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This article serves as an introduction to six articles featured in a special issue on diversity in the work–life interface. This collection of papers contains research that contemplates the work–life interface in different geographic and cultural contexts, that explores the work–life experiences of minority, marginalized and/or underresearched groups of workers and that takes into account diverse arrangements made to fulfill both work and nonwork responsibilities.

This introductory article first summarizes some of the emerging research in this area, introduces the papers in this special issue and links them to these themes and ends with highlighting the importance of using an intersectional lens in future investigations of the work–life interface.

These six articles provide empirically based insights, as well as new theoretical considerations for studying the interface between paid work and personal life roles. Compelling new research directions are identified.

Introducing the new articles in this special issue and reviewing recent research in this area brings together the work–life interface scholarship and diversity management studies and points to the necessity for future investigations to take an intersectional and contextualized approach to their subject matter.

Draws attention to recent broad trends in UK employment regulation that refocus the emphasis in employment rights away from a primary concern with safeguarding collective rights toward a more differentiated approach privileging more individual concerns.

Seeks to explain the reasons and consequences of this development.

Argues that rights are defended on the basis of their ability to secure greater employee motivation and productivity.

Explains that this is a business-case defense rather than a requirement for social justice.

Advances the view that modern Conservatives see society as made up of a broad range of actors and not reducible to state action.

Claims that the extension of the minimum period of employment required before an employer may be taken to tribunal to two years, together with a greatly increased fee required to bring a case, mean that cases are much more difficult to make.

This chapter reviews the ongoing processes of marketisation in secondary school teaching and its further embedment through commodification of teachers’ performance. We track developments through documentary evidence from Government statements and other agency reports and unstructured interviews with teachers’ union representatives in the South West of England. Following Carter and Stevenson (2012) we begin by introducing the labour process debate concerning teachers’ productive labour to provide the backdrop for the argument that teachers’ work is increasingly commodified and judged along neoliberalised requirements. Commodification has taken place through measurement of abstract standards constructed by associating individual teachers with their pupils’ achievements, as well as subjective assessment of teacher behaviour judged against newly introduced ‘Teacher Standards’. We argue that this attempted quantification of teacher output is constructed, in Marxist terms, to accommodate to the ‘socially necessary labour time’ and to indirectly maximise work ‘output’ for individual teachers through a process of standardisation of processes involved in task completion. We attempt to define new ways of measuring teachers’ work through the lens of abstract labour and link such processes to workplace alienation. In such fashion, teachers are subject to work intensification, increased monitoring and surveillance, further standardisation of work and weakening of creative autonomy leading to intensified alienation from the professional nature of the job.

Migration has become a challenging issue in the field of education and an ongoing crisis for many countries. The migration crisis and education have a reciprocal relationship in that the influx of migrants puts a strain on educational systems, particularly regarding resources, funding, and linguistic and cultural differences. However, education can play a crucial role in addressing some of the challenges associated with migration, such as the need to integrate, skill acquisition and cultural awareness in host countries, as well as brain drain in the countries of origin. It is crucial to investigate how education can both address the problems caused by migration and maximise its potential for sustainable development. This chapter targets analysing relevant scholarship and aims to illustrate the broad patterns of relevant scholarly sources on migration in the field of education indexed in the Web of Science between 2015 and 2022, explore their collaboration trends, and reveal the conceptual structure of these studies in the context of international sustainable development. A bibliometric methodology is employed for the exploration and analysis of the publications; 991 studies on migration in the field of education are descriptively analysed in terms of distribution of publications with their citations, topics at the micro level, journals, and the number of authors contributing to these papers. The results contribute to picturing the characteristics and collaboration trend of the scholarly sources on migration in the area of education as a challenging disabler or a driving force that contributes to societal development within the scope of international sustainable development.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent of convergence of regulations and of practice regarding corporate governance between a developing country (Turkey) and a developed country (the UK).

The development of the codes is described and compared and then research is conducted into the top 100 companies on the stock exchanges of each country.

It is shown that, although the codes, and their iterative development, are similar, the degree of compliance is dissimilar.

These findings suggest that further research in other countries is also needed to see if the explanations are robust.

Much research has been undertaken into corporate governance and national differences but the paper is different in that it makes a comparison between countries and also between regulation and practice to show that these diverge.