British Manufacturing Organization and Workplace Industrial Relations: Some Attributes of the New Flexible Firm

The characteristics of the largest British manufacturing firms are analysed in order to argue that the form of organization adopted at corporate and plant level by such firms is distinctive. The first part of the paper looks at the characteristic kinds and types of productive activities that the largest British firms undertake. It is then suggested that there is a distinctive pattern of organization for production at plant level, described as the 'new flexible firm', the features of which are formally set out. The new flexible firm have some key features which help to make sense of an emerging pattern of workplace industrial relations in manufacturing. The way this new form of organization at plant level utilizes labour contradicts rather than supports the expectations of some analysts about the importance of human resource management.     

Annual Review Article 1993: British Public Sector Industrial Relations

Abstract : Developments in public-sector industrial relations during 1993 have raised questions about unions, pay determination and conflict resolution. This review explores some of the tensions in these areas created by new restrictions on pay increases, changes in reward structures and further market-testing across services. Where the different forms of pay determination buy industrial peace, the price may be too high in terms of the productivity and efficiency requirements gains now being demanded. But co-operation is needed too, and the dilution of the Whitley system of collective bargaining may be more likely to produce the very co-operation embodied in its philosophy, but not always present in its practice. The new 'superunion' UNISON will play a role here, as single-table bargaining and even single-union deals develop. These institutional developments will also be affected by pay flexibility measures which endeavour to improve individual performance at the front line of services, while in practice increasingly giving the rewards to management.     

Collective Bargaining as Industrial Democracy: Hugh Clegg and the Political Foundations of British Industrial Relations Pluralism

Hugh Clegg and Allan Flanders are generally recognized as the founding fathers of postwar British academic Industrial Relations (IR). While Flanders is regarded as the chief ‘theorist’ of pluralism, Clegg’s own contribution is seen mainly in terms of his empirical research and public policy work: as the author of numerous detailed studies and the field’s major textbook, the first Director of the Industrial Relations Research Unit at the University of Warwick, a member of the Donovan Commission and many other enquiries. Indeed, Trade Unionism under Collective Bargaining (1976) is often regarded as Clegg’s one and only foray into IR theory. This paper explores Clegg’s largely forgotten early writing on industrial democracy to argue that he made a critical, independent theoretical contribution to the British IR paradigm.     

British Managers' Attitudes and Behaviour in Industrial Relations: A Twenty-Year Study

A unique longitudinal study of Britain's managers conducted in 1980, 1990 and 2000 permits comparisons of managerial attitudes and behaviour in industrial relations over twenty years. We find clear evidence of the relationship between macro‐level political and economic movements of the period from 1980 up until the late 1990s on managerial attitudes, the impact of changes in power relations and the ‘lag effect’ of institutions. The most unexpected findings are the modest rise of managerial unionism in the 1990s and the limited evidence of the replacement of collective bargaining by either individual or group involvement or by employee financial participation.     

Integration and Dealignment in Public Enterprise Industrial Relations: A Study of British Rail

This paper considers whether a process of dealignment of workplace organizations from the national union and industrial relations system has occurred in British Rail. As a starting point, it is noted that workplace representatives have traditionally been closely integrated with other actors in the system. Integration has been based on the supply of bargaining resources by the national union and other bargaining institutions. If new management industrial relations policies have cut back the supply of these, it is possible that workplace organizations will dealign themselves from the national union. This hypothesis is considered using data obtained from a survey of train drivers' representatives. It is found that there is no evidence for dealignment and that in a significant minority of cases closer rather than weaker links are being forged.     

The Ascendancy of Employment Arbitrators in US Employment Relations: A New Actor in the American System?

In this paper, we survey the underpinnings of the trend towards employment arbitration in the United States, and its implications for the broader industrial relations system. Specifically, we address the question of whether or not employment arbitrators have been substituted for collective bargaining by the government to an extent that warrants their inclusion as an actor in the industrial relations system. We review developments in workplace dispute resolution in the United States, the literature that attempts to explain these developments and posit an assessment of the stability of employment arbitration, and employment arbitrators, as a central feature of the US industrial relations system.     

Root Metaphor in the Old and New Industrial Relations

Why have academic concerns and priorities within the old industrial relations paradigm seemingly wilted before the ideas of a new, more business oriented paradigm? I suggest that the answer lies partly in the relative appeal of their respective root metaphors. The metaphor of the old tends to be closed, static and pessimistic — industrial relations as trench war. The new offers a more hopeful, essentially American pioneering metaphor that conveys challenge and progress and makes a fetish of change. However, while I accept the inevitability of metaphorical devices in disseminating and even generating ideas in social science, the article warns against being seduced by the attractiveness of the metaphor rather than the robustness of the idea.