Showing papers on "Industrial relations published in 1993"

Affect and managerial performance: A test of the sadder-but-wiser vs. happier-and-smarter hypotheses.

Abstract: We thank Jennifer Halpern for her role in the original planning of this study and for her contributions to the development of the coding scheme used in this project. This study was made possible by a faculty research grant to the first author from the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California at Berkeley. This study provides a comparative test of two psychological theories concerning the relationship between affect and performance. Managerial simulations are used to test whether people who are positive in disposition perform better or worse on both decisional and interpersonal tasks. Results are consistent in supporting the happier-and-smarter as opposed to the sadder-but-wiser hypothesis, since they show positive relationships between dispositional affect and performance. The results are discussed in terms of their relevance to both the older literature on links between satisfaction and performance and the more recent controversy over the dispositional approach to job attitudes.'

The theory and measurement of work commitment

Abstract: This is the 15th volume in a series of monographs whose main topic of concern is that of organizational behaviour and industrial relations. This volume deals with the theory and management of work commitment.

Managing the new public services

Abstract: Preface - List of Contributors - List of Figures - List of Tables - PART 1 THE CHANGING CONTEXTS OF MANAGEMENT - The Political Economy of Public Sector Change D.Farnham & S.Horton - Managing Private and Public Organizations D.Farnham & S.Horton - PART 2 MANAGERIAL FUNCTIONS - Strategic Management H.Elcock - Financial Management R.Tonge - Human Resources Management and Employee Relations D.Farnham - PART 3 CASE STUDIES - The Civil Service S.Horton - Local Government H.Elcock - The National Health Service G.Moon & I.Kendall - Education M.McVicar - The Police Service F.Leishman & S.Savage - PART 4 CONCLUSION - The New Public Service Managerialism: An Assessment D.Farnham & S.Horton - Bibliography - Index

Managing Human Resources and Industrial Relations

Abstract: The book brings together for this first time an analysis of human resource management and industrial relations Its pivotal theme is the interplay (and tensions) between individualism and collectivism

The Sociology of Work and Occupations

Abstract: I review recent studies of work and occupations. Most of this work proceeds at the individual level, studying individual characteristics of workers, qualities of the work experience, and, to a lesser extent, stages of the work experience. Structural analysis is less common and often treats structural phenomena as aggregates rather than emergents, except in the area of labor relations. A substantial literature—probably a third of the total—examines particular occupations. In general the literature is divided into two “sides”—one focused on gender, inequality, and career/life cycle issues, the other on unions, and industrial and labor relations. Between these are smaller foci on theoretical issues and on general structures of work. I conclude that with the possible exceptions of Marxism and the study of professions, subfields of work and occupations lack the synthetic theory that would enable synthesis of empirical results. I also consider the twofold role of politicization in the area: the positive role of...

In Search of HRM

Abstract: HRM has been the industrial relations issue of the 1980s and early 1990s. Although it has very few direct references to HRM, WIRS3 sheds considerable light on a number of the debates involved. Not only does it suggest that some of the ideas and practices associated with HRM appear to be taking root; its most striking, and paradoxical, findings are that these fragments of HRM are to be found in union rather than non-union workplaces. These findings have considerable implications for policy and practice as well as for future WIRSs.

Principles of Human Resource Management

Abstract: HRM - a new trajectory human resourcing - planning and performance assessment - judging people and performance training and development - building bridges reward motivation and control commitment and employee involvement - HRM's holy grail? welfare - health and efficiency? trade unions and the new industrial relations equal opportunities - challenge and change towards a European HRM?

The Japanization of British Industry: New Developments in the 1990s

Abstract: List of Figures. List of Tables. Foreword. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Western Interest in Japan. 2. Japanese Industrial Practice. 3. Theoretical Perspectives. 4. Case Studies in Emulation. 5. Manufacturing Practices and UK Companies. 6. Personnel Practices and UK Companies. 7. Suppliers, Retailers and UK Companies. 8. Cases: Three Japanese Companies in the UK. 9. Japanese Companies in Britain. 10. Industrial Relations and Trade Unions. 11. Policy Implications and Conclusions.

What do wages buy

Abstract: Jim Lincoln kindly provided me with the dataset. I have also benefited from reading his and his co-authors' research. Libby Bishop and Ishak Saporta provided expert research assistance, funded by the Institute of Industrial Relations and the Consortium on Competitiveness and Cooperation, U.C., Berkeley. Helpful comments from Jim Baron, Bill Dickens, Jonathan Leonard, Lee Levine, Jim Lincoln, Janet Yellen, seminar participants at Stanford, Wharton, the Sloan School, and U.C., Berkeley and from the editors and referees are gratefully acknowledged. This study examines data on more than 8,000 employees of nearly 100 manufacturing plants in the United States and Japan to measure the effects of differences in wages on workplace attitudes and behaviors. In both the U.S. and Japan, workers receiving high wages are less likely to quit, are more satisfied with their pay, and report that they work harder than they have to. These results support theories of segmented labor markets and of social comparison, but not theories of human capital or compensating differences. In the U.S. data there is no evidence that the effects of high wages are less powerful than the effects of low wages. This result contradicts some variants of status-inconsistency and distributive justice theories. In Japan, workers who are highly paid compared with others in their plant appear to experience discomfort. This result indicates the important role social comparison plays in Japan.'

Union Exclusion and the Decollectivization of Industrial Relations in Contemporary Britain

Abstract: A major focus of the Conservative government's employment policy since 1979 has been the reduction of union power within the labour market, the employment relationship and as representatives of a separate ‘labour interest’ in society ' union exclusion. The principal impact of the legislative changes is to deny workers access to resources of collective power, thereby commensurately increasing employers' discretion to determine the terms of the employment relationship. When forming new subsidiaries and establishments, or purchasing non-union subsidiaries, employers have been able to resist unionization and recognition except on their own terms, but comparatively few have terminated existing union recognition agreements, preferring to marginalize the role of unions through the adoption of partial exclusion policies ' joint consultation, direct communication, performance-related pay, and the fragmentation of common employment and bargaining.

Women challenging unions : feminism, democracy, and militancy

Abstract: Women Challenging Unions is a collection of original papers that presents a vision of an invigorated and vibrant labour movement, one that would actively seek the full participation of women and other traditionally excluded groups, and that would willingly incorporate a feminist agenda. This vision challenges union complicity in the gendered segmentation of the labour market; union support for traditionalist ideologies about women's work, breadwinners, and male-headed families; union resistance to broader-based bargaining; and the marginalization of women inside unions. All of the authors share a commitment to workplace militancy and a more democratic union movement, to women's resistance to the devaluation of their work, to their agency in the change-making process. The interconnected web of militancy, democracy, and feminism provides the grounds on which unions can address the challenges of equity and economic restructuring, and on which the re-visioning of the labour movement can take place. The first of the four sections includes case studies of union militancy that highlight the experiences of individual women in three areas of female-dominated work: nursing, banking, and retailing. The second and third sections focus on the two key arenas of struggle where unions and feminism meet: inside unions, where women activists and staff confront the sexism of unions, and in the labour market, where women challenge their employers and their own unions. The fourth section deconstructs the conceptual tools of the discipline of industrial relations and examines its contribution to the continued invisibility of gender.

A Union of Professionals: Labor Relations and Educational Reform.

Abstract: Describes a new form of organisation for teachers, a departure from industrial assumptions for schools and for unions. Through case studies in nine districts, the book illustrates how teacher and administrative work change, and how labour and management learn to look at their common needs.

Job Security in America: Lessons from Germany

Abstract: American employers rely heavily on layoffs to reduce the size of their work force during downturns. While layoffs are unavoidable in any competitive economy, they are far more common in the United States than in other industrialized countries. But can US workers be offered more secure employment without burdening the companies that employ them?. Katharine Abraham and Susan Houseman address this question by comparing labor adjustment practices in the US where existing policies arguably encourage layoffs, with those in Germany, a country with much stronger job protection for workers. Based on statistical analysis of the two countries' manufacturing sectors, they conclude that German policies generally have been successful in providing workers with more stable employment without inhibiting labour adjustment. In their assessment of the German experience, Abraham and Houseman emphasize the interaction of various labour market policies. Stronger job security in Germany has been accompanied by an unemployment insurance system that facilitates short-term work as a substitute for layoffs. In the US the unemployment insurance system has encouraged layoffs while discouraging the use of work-sharing schemes. The authors recommend reforms of the US unemployment insurance system that include stronger experience rating and an expansion of short-term compensation programs. They also point to the critical link between job security and the system of worker training in Germany, and advocate policies that would encourage more training by US companies.

Industrial relations, worksite stress reduction, and employee well-being: A participatory action research investigation.

Abstract: The workplace has become the locus of many stress management and stress reduction interventions. However, little attention has focused on how worksite factors affect the implementation and impact of such interventions. In this paper, we investigate the effect of new versus traditional industrial relations practices on the impact of a worksite stress reduction program in a manufacturing setting. More specifically, a participatory action research (PAR) stress project is described and evaluated in two different labor–management relations contexts. One organization is characterized by the emerging ’new‘ industrial relations system where labor–management relations incorporate elements of joint problem-solving. The other organization has a more traditional approach where labor–management relations are formally adversarial. Results indicate that the labor–management relations context did influence the impact of the stress project. Involvement in the PAR stress project enhanced employee participation in decision-making in both contexts. However, involvement in the stress project enhanced employees' perceptions of the climate for participation only in the organization with more cooperative industrial relations. Increases in coworker support and decreases in depressive symptoms were associated with involvement in the PAR stress project in the organization with more adversarial industrial relations.

Industrial Relations and Economic Performance

Abstract: Post-war concern about our industrial relations system has been dominated by three issues - pay performance at workplace, company and national level, and industrial action. In each case the focus of interest is the link between the institutions, procedures and processes of the system and the outcomes that it generates. This paper evaluates evidence on these three issues for the last quarter of a century, since the publication of the Donovan Report in 1968. Special attention is given to information from successive WIRSs. The evidence suggests that (I) industrial action is of minor importance; (ii) the industrial relations system can no longer be held to stymie company performance; (iii) the pay/jobs trade-off is as intractable as ever.

Contracts and Commitment: Economic and Sociological Perspectives on Employment Relations

Abstract: This paper proposes a contract model of employment relations that integrates insights from economic and sociological perspectives on labor market transactions. The utility of the contract model is illustrated empirically using a large data set on organizations and their employees in U.S. and Japanese manufacturing industries. The results are consistent with many transaction cost and agency theory predictions, though they also indicate the need to supplement these economic theories with sociological explanations based on political, cultural, and other institutional differences.

The significance of human resource management: a reconsideration of the evidence

Abstract: Since the publication of the seminal American texts in the early-to-mid-1980s, we have witnessed several years of debate about the academic significance of human resource management (HRM). The debate has been made difficult by the definitional confusion surrounding the term itself. It would be wrong, however, to dismiss HRM on the basis of this confusion. This paper offers a review of the seminal and important works in the HRM canon. It organizes the literature into two broad strands of meaning. The first sees HRM as a practitioner movement or new pattern of management strategy in employment relations, typically emphasizing employee commitment and union substitution. The second sees HRM as a broadly based theoretical development concerned with the relationship between employee relations and strategic management in the firm. While recognizing the links between the two strands, this paper assesses the academic merits of each approach and reaches a series of conclusions on the problems and potential of the s...

The challenge of human resource management for industrial relations research and practice

Abstract: Human resource management (HRM) is strongly associated with the rise of management power and the rediscovery of the management prerogative. In most models, however, emphasis is placed on commitment and empowerment as means of control in place of command and control systems with their Taylorist notions of work design and fragmentation. The universal explanation for the growth of the rhetoric, if not the practice, of HRM is found in the internationalization of product markets, weakened trade unions and the relative withdrawal of the State from regulating labour markets. The danger of descriptions of HRM as modern best managerial practice is that they stereotype the past and idealize the future. The distinctive feature of HRM from an industrial relations perspective is the downgrading of secondary institutions and the rise of individualism within the firm. But the focus on the single firm in isolation from its environment is seen to be misleading. Ironically, when questions are asked about why best practice ...

Big Business and the State

Abstract: The first puzzle to be addressed is why it is taking so long for the study of international relations to embrace and incorporate big business into the analysis of the international system. Not only is it 20 years since Vernon’s Sovereignty at Bay came out in America: it is 20 years or more since, with the blessing of the London School of Economics’ International Relations department under Geoffrey Goodwin, that I initiated a small graduate seminar on International Business in the International System.2 I was not even on the staff at the time, but that acorn grew into a sapling — a regular Master’s course with examinations. The only other people at the LSE who were interested in transnational corporations then were Professor Ben Roberts and some colleagues in the Industrial Relations department. Their concerns, however, were narrower and their work more directed at how labour relations with management were affected by the internationalisation of production.

Industrial relations and the customer

Abstract: This article examines the implications for industrial relations of the current enthusiasm for ‘customer care’. It does this by reviewing how the three main industrial relations actors; managers, government and trade unions, have responded to the customer service imperative and by considering some of the implications of a ‘customer focus’ for industrial relations theory.

The Union and Its Members: A Psychological Approach

Abstract: This work explores three key topics in social psychology: the manner in which labour unions shape organizational behaviour, a relationship which has been effectively ignored in the literature; the organization of the union itself, a fascinating test case for the organizational psychologist; and the way in which theories and methods of organizational psychology may assist labor organizations in achieving their goals. Since the union maintains unique characteristics of democracy, conflict, and voluntary participation within a larger organization, the authors offer a detailed study of a union's dynamics, including demographic and personality predictors of membership, voting behaviour, union commitment and loyalty, the nature of participation, leadership styles, collective bargaining, among other topics. This is the first book to be published in the new Industrial and Organizational Psychology Series. It will be of interest to not only industrial and organizational psychologists in industry, academica, and private and public organizations, but to graduate students in psychology departments and business schools, and to academics and professionals in business and management studying industrial relations.

New developments in the labor market : toward a new institutional paradigm

Abstract: The structure of employer/employee relationships is changing. These original contributions report on new developments taking place in today's labor market and on the role of public policy in shaping that process. They provide an illuminating description of the current state of internal labor market theory and practice, document the evolution of trends in the public and private sectors, and are joined in a concern for disadvantaged and unemployed workers that is all too rare in scholarly work. A central theme is the adaptation of labor market institutions to the important environmental changes of recent years, including the shift to an international marketplace for goods and services, the spread of new workplace technologies, new work force demographics, and changing conceptions of the role that government should be expected to play.Katharine Abraham is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. Robert McKersie is Professor of Industrial Relations at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.Contents: Introduction, Katharine G. Abraham. Norms and Cycles: The Dynamics of Nonunion Industrial Relations in the United States, 1897-1987, Sanford M. Jacoby. The Effects of Worker Participation in Management, Profits and Ownership of Assets on Enterprise Performance, Michael A. Conte, Jan Svenjar. Restructuring the Employment Relationship: The Growth of MarketMediated Work Arrangements, Katharine G. Abraham. The Evolving Role of Small Business and Some Implications for Employment and Training Policy, Gary W. Loveman, Michael J. Piore, Werner Sengeneberger. Employment Security and Employment Policy: An Assessment of the Issues, Paul Osterman, Thomas A. Kochan. The Equity and Efficiency of job Security: Contrasting Perspectives on Collective Dismissal Laws in Europe, Susan N. Houseman. ContinuousProcess Technologies and the Gender Gap in Manufacturing Wages, Susan B. Carter, Peter Philips. Reducing Gender and Racial Inequality: The Role of Public Policy, Peter Gottschalk. Government and the Labor Market, Robert M. Solow.

Enterprise Bargaining, Union Structure and Wages*

Abstract: Models of simultaneous bargaining games are used to analyze the wage outcomes associated with various systems of industrial relations, including bargaining by craft, enterprise, industry or the whole economy. Union structure is a key determinant with highest wage pressure occurring when unions are organized along craft lines at industry level Abandonment of centralized bargaining and the splintering of both union and employer organizations into craft and industry units may well lead both to higher aggregate wage pressure and to greater wage inequality.

The take-up of human resource management by mainstream companies: key lessons from research

Abstract: Drawing upon a major British study involving over 300 interviews in fifteen case organizations from the private and public sectors, this paper draws out the essential elements of recent changes in industrial relations In particular, it examines the significance of human resource management initiatives for the practice of industrial relations The main thrust of the paper examines the ways, and the extent to which, mainstream organizations have transposed and absorbed concepts and practices from the highly publicized ‘lead cases’ into their own routines The central argument has three component elements: a whole array of managerial initiatives was launched in the period covered by the research; many of the more far-reaching of these were devised and driven from outside personnel or industrial relations management; cumulatively, these initiatives have impacted on the conduct of industrial relations A key concept which is identified and explored is that of HRM/IR ‘dualism’ This is the attempted bolting-on

Individualization of the Employment Relationship and the Implications for Trade Unions

Abstract: A whole array of management‐led initiatives over the past ten years has resulted in a significant shift in the basis of the employment relationship. In summary, this may be described as a move from “collectivism” to “individualism”. Highlights and describes the main elements of this and assesses the implications for the future of trade unions and collective bargaining.