‘Them and Us’: Social Psychology and ‘The New Industrial Relations’
| Author | Caroline Kelly,John Kelly |
| Published date | 01 March 1991 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1991.tb00226.x |
| Date | 01 March 1991 |
British
Journal
of
Industrial
Relations
29:
1
March
1991
0007-1080
$3.00
‘Them and
Us’:
Social Psychology
and ‘The New Industrial Relations’
John
Kelly”
and
Caroline
Kelly*
*
Final version accepted
20
September 1990.
Abstract
Thh article sets out to examine the impact
of
‘new industrial relations’
techniques on worker attitudes to management and to worker-management
relations. We found 17 case studies of share schemes, profit-sharing, quality
circles and autonomous work-groups which reported relevant evidence on
worker attitudes. Although workers often welcome new industrial relations
techniques, there is very little evidence
of
any impact on ‘them and
us’
attitudes. Drawing on social-psychological theories of attitude change, the
persistence of ‘them and
us’
attitudes can be explained by the
ways
in which
new
industrial relations techniques have been implemented and managed in
organisations. Workers have often lacked choice over participation in new
schemes; there has been
a
lack
of
trust between the parties involved, together
with inequality in status and benefits and
a
lack
of
institutional support for the
schemes among senior management. It is argued that these conditions explain
the failure
of
new organisational initiatives to bring about changes in ‘them
and
us’
attitudes.
1.
Introduction
One
of
the great controversies in contemporary industrial relations is
whether new management techniques adopted in the 1980s have
fundamentally transformed the climate of labour-management relations
(e.g. Batstone 1988; Edwards 1987; Edwards and Heery 1989; Kelly and
Richardson 1989; Metcalf 1989; Millward and Stevens 1986; Richardson
and Wood 1989). These techniques span a number of different spheres of
work: rewards, e.g. share ownership, profit-related pay (Bradley and Gelb
1986;
Schuster 1984); work organisation, e.g. autonomous work groups,
quality circles (Collard and Dale 1989); decision-making, e.g. joint consult-
ative committees (Marchington 1989); and employee communications
programmes (Townley 1989).
*
*
Lecturer in Social Psychology, Birkbeck College
’
Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations, London School
of
Economics
26
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
It has been argued that these organisational changes, subsumed under the
rubric of ‘new industrial relations’ (hereafter NIR), will lead not only to
changes in worker behaviour, but more importantly to enduring changes in
underlying attitudes, and that these in turn will result in gains to the
company, such as productivity or quality improvements. It is captured most
clearly in the remark by Bassett that NIR entails ‘the replacement
of
the
class struggle with the struggle for markets. No longer us (the workers)
against them (the management), but us (our company) against them (the
competition)’ (Bassett 1986: 174). Fogarty and White (1988) cite the
reduction
of
traditional ‘them and
Us’
feelings as one of the major expected
benefits
of
wider share ownership, and the first chapter in Wickens’s (1987)
influential book on Nissan is titled ‘Them and
Us
.
.
.
to Just
Us’
(see also
Ray 1988). Surveys
of
British employers have shown that the reasons most
frequently cited for the introduction
of
shareholding or profit-share schemes
are to promote worker identification and commitment to the organisation
(Baddon
et al.
1989: 88; Dewe
et al.
1988; Poole 1989: 69), and similar
objectives have been cited by employers implementing other NIR tech-
niques (e.g. Marchington and Parker 1990: 147). American writers have
frequently defined NIR in terms
of
co-operative rather than adversarial
labour-management relations (Kochan
et al.
1986; Rico 1987); and organ-
isational theorists, such as Walton (1985), have placed the concept
of
organisational commitment (defined as internalisation of company goals,
willingness to work for the company and desire to stay with the company: see
Griffin and Bateman 1986) at the heart
of
new systems
of
industrial
relations. (For union views
of
NIR in America, see Parker 1985; Parker and
Slaughter 1988.)
There is now sufficient evidence to suggest some preliminary conclusions
concerning the impact of NIR techniques on worker attitudes, and
specifically on the underlying ‘them and us’ attitudes that have been seen to
characterise both British and American industrial relations (e.g. Barnett
1986; Kochan
et al.
1986). This evidence is reviewed in Section 2 below. It
suggests that, while workers often express positive attitudes towards the
specific NIR techniques implemented in their companies, this positive
response does not generalise to affect the underlying climate of manage-
ment-worker relations.
In Section
3
we explain these findings using a framework provided by
social psychology, a discipline in which there is considerable interest in
attitude change and intergroup relations. A social-psychological definition
of
‘them and us’ attitudes involves both the perception of a clear division
between managers and workers and a feeling
of
identification with one
of
these groups. These features are often accompanied by a belief that the
groups have conflicting interests. By exploring the conditions that are
theoretically necessary in order to bring about attitude change, it is possible
to provide an explanation for the failure
of
NIR techniques to reduce ‘them
and us’ attitudes. It is argued that this failure may be explained by workers’
lack of choice over the implementation of NIR initiatives,
by
a lack
of
trust
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