Knowledge that Transforms

Book reviewed in this articles. Rubin, Paul H. Managing Business Transactions: Controlling the Cost of Coordinating, Communicating, and Decision Making. Lawry, P. Employment Disputes and the Third Party. Porter, Michael. The Competitive Advantage of Nations. Robert G. Dyson. Strategic Planning: Models and Analytical Techniques. De Woot, Phillipe. High Technology Europe: Strategic Issues for Global Competitiveness.

ABSTRACT The interrelations between the search for greater flexibility and the decentralization of industrial relations have received comparatively little attention. The developments within British Steel over the past decade indicate how these two developments can interact. Against a background of a stagnant market for steel, overcapacity, changing state attitudes towards the nationalized sector and a national steel strike, management at British Steel have used local agreements as a key vehicle for introducing widespread restructuring and changes in work organization. In particular, the tying of local bonus payments to achieved performance and to changes in work organization has enabled management to introduce fundamental changes to traditional work arrangements with little worker or union resistance.

ABSTRACT This article seeks to exsplore the ways in which profit sharing is used by employers as a means of securing more employoee involvement. Although this is the main reason employeras have gilven for introducing profit sharing, and has been a principal objective of the government's recent initiative over profitrelated pay, the evidence suggests that little so far has been achieved. By examining employers’deeep seated concerns about some of the implications of profit sharing, particularly those that involve disclosure of information, this article argues that employers are reluctant to pursue such a strategy of involvement because of the risk of stimulating employees to demand greater influence in how the enterprise is managed. This prompts a consideration of the conceptual ambiguity surrounding the notion of employee involvement, and the article concludes that the contradicatory implications this entails for employers renders it largely impotent except at the level of rhetoric

ABSTRACT The authors challenge the view that the UK Conservative governments during the 1980s achieved important advances in industrial performance through the abandonment of corporatist policies that allowed management to regain the initiative and push through changes in work organization. The article takes issue with the idea that collective labour institutions necessarily impair economic efficiency, and it points up important connections between Thatcher's offensive against organized labour and the enduring weaknesses in human capital and technology. The article has three sections: the first examines labour markets and industrial relations; the second analyses government regulation; and the third assesses trends and prospects for the future, with emphasis on employment flexibility and labour productivity. The authors conclude with some comments on future prospects in the context of Britain's fuller integration in Europe.

ABSTRACT Employee relations in non‐union settings remain largely uninvestigated by industrial relations researchers. This article examines the management of employee relations in establishments in high technology industries in the Southeast of England ‐ a sector and locality frequently identified with high levels of non‐unionism. Moreover, high technology firms are frequently seen as exemplars of new human resource management techniques designed to substitute for unions. Our data from postal and interview surveys of 115 establishments suggests that HRM is only one, and by no means the dominant, approach to managing employee relations in high technology establishments.

ABSTRACT This article examines the proposition that the multidivisional structure is determined by both power and efficiency imperatives. It is theorized that combining the coalitional power and information‐processing perspectives of organizational choice enables us to explain and predict organizational form. The theory is tested on 291 Fortune 500 firms. The results largely confirm theoretical expectations. It is submitted that the multidivisional paradigm illustrates the central premises of the article: (1) a synthesis of efficiency and power perspectives is a viable research programme; and (2) theoretical pluralism increases empirical content and should be valued by those concerned with progress in the emerging field of strategic management.

ABSTRACT This article provides an in‐depth case study of a UK mutual life insurance company with the pseudonym Pensco. The case is presented partly to illustrate some theoretical and empirical weaknesses within the managerialist literatures on human resource management (HRM), and in those academic critiques which perceive it to be all ‘hype’and no substance. Our concern is not with the questin of whether Pensco ‘fits’an HRM model, but with examining changes in management practice, their effects on the nature of management control and the growth of self‐discipline throughout the company's hierarchy. Focusing on two management techniques regarding the development of ‘team’spirit among company employees, we see these changes as coinciding with the emergence of a language, if not directly the practice, of HRM which has come to pervade management in this and other contemporary organizations.