BOOK REVIEWS
| Date | 01 March 1993 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1993.tb00385.x |
| Published date | 01 March 1993 |
British Jourrial
of
Inrlirstrral Relations
31:
1
March
1993
0007-1080
BOOK
REVIEWS
The Power
to
Manage.? Enip1oyer.s wid Indiistriul Relations in Comparative-
Historicul Perspecii\,e
edited by Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin.
Routledge, London.
1491.
ix
+
352 pp..
f45.
Two decades ago, Eric Wigham wrote a history
of
the Engineering Employers'
Federation and adopted the title
The Power
fo
Manage.
The defence
of
'managerial
functions' was central to the formation and key engagements
of
the EEF; and even
though its authority was disintegrating as Wigham wrote,
no
question mark
qualified his theme. For the editors
of
the present volume, and for many
of
the
contributors, managerial control is
11
far more problematic notion.
As
is
so
often true
of
collections deriving
from
conference proceedings- the case
here, as the keen eye may infer from the convoluted subtitle
-
the contents are
heterogeneous. The 'comparative-historic;il' topics vary widely
in
terms
of
country,
industry and historical period. Thematically, two rather distinct sets
of
questions are
addressed: How
far
have employers attempted (and how successfully)
to
impose
'direct control' upon the workforce? and Why in some contexts have they
endeavoured to handle industrial relations independently, while in other cases they
have preferred
to
do
so
collectively through multi-employer bargaining?
The most closely integrated set
of
chapters
-
by Reid, Zeitlin and Tolliday
-
explores the gap between assertions
of
managerial control and the actuality of shop-
floor labour relations in Britain, examining, respectively, shipbuilding, the
EEF
and
Ford
UK.
In the first. product diversity entailed dependence on craft labour; in
engineering. most employers lacked either the will
or
the competence
to
build on the
lock-out victories on
1898
and 1922; while Ford's tough anti-union line proved
incompatible with the need
to
win legitimacy and consent in the production process.
Four fascinating but diverse studies offer overseas examples
of
employer
collectivism. Harris examines the Philadelphia metal employers' association, which
in
the early decades
of
this century successfully pursued an 'open-shop' strategy but
sought to conciliate skilled
labour
through 'progressive' personnel policies.
Homburg discusses the limits
of
scientific management in interwar Germany; the
failure
of
psycho-technological recipes
to
yield
ii
transformation in productivity and
Inbour relations, she suggests, increased employers' enthusiasm
for
Nazism. Plumpe
explores the organization and objectives
of
German steel companies
in
the
immediate postwar era. explaining the origins
of
the distinctive co-determination
system
in
the industry. In Italy, Confindustria has played
a
continuously influential
role in politics and industrial relations froni the pre-Fascist years to the present day,
and Contini details its internal and external struggles.
Two chapters offer explicitly comparative analyses. Jones discusses flexible
152
manufacturing systems in Britain, Japan and the USA, insisting that strategies
of
labour control play no significant
role
in the process
of
technological innovation, and
that the actual implementation varies considerably according to national differences
in company structure, management practice and government influence. Sisson uses
his seven-country comparison of employer organization to emphasize the persistence
of collective bargaining institutions established through often distant ‘historical
compromises’, and the degree to which such institutional arrangements continue
to
shape employer policies. He also suggests that the ‘common-law’ model
of
procedural regulation in Britain has created particular difficulties for employers to
‘neutralize’ the workplace from trade union influence.
In the main, then, the book covers employer organization and policy in a limited
number
of
countries, principally
in
the metal industries. In an introduction and
conclusion, the editors attempt to set these contributions within a far broader
comparative perspective. Their survey is unremittingly scholarly
(73
pages
of
text,
28
pages of notes) but largely negative in character. The main concern is to attack any
model
or
theory that generalizes about employer behaviour, demonstrating that
these fail to account for the diversity
of
empirical experience. At times, the exercise
amounts to the demolition
of
straw men; more fundamentally, it avoids the issue
of
the relationship between different
levels
of
explanation and analysis. In what ways
can individual cases be said to support
or
refute theoretic generalization? The editors
assume that the link is simple and mechanical
-
as does Reid in his chapter, where
the experience of British shipbuilding is supposed to disprove both Marx and Weber!
The argument seems ultimately that all contexts are special cases, that
the
relationship between situational determination and strategic choice cannot be
specified in general terms. Those who believe that theoretical generalization is
both
necessary and possible are unlikely
to
be convinced by such nihilism.
British
Journal
of
Industrial
Relutions
RICHARD HYMAN
University
of
Warwick
Comparutive Indi~striul Relations: Contemporary Research
unri
Theory
edited by
Roy J. Adams. MarperCollins Academic, London.
1991,
xi
+
145
pp.,
f28,
f0.95
paper.
This slim, but useful. volume had its origins in a session
of
the Eighth World
Congress of the International Industrial Relations Association which was held in
Brussels in
1089.
The intention was
to
produce a ‘broad-ranging review of the current
state
of
the art
in
comparative industrial relations’.
The essays in the volume fall into three parts. The first consists
of
three papers
which present an overview of some major attempts at theory in industrial relations.
Ray Adams’s introduction provides a broad survey of theory and research and a
good introduction
to
the rest
of
the book. The next two essays, by Meltz and
Barbash, concentrate respectively
on
the theoretical contributions of Dunlop’s
Industrid Relations System
and Commons’s extensive writings on industrial rela-
tions. Meltz provides a sensible defence of Dunlop’s systems approach which has
been subject to much easy criticism over the years
-
often, one suspects, by people
who have never read and certainly never gone back to the original. The essay on
Commons (though somewhat hagiographic) should draw the attention of more
scholars and students to the strong insights and moral positions
of
one of the real
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