The work reported herein was supported under the Educational Research and Development Center program, agreement #R1 17000011-91, CFDA 84.117Q as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. The findings and opinions expressed in this report do not reflect the position or policies of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement or the U.S. Department of Education. This paper has profited tremendously from comments offered by Dan Brass, Mark Mizruchi, Bonnie Nelsen, Christine Oliver, Linda Johanson, and the three anonymous scholars who reviewed the manuscript. This paper lays the groundwork for new models of work and relations of production that reflect changes in the division of labor and occupational structure of a postindustrial economy. It demonstrates how new ideal-typical occupations can be constructed, drawing on a set of ethnographies to propose an empirically grounded model of technicians' work. The paper focuses on two questions: What do technicians do and what do they know? The answers constitute a first cut at the ideal type, technician. The paper then turns to evidence of the difficulties that arise when organizations employ technicians but fail to appreciate the nature of their work. It closes by showing how a contextually derived model of technicians' work enables us to evaluate why some recent trends in organizing are congruent with an increasingly technical workforce, why others may be misguided, and why organizations are likely to face challenges that organizational theorists have but vaguely anticipated. The paper shows that the emergence of technicians' work may signify a shift to a more horizontal division of substantive expertise that undermines the logic of vertical organizing on which most organizational theory and practice still rests.'

Technicians in the Workplace: Ethnographic Evidence for Bringing Work into Organizational Studies

Employee voice has been an enduring theme within the employment relations literature.This article profiles the incidence of a range of direct and indirect employee voice mechanisms within multinational companies (MNCs) and, using an analytical framework, identifies a number of different approaches to employee voice. Drawing from a highly representative sample of MNCs in Ireland, we point to quite a significant level of engagement with all types of employee voice, both direct and indirect. Using the analytical framework, we find that the most common approach to employee voice was an indirect voice approach (i.e. the use of trade unions and/or non-union structures of collective employee representation). The regression analysis identifies factors such as country of origin, sector, the European Union Directive on Information and Consultation and date of establishment as having varying impacts on the approaches adopted by MNCs to employee voice.

Patterning employee voice in multinational companies

This paper examines the policies towards unions and collective representation in US multinationals in the UK. It uses detailed case-study data to argue that the dominant ‘ideological norms’ of anti-unionism in the US business system shape, but do not determine, the behaviour of US multinational subsidiaries in the UK. Within the structural constraints determined by such factors as sector, subsidiary policy and behaviour towards unions are the outcome of the complex interaction of the contrasting ‘macro-institutional’ forces of home and host business systems, and how these are filtered through the perceptions and interests of actors at different levels of the multinational. The resulting ‘micro-politics’ generates a complex and evolving pattern of union relations and non-unionism in US subsidiaries.

Policies on Union Representation in US Multinationals in the UK: Between Micro‐Politics and Macro‐Institutions

It is often a sterile exercise to attach labels to particular theorists in the hope that this will clearly indicate their beliefs and fashions of analysis: this is one of the lessons to be drawn from recent controversy on pluralism in industrial relations. Practical persons are usually unconcerned with the finer points of definitional exactitude, and it is no accident that pluralism was once described as ‘just a term for a convenient mode of treating pragmatism from a theological point of view’.1 The links between pluralism and pragmatism in industrial relations are particularly intimate;2 because of the overriding concern of most adherents with immediate practical problems, pluralism as a theology has been remarkably poorly endowed with explicit dogma (however rich in unstated and implicit presuppositions). There is thus little value in arguments along the lines that a certain author is a pluralist and must therefore be held to endorse a given series of propositions.

Pluralism, Procedural Consensus and Collective Bargaining

While there is a large body of academic debate surrounding human resource management issues in multinational corporations (MNCs), industrial relations (IR) issues often fail to receive the same degree of attention. This paper attempts to move the debate forward by critically reviewing some of the key debates surrounding IR in an international context. First, some key themes surrounding the comparison of industrial relations across borders and IR in multinational companies are delineated and defined. Then, the reasons why an international IR (IIR) perspective has been under-represented in the literature to date are considered. The paper then explores the contribution which an IIR perspective can bring to the study of management practices in MNCs. This is discussed in terms of IIR's potential contribution as an alternative analytical approach and also differences in its substantive coverage. The impact of IR systems on MNC location and relocation decisions, key issues for employees, trade unions and managers of MNCs, is then discussed as an example of the former. The potential for, and evidence of, international collective bargaining as a potential counter-balance to the power the MNC in the global environment is then considered as an example of a differing area of substantive coverage of IIR. Finally, some avenues for potential study are outlined.

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John Gennard

Papers

Industrial relations theory—a critical review

The industrial relations of foreign owned subsidiaries in the united kingdom

Reluctant Militants: A Study of Industrial Technicians

Multinational corporations and British labour

Supplementary benefit and strikers