OCCUPATIONAL CHANGE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTEREST GROUPS AMONG WHITE‐COLLAR WORKERS IN THE U.K.: A LONG‐TERM MODEL*
| Published date | 01 November 1972 |
| Date | 01 November 1972 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1972.tb00592.x |
| Author | Ray Loveridge |
OCCUPATIONAL CHANGE AND THE DEVELOPMENT
OF
INTEREST GROUPS AMONG WHITE-COLLAR
WORKERS IN THE U.K.: A LONG-TERM MODEL*
RAY LOVERIDGET
THIS
paper sets out a brief summary of the analysis of industrial relations
systems that has emerged from the work of scholars observing the British
situation over the past twenty years. In particular it focuses upon the
‘consensus-convergence model’ favoured by American academics in the
1950s
and secondly, upon the ‘informal-formal divergence’ model put
forward by a group of Oxford scholars in the
1960s.
Both models empha-
size institutional aspects of the system: the needs and aspirations of the
actors are seen as part of the input of the system largely in
so
far as as they
involve conflict or disorder. The output of the industrial relations system
is seen to be rules, the most important of which are the procedures by
which disputes may be resolved and individual grievances may be handled.
The production of such rules depends on the support forthcoming through
‘a sufficiently high degree of consensus among those whose interests are
most affected by their application’.l
Much of the empirical material upon which such models rest is derived
from a short-term historical analysis of the institutional output of rules
and actions stemming from the system under examination. The paper
suggests that greater attention should be paid to the actors’ needs which
provide an input to the system and to the nature of the consensus required
for the operation of existing institutions.
It
maintains that a longer term
model of occupational change as related to market, technological and
organizational factors, may prove to be more viable than past models in
predicting the concomitant modifications in the institutions of industrial
relations.
THE
NORMATIVE-CONSENSUS CONVERGENCE MODEL
During the
1950s
a number of studies appeared in which it was
suggested that the industrial relations systems were capable
of
obtaining
*
The ideas presented in this paper are based on statistical materials and concepts developed
in the course of a study of industrial technicians conducted by the Department of Industrial
Relations
of
the London School
of
Economics between 1966 and 1970. The author acknowledges
his especial debt to Professor
B.
C.
Roberts and to his colleagues at the London School of Econo-
mics, particularly
Mr
J.
Gennard and
Mr
J.
V.
Eason
for
their help in the development of this
work.
See
B.
C.
Roberts, Ray Loveridge and John Gennard,
Reluctant
Militants,
Heinemann
Educational Books, London,
1972
A.
Fox and
A.
Flanders,
‘The
Reform of Collective Bargaining: from Donovan to Durkheim’
BritishJournal
ofhduslrial
Relations,
Vol.
VII,
No.
2,
July 1969, pp. 151-180
t
Lecturer, London Graduate School of Business Studies
340
OCCUPATIONAL CHANGE AMONG WHITE-COLLAR WORKERS
34
1
a steady state equilibrium normally referred to as ‘maturity’. In the model
constructed by Ross and Hartmann2 this higher state of development was
seen to have been reached in the Northern European countries and in
particular in the United Kingdom, For it was in Britain that unions
appeared to these scholars
to
have become most integrated into the
general policy and into community life at all levels of society. There were,
it was true, minor aberrations around this trend towards equilibrium,
which in Britain was manifested by local outbreaks of discontent expressed
in ‘wild-cat’ or unofficial strikes. But like Richard
A.
Lester3 most authors
agreed that the United Kingdom and Scandinavia provided the best
examples of mature systems in which a formally centralized system
of
collective negotiations was supplemented by plant bargaining which gave
flexibility and greater viability to the system as a whole. This view
was supported by most domestic observers as well. Indeed the
principle of ‘voluntarism’ (i.e. freedom from legal restraint) upon
which the British system was built was best seen in the local arrange-
ments built upon ‘custom and practice’ rather than upon written
agreements.*
A
much more sophisticated typology of system development which
was put forward in the late
1950s
saw industrial relations as part of the
whole process of industrialization within wider society. In this model it
was seen to be the task of the employers to obtain a minimum commitment
from the general populace in order to gain and maintain control over
both the material resources required for industrial production and their
compliance within the labour market and within the bureaucratic
authority structure of the work organization.6 In this typology the
system’s ‘maturity’ was seen to occur upon the emergence of
a
professional
cadre of management owing no specific loyalties either to shareholders or
to
a
political tlite. Instead they pursued the more limited goals defined
in terms
of
their organizational effectiveness, tempered by
a
regard for
the general community welfare function.
Whilst the typology
of
Clites and of the process described by different
industrial relations systems was
a
particularly suggestive one, the signifi-
cant feature of this model was that it shifted the emphasis of structural
analysis away from that of ‘protest’, that is from the response
of
the labour
movement to the anonymous processes of industrialization. Rather its
focus was on the progenitor of the process, the employer in his role as
entrepreneur.
This shift in focus had already been indicated in the prognostications
of other scholars who spoke of the growing sophistication of management
a
A.
M.
Ross
and P. Hartman,
Changing Patterns
of
Industrial Conjkt,
Wiley, New
York,
1960
R.
H. Lester,
As Unions Mature: an Analysis
of
the Euolution
of
American Unionism,
Princeton
*
A.
Flanders and H. Clegg (eds.),
The System
of
Industrid Relations in Great Britain,
Blackwell
C.
Kerr,
J.
T.
Dunlop,
F. Harbison and
C.
Myers,
Industrialism and Industrial Man:
The
University Press, Princeton,
1958
and Mott, Oxford, 1954
Problems
of
Labour and Management,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1960
To continue reading
Request your trial