The Decline of Collectivism? A Comparative Study of White‐Collar Employees in Britain and Australia
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8543.00126 |
| Published date | 01 June 1999 |
| Date | 01 June 1999 |
The Decline of Collectivism? A
Comparative Study of White-Collar
Employees in Britain and Australia
Stephen Deery and Janet Walsh
Abstract
There is a widely held view that important changes are occurring in the
character of employee attitudes. With the growth of individualistic human
resource management techniques, it is argued that employees' collectivist
work orientations are in decline. Drawing on data from a large-scale survey
of bank employees in Britain and Australia, this paper explores the attitudes
of employees to work, trade unions and collective action and identi®es the
determinants of those attitudes. In both countries, collectivism is found to
have a signi®cant effect on the preparedness of individuals to ful®l their
union obligations and duties and to take industrial action. There is little
evidence to indicate the demise of collectivism.
1. Introduction
There has been a widespread diffusion of new industrial relations practices
in Britain and Australia. These have taken the form of changes to the
reward system, the organization of work and the form and channels of
communication. They have invariably been accompanied by decentralized
bargaining and sometimes by new procedural arrangements including no-
strike clauses and binding arbitration. Workplace authority has shifted
decisively towards management. This has led to an erosion of the collective
determination of wages and working conditions and to attempts to
individualize the employment relationship through the greater use of
performance-based pay and individual appraisal systems and goal-setting.
Trade union involvement in the procedural and substantive rule-making
process has contracted noticeably (Millward et al. 1992). Some writers have
viewed this as a `secular drift' towards individualism and as a fracturing of
the previously prevailing collectivistic form of industrial relations (Storey
and Bacon 1993; Bacon and Storey 1996).
Stephen Deery and Janet Walsh are in the Department of Management at the University of
Melbourne, Australia.
British Journal of Industrial Relations
37:2 June 1999 0007±1080 pp. 245±269
#Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
In this context, there has been increasing interest in the effects of these
changed practices and processes on employee attitudes. There has been
some speculation that workers may be becoming more individualist in their
work orientation and therefore less willing to respond to workplace
grievances in a collective manner (see Waddington and Whitston 1995).
From this perspective, the new industrial relations practices can be seen as
a direct threat to union loyalty and participation, and to members'
`willingness to act' (Offe and Wiesenthal 1985). Individualistic human
resource strategies may thus undermine the basis of effective trade union-
ism, namely, the capacity to mobilize members (Kelly 1996). Employees
who are subject to policies of direct communication, individual appraisals
and performance-related pay may become more organizationally com-
mitted and less likely to see their interests as being advanced through
collective or associational efforts. Consequently, trade unions may ®nd it
more dif®cult both to recruit members and to secure involvement in the
pursuit of generalized improvements in wages and working conditions.
Hyman (1994), for example, attributes the decline in union membership in
many European countries in part to deep-rooted, albeit complex, shifts in
employee attitudes, and views the reduction in strike activity in the 1980s
and 1990s as a sign of `diminished mobilizing potential'. Changes in
employee attitudes and consciousness are seen to underly an emerging
crisis in `traditional trade union practices' and, by implication, the viability
of unions as representative organizations (Hyman 1994: 118).
1
Such a
`crisis' variously affects the willingness of employees to join trade unions,
the views and expectations of employees about unions, the involvement
and participation of employees in their union's internal organization and,
lastly, the preparedness of members to take collective action.
In the light of this important debate, the purpose of this paper is to
explore the attitudes of employees to collectivism. In particular, our
objective is to identify the factors associated with collectivist orientations
to work and to examine the implications of those orientations for union
commitment and the willingness to take industrial action. The research has
been conducted in both Britain and Australia in order to ascertain whether
different national institutional settings might affect employee attitudes to
collectivism and to trade union activism and militancy.
In Britain the new industrial relations practices and the alleged `drift to
individualism' have occurred in a political and legal environment that has
assisted management to determine unilaterally the nature and process of
organizational change. Public policy has substantially removed the statu-
tory and administrative support for collective bargaining and consequently
has marginalized trade unions as legitimate and effective representative
institutions (Ackers et al. 1996). In Australia, by contrast, up to the time
this research was conducted neo-corporatist industrial relations policies
had invested trade unions with greater authority over the formulation and
implementation process of workplace reform. An institutionally managed
programme of award restructuring and enterprise bargaining had contained
246 British Journal of Industrial Relations
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