Paul Stewart

From ‘embrace and change’ to ‘engage and change’: trade union renewal and new management strategies in the UK automotive industry?

This article focuses on the relationship between the introduction of new management techniques (NMTs), trade union responses and employee attitudes in the automotive industry in the UK. In contrast to a prevailing pessimistic prognosis for the survival of traditional industrial relations in the ‘new management’ environment, unions remain as an independent and dissenting force. Paradoxically, one of the significant features driving union recovery has been the opportunities presented by the very nature of NMTs themselves which, among other things, have opened the possibility for increased local autonomy.

Out of chaos comes order: from Japanization to lean production

This article is concerned with three key approaches to the implications of Japanese involvement in the UK. It is argued that the paradigms of the so‐called Japanization and lean production schools are inadequate to the task of resolving the sociological implications of Japanese investment and that by contrast what is needed is a critical social relations approach. This will be concerned with the processes of social exclusion implied by new forms of work organization together with the roles of employee collective organizations and identities in these processes.

Beyond Japan, Beyond Consensus? From Japanese Management to Lean Production

The author argues that the current hcgernonic conceptions of the trajectory of Japanese management at home and abroad allow for only a limited understanding of the broader sociological questions relating to the subordination-insubordination of labour. The Japanese management school in the UK reifies Japancsc management by either overplaying its consensual nature or over-estimating its coercive features. In addition, it is suggested that the arguments about ‘Japan’ in the Japanization school provide the basis, significant differences notwith-standing, for the ideological agcnda of the lean production school. A more nuanced account of Japan and Japanese management would draw upon the nature of struggles in the workplacc and the wider society. While some of thesc struggles can be contained within corporatist management and union strategies, othcrs clearly cannot. This suggests that a broader understanding of the uncvcnness of workplacc subordination and quiescence requires an agenda which gocs beyond that pr...

Management Control and a New Regime of Subordination: Post-Fordism and the Local Economy

In a recent review of the changing organisation of modern industry, Wood (1989) firmly concluded that while transformations in work may be occurring, the changes are too diverse to support the notion of a single, linear trend in new developments. This sensible note of caution informs our contribution to the debate about flexibility at the core of recent industrial change, and we address this via an analysis of the Nissan project in Sunderland. Nissan is represented as, and makes the claim for itself to be (Wickens, 1987), a pathfinder in the modernisation of an old industrial region. The Nissan development has been actively encouraged and assisted by UK governments in the 1980s (Garrahan, 1986; Crowther and Garrahan, 1988) and there is a strong resonance here with the Thatcher governments’ antiunion legislation. However, the significance of Nissan is not so much in employment creation as in the innovation of new management styles in industry. At the heart of this managerial renaissance are notions of a more flexible, more integrated, and hence more productive set of industrial relations.

Unions on the Brink

The 1980s has been viewed as a period of considerable change in industrial relations. The transformation of the global market and new style management practices have raised important questions regarding the extent and character of continuities and discontinuities. Much emphasis has been placed on managerial initiatives although the substance of change has remained relatively unexplored. Much of the focus of change in terms of sophisticated management has underestimated the continuing indeterminancy of management in practice. The importance of trade union responses, including the role of employees, cannot be easily deduced from a focus upon the mechanisms of change. Considers some of the questions arising out of the new paradigms of managerial change in terms of institutional reform, human resource management and Japanization.

Labour in Uncertain Worlds: The Return of the Dialectic?

J. Rinehart, J. Huxley and D. Robertson, Just Another Car Factory? Lean Production and its Discontents, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, £11.95 paper, xi+249 pp. K. Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy, London: Verso, 1997, £14.00 paper, viii+342 pp. T. A. Kochan, R. D. Landsbury and J. P. MacDuffie, J. P. After Lean Production: Evolving Employment Practices in the World Auto Industry, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, £14.95 paper, x+349 pp.