 18 March 2015). Implicit in this list of factors is a theory emphasising the location and externalisation advantages of reshoring, a perspective that is 1 Unless indicated otherwise data for the UK are taken from the Annual Business Survey (ABS), data for the regional level are from the regional results of the ABS. Note that ABS data from 2008 onwards shift from SIC 2003 to SIC 2007 classification. For apparel manufacturing this means that hosiery and knitted garments are included in 'wearing apparel' whereas the manufacture of articles of fur is excluded. 2 These employment data are from the ONS table 'JOBS03 Employee Jobs by Industry (not seasonally adjusted)'.

Belvedere Meridionale, 2016

Th e paper off ers insights into the views and experiences of DAS-double academic status-students... more Th e paper off ers insights into the views and experiences of DAS-double academic status-students at a Romanian university. Th is practice is discussed in the paper from the perspective of increased participation in higher education, when more and more people spend time and money not only on gaining qualifi cations, but also on boosting their credentials by participating in various extra-curricular activities with the hope of securing an advantage for their labour market entrance. Th e processes of who, when and why these students ended up in DAS will be explored along with refl ecting on the local and national structural elements that allowed, and at times encouraged, such a practice.

Narrative Works, 2013

This paper is my "story" about the dilemmas I encountered and choices I made whilst carrying out ... more This paper is my "story" about the dilemmas I encountered and choices I made whilst carrying out narrative research in higher education in England and Romania, and the role languages played in the study. The research is rooted in my own life events, characterised by transitions and translations within/between languages and cultures, in much the same way as in the lives of the students I researched.

The UK apparel manufacturing industry, after significant decline, has experienced renewed growth ... more The UK apparel manufacturing industry, after significant decline, has experienced renewed growth in recent years as many retailers and brands have commenced or increased sourcing from local suppliers. This presents significant opportunities for regional economies as it can offer local garment manufacturers entry points into global value chains as well as employment opportunities for their community. At the same time, as this industry revives, anecdotal evidence has emerged about considerable risks in the form of violations of work and employment regulations. Recent media reports have highlighted serious labour rights issues and other concerns such as unauthorised subcontracting within UK apparel manufacturing. Particular concerns have been raised about working conditions in the garment manufacturing hub of Leicester and its surrounding areas, relating to both registered factories and smaller unregulated production units. Alleged workers’ rights issues included excessive working hours, poor health and safety conditions in the workplace and night shift subcontracting, among others. It was also thought that some registered factories may be subcontracting to unregistered units to meet high volume and short turnaround order commitments within tight cost constraints. These concerns came to the attention of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a UK-based alliance of lead firms, trade unions and NGOs that promotes respect for workers’ rights around the globe. ETI members include many well-known UK fashion brands and retailers, for whom Leicester represents a sourcing destination for some product lines. Poor working conditions often result from a wide range of political, social and economic factors. ETI’s work is grounded in the belief that to truly bring about sustainable change to workers’ lives, the root causes of labour rights issues need to be identified, understood and tackled collaboratively. ETI identified the need for substantive research to better understand supply chain relationships and working conditions within the UK garment sector, with a focus on Leicester, before deciding on what action to take. The University of Leicester’s Centre for Sustainable Work and Employment Futures was commissioned to lead a research study, due to its focus on industrial relations and labour rights and strong connections with local stakeholders. Dr Nik Hammer and his research team brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to the project, and worked closely with a wide spectrum of stakeholders through the research process. The following report represents the outcome of this commission. (Preface

2014 júniusában fontos konferencia került megrendezésre a Leicesteri Egyetemen Elias munkásságáró... more 2014 júniusában fontos konferencia került megrendezésre a Leicesteri Egyetemen Elias munkásságáról, amelynek apropóját az életművet bemutató összkiadás (Th e Collected Works of Norbert Elias) kötetsorozatának befejezése szolgáltatta. Az összkiadást a University College Dublin Press adta ki Stephen Mennell szerkesztésében [az ezzel kapcsolatos információkat lásd a hasznos oldalak között a kötet végén]. A konferencia főszervezői John Goodwin és Jason Hughes voltak, a szervezésben aktívan részt vett Plugor Réka, és – a mintegy kéttucatnyi országból érkezett konferencia-résztvevő között – jelen volt Hadas Miklós is. Itt merült föl annak ötlete, hogy elkészüljön ez a különszám

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019

Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research pu... more Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.