Social and labour rights in a global context - International and comparative perspectives

Edited by Bob Hepple, Cambridge University Press, 273 pages, hardback, £45.00

Hepple introduces this book by affirming that social and labour rights "are usually asserted by those without power against governments".

However, he argues that there is a need to rethink these rights because the environment in which they were first advanced, in the period from the Russian revolution of 1917 onwards, has been fundamentally affected by globalisation and what he describes as the "expansion of the network society".

The book focuses on the way that the law has fostered "extravagant individualism" at the expense of collective rights.