Ray Loveridge

Towards an organizational study of trade unions

This paper develops modes of analysis for three major issues in the study of trade unions as organizations. These are, first, their distinctiveness as a discrete type of organization; secondly, the nature of their membership attachment; and thirdly, their twin rationales of representation and administration. The integration of these analyses within a new framework is then pursued. This framework serves to suggest propositions requiring empirical investigation and reference is made to some results from a preliminary study.

The strategic management of technological innovation

Introduction - defining the field of technology and strategy strategies in context structures, boundaries and alliances crisis, learning and adaptation.

60 years of Human Relations

Human Relations was founded in 1947 as a collaborative transatlantic project between the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London and the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its objective was to encourage theoretical and methodological contributions to the social sciences and to promote their practical application to solve community problems. This article traces the development and evolution of the journal and seeks to assess its contribution to social science research. It examines the intellectual role of the Tavistock Institute and the tensions and pressures that the journal has faced over the past 60 years as it has sought to fulfil its mission and achieve its academic goals.

The Ethical Significance of Corporate Culture in Large Multinational Enterprises

This chapter takes an instrumental view of ethical values in international business. It suggests that certain values transcend national differences in culture because they are universally important in supporting economic activity. It argues that investment in value systems of this kind is increasingly undertaken by private firms, partly to compensate for a decline in commitment to these values in society at large. These values are embodied in corporate cultures which are instilled in employees through the human resource management (HRM) practices of the firm. The results of an empirical study of HRM practices in large multinational firms are reported. They show that many firms have systematically invested in corporate culture in recent years, particularly in response to increasing volatility in the business environment. Firms involved in large scale mergers and acquisitions are particularly interested in corporate culture as a vehicle for the cultural integration and homogenisation of their employees.

Globalisation in Telecommunications: The Dynamics of Firms, Governments and Technologies.

The focus of this paper is to be upon the differential effect of national institutional frameworks on actors in a pivotal sector in the growth of global markets-telecommunications. We emphasise the varying modalities in which corporate and sectoral agendas inform public policy making and vice versa in a manner which modifies the institutional framework. We seek to illustrate the multi-layered nature of this interaction between structures and actors. The paper will describe the manner in which the telecommunications sector emerged historically within different national business systems (NBSs) and has become a global arena for contest between multi-national corporations (MNCs) serviced by regional supply chains. The life cycle effects of emergent boundaries to sectoral relationships and to technological “best-practice” are seen to be shaped both by national ideologies and institutional frameworks and by a range of competitive and what are sometimes loosely described as isomorphic pressures. In this process the MNC is seen to acquire an increasing degree of detachment from any single NBS and an ability to leverage its capabilities across national markets.

Human Resource Management in the Multinational Enterprise: Styles, Modes, Institutions and Ideologies

In their pioneering text Human Resource Management in the Multinational Company, Robert Desatnick and Margo Bennett (1977) advise that ‘If the right man is hired and properly trained to manage the foreign subsidiary, the corporate parent need not worry; but periodic audits are always advisable. His training should be concentrated at the operating company level, within US or Europe’ (p. 114). Even twenty years ago the wording of this prescription might have seemed a little archaic. Yet even if the authors had substituted Japan or Korea as the subjects of their own ethnically and sexually biased discourse they would, perhaps, have not been far from an accurate description of human resource management (HRM) practice in parent enterprises today.

Book Review: Politics and Power in the Multinational Corporation: The Role of Institutions, Interests and Identities

The tendency to treat ‘the organization’ as a unitary agent runs through much of contemporary analysis in strategic organization theory. An earlier concern for intra-organizational conflict now tends to be re-cast in guides to the lubrication of frictional inter-faces or as constituting ‘implementational deficits’ in the design of strategic change (Kotter, 1995). Its analytical significance may, indeed, be seen to evaporate in the face of what are seen to be inexorable isomorphic pressures towards strategic conformity across inter-organizational fields. Yet other perspectives view social networks as rapidly expanding modes of work organization, eroding hierarchy and allowing widely emancipating effects on participatory performance. Within the theoretical framing of the academic field of International Business (IB), the analytical disregard for intra-organizational conflict has, until recently, tended to be even more pronounced. The field’s origins in the economic analysis of international trade has provided IB analysts with an overriding and continuing concern for the functional effectiveness of the multinational corporation (MNC) as an agent in the creation of global markets. This frame can be seen to circumscribe ontological perspectives on the tensions that pervade the ongoing process of negotiating dependency relations between the head-office (HQ) of the parent firm and its foreign subsidiaries or affiliates. IB’s narrowly rationalist view of resource dependency and of the subsidiary’s agency role has been the subject of a developing critique that is well represented in the work of Christoph Dörrenbächer and Mike Geppert (2006) and others. Particularly associated with research at the universities of Groningen and Surrey, it now extends across a broadening range of organizational theorists including comparative institutionalists such as Kristensen and Zeitlin (2005). The former two scholars are editors of a new collection of research and theory entitled Politics and Power in the Multinational Corporation. In their Part I introductory chapter they describe the collection as representative of an ‘emergent critical perspective’ (p. 5). Besides critiquing the rationalistic apolitical approach of mainstream IB scholars, Geppert and Dörrenbächer target the analytical frames of both North American neo-institutionalism and European comparative institutionalism – the first for its disregard for institutional distance, the second for its neglect of social agency and its use of static configurations. They propose that ‘MNCs are indeed social constructs enacted by powerful actors which bring diverse and sometimes contradictory “contextual rationalities” into play when contesting and negotiating the methods and degrees of local adaptations’ (p. 23). And, ‘In short, power relations are context-specific (institutional and culturally shaped but not determined) and 431657OSS33210.1177/0170840611431657Book ReviewOrganization Studies 2012

Book Reviews : Robert D. McPhee and P. K. Tompkins (eds.): Organizational Communications: Traditional Themes and New Directions 1985, Beverly Hills: Sage. 296 pages

provide first a summary of findings in relation to received co-operative theory, whereby the authors concede the well-documented pressures towards degeneration, but also emphasize possible processes of regeneration, particularly if there is external support and some protection from unbridled market forces (cf. pp. 208-209). Strengthening the worker cooperative sector requires, inter alia, solving the problems of entrepreneurship, financing and professional management in order to allow co-operative working based on a workable balance between social and business objectives. In addition, the problem of internal limits to growth has to be faced by establishing a clear place for co-operatives in the (capitalist) economy. In this context, co-operative support is of utmost importance. To return to Franz Oppenheimer’s famous transformation law. The authors of this book arrive at a more optimistic prospect. They see ways of solving the fundamental dilemma of worker co-operatives, by finding

The Early History of White-Collar Unionism

Of all the blackcoated unions that have emerged in the course of the present century, the RCA deserves special notice. Not only has it achieved a high degree of unionization, but its members have displayed a sense of allegiance to the Labour Movement which, going far beyond that of any other organized group of clerks, has in some respects even surpassed the class consciousness of traditional working-class unionism. Its history stands as a living refutation of the charge that blackcoated workers lack the necessary virility for a manly defence of their interests. The study of the development of trade unionism among railway clerks can only lead to a rejection of the common stereotype of the clerk, and to an awareness of the actual variations in class consciousness which that stereotype obscures.

Segmented labour markets

The movement in the nineteenth century thought towards consumerism was marked by a growing recognition of the heterogeneity of consumer tastes. Hence the concept of segmented markets developed most rapidly in the marketing of products. As defined by W.R. Smith: Segmentation is based upon developments on the demand side of the market and represents a rational and more precise adjustment of product and marketing effort to consumer or user requirements. In the language of the economist, segmentation is disaggregative in its effects and tends to bring about recognition of several demand schedules where only one was recognised before (1956: 5).