worker representation and workplace and safety – by david walters and theo nichols

BOOK REVIEWS

The Meaning of Work in the New Economy by Chris Baldry, Peter Bain, Phil Taylor,Jeff Hyman, Dora Scholarios, Abigail Marks, Aileen Watson, Kay Gilbert,Gregor Gall and Dirk Bunzel. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007, xi + 277pp., ISBN 1 0439 3407 9, £60.00.

Making a useful contribution to debates about changes in employment relations,The Meaning of Work in the New Economy provides a comparative, in-depth analy-sis of two types of knowledge work, asking whether they live up to positive pre-dictions about such work in the contemporary economy. The authors frame theirextensive empirical study by introducing claims about knowledge work that havebeen advanced by researchers who believe that jobs in which people work with andproduce knowledge have an enabling capacity. Perhaps best recognized in the workof Manuel Castells and Robert Reich, but found in the work of numerous otherresearchers, ideal-typical knowledge workers deploy communications technologies(primarily computer-based technologies), manipulate information and symbols,work collaboratively and within networked rather than hierarchical, bureaucraticorganizations.

These jobs, the optimistic proponents of knowledge-based employment oftenargue, can give employees greater autonomy, entail greater creativity, higher levels ofdecision-making capacity and can be enriching and gratifying in a way that has beenuncommon under contemporary capitalism. Knowledge workers are often thought ofas the paradigmatic free agents who follow boundaryless careers outside formalorganizations. The authors of The Meaning of Work have a meta-theoretical goal oftrying to understand the disjunctions and continuities between new and old modes oforganizing labour. In other words, they are centrally concerned about what is new inthe new economy.

Baldry and colleagues approach this goal with a careful comparative researchdesign and by collecting an impressive amount of data. Their data are from twosectors in what might be broadly called the knowledge sector of employment: callcentres and software development operations in Scotland, a sector that has seenconsiderable growth in that country in recent years. The project entailed organiza-tional case studies of nine workplaces: 3–4 months of fieldwork in each site, duringwhich teams of 3–4 researchers analysed organizational artifacts and documents,observed people at work, in training sessions and business meetings, engaged inguided conversations with selected groups of employees, and collected companystatistics. In addition, the authors surveyed over 1,100 employees, which they fol-lowed up with in-depth interviews with a smaller subset of respondents. Combiningthese multiple methods, the authors were well positioned to generate meaningfulcomparative conclusions about contemporary knowledge work.

British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2008.00682.x46:2 June 2008 0007–1080 pp. 367–383

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2008. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Their comparisons proceed along a handful of dimensions that are critical forunderstanding contemporary work and what has changed. They explicate what isunique in call centres and in software development enterprises by comparing thematerial/formal structure of work in each sector, the respective human resourcesstrategies, temporal flexibility, divergent labour processes, organizational manage-ment of commitment, and other key features that shape daily work experiences andattitudes. They move beyond workplaces as well by delving into workers’ views on themeaning of work, how important work is relative to family, leisure and personal life,and community. A strength of this book is the authors’ insistence that work andemployment cannot be considered in a vacuum and that the degree to which peoplecan balance work with personal life and put boundaries on the demands of paid worktells us much about the benefits and advantages of new work arrangements.

Throughout their discussion, Baldry and colleagues are attentive to gender statusand relations, whether asking about the gender-skewed nature of the occupations (callcentre jobs are staffed primarily by women while software development jobs arestaffed primarily by men) or asking about the gendered division of labour in the home.By doing this, the authors are able to grasp the nuances of the connections betweenpaid and unpaid work, and provide some useful answers about whether occupationaltrends can restructure inequitable gender relations in households.

Baldry and coauthors conclude that, except for the privileged cadre of skilledsoftware professionals, the realities of everyday life in these occupations and theorganizations in which they are embedded fall well short of the positive and optimisticrhetoric about knowledge work. For one thing, the structure of work in the callcentres was fairly regimented and taylorized, managerial control of workers wasdirect, and the work environment was characterized by a focus on increasing produc-tivity and quantifying results. For many who study work, this finding will not beespecially surprising. However, Baldry and his team argue that it is important toacknowledge this because it refutes the more idealized image of knowledge workersand undercuts the image of a universal, advantaged category of knowledge worker.

At the same time, they found surprising similarities between the two sectors. Inboth, organizations’ enabling human resources strategies were limited: piecemeal andgenerally superficial. While organizations in the two sectors attempted to manufac-ture cultures that emphasized employee commitment, their efforts were limited andineffective. Employees tended to distance themselves from wholehearted identifica-tion with their firms and even resist and subvert many of the positive cultural themesthat managers endeavored to ‘sell’ to their employees. In both sectors, considerablenumbers of employees were principally interested in maintaining careers with theirfirms rather than pursuing careers in external labour markets. Those who were mostlikely to speak positively of extra-organizational careers were the more highly skilledand highly paid software specialists who possessed greater market power than eithertheir less-skilled and lower-paid comrades in software development or the less-skilledand lower-paid employees in call centres.

For workers in both sectors, the researchers also found a significant degree of workspillover into family and private life. While people varied with respect to the resourcesthey possessed for managing and fending off work spillover, both groups neverthelesshad to contend with the stresses and time challenges from paid work. Not surpris-ingly, professional and well-positioned software workers were most advantageouslypoised to protect their family life and to create temporal flexibilities because many oftheir employers had work/life policies that enabled them to better accommodate thedemands of work to the needs of family. Importantly, however, workers across both

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sectors devoted considerable energy to negotiating the boundaries between the twoworlds. And, the majority of workers they surveyed and interviewed believed thatclass continued to be a salient category of personal and social life, even though some(call centre workers, primarily) identified as working class while others (primarilysoftware employees) identified as members of the professional, middle class.

The Meaning of Work in the New Economy thus sheds considerable light on an issueof critical importance for social scientists and labour relations experts who study workand employment today. Baldry and colleagues paint a nuanced picture of knowledgeworkers, showing that this class of workers cannot be pigeonholed or simplisticallycategorized, and convincingly arguing that the work conditions that knowledgeworkers experience in the new economy should be viewed on a continuum of workconditions with the past, rather than as radically new or particularly liberating.

Vicki Smith

University of California

The Myth of Japanese Efficiency — The World Car Industry in a Globalizing Age byDan Coffey. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2006, 202 pp., ISBN 978 1 84542041 3, £59.95.

Coffey argues that our understanding of the automotive industry, like other culturalartefacts, is refracted through the process of story and mythmaking. The recenthistory of the industry is characterized by a particular myth, that of Japanese pre-eminence, which rests upon a series of counterfeits.

As a labour economist he is attempting to make sense of a series of paradoxesderived from a historical reworking of recent industrial performance. The centralparadox is this: why is it assumed that Toyota and Japanese manufacturers, morebroadly, have solved the ‘problems’ of Fordism when this is unsupported by the facts?The subtitle could just have easily been ‘the world turned upside down’. His argumentis convincing, and thus, he makes his case.

For over 20 years, western academics, the media and countless cadres from business(now even the public sector — ‘leaning’ the UK Civil service) have pursued an agendathat makes sense only if history is reversed. This is that the rise of the Japanese firmin the 1960s and 1970s, and specifically Toyota, has transformed business and led usout of the increasingly feeble world known as Fordism to the promised land of, first,Japan, then Toyota (when Japan was not all it was supposedly cracked up to be) andlatterly to lean production. The ‘line’, the founding myth so to speak, has been thatthe Japanese auto industry and notably Toyota, invented the superior organizationaland production methodologies necessary to break from Fordism, including the wayout of its various forms of stagnation — that is, inflexibility, limited product optionsand rigid organizational and social (worker-centred) inefficiencies. This is told incountless writings, a form of hagiography now taught as second nature in businessschools across the land and reinforcing a myth of monstrous distortions.

Subsequently, the MIT-based International Motor Vehicle Programme (IMVP)world survey set out to discover the how and what of this preeminence. Coffey, citingwonderful exemplars, argues that, in fact, it was not Toyota in the 1970s but ratherFord and GM who, in the 1950s and 1960s, were noted for their flexible productrange. Toyota and other Japanese producers were ‘laggards’, not innovators, inflexible production. While Karel Williams and his colleagues made similar arguments

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in the early 1990s, Coffey wants to make a broarder point about the way these mythshave been constructed. Coffey argues for the academic value of the IMVP project thatsubsequently spawned the polemical popularizer of the myth of lean, The Machinethat Changed the World. But the issue for Coffey is why considerably more vital datafrom the IMVP findings were ignored, and by none other than J. F. Krafcik, theprincipal researcher for whom he has the highest regard. Crucially, this issue is thatthe survey masks two crucial aspects that have been necessarily ignored in the creationof the Toyota myth — ‘high levels of automation, and . . . long hours’ allow theIMVP to explain Toyota’s contrived ‘success’ (p. 92).

The background myths matter because they make it almost impossible for theIMVP and subsequently their popularizing followers to see distortions. Based uponan assessment of the IMVP methodology and results (chapter 4), Coffey argues thatthe above oversight allowed the researchers also to misunderstand the relationshipbetween production time and the nature of vehicle complexity and variety whencomparing different manufacturers. Moreover, chapter 3 is devoted to the case of theBMW–Rover debacle (from 1994); the implications of this misunderstanding weredemonstrated graphically in the disastrous attempt to implement ‘lean’.

In driving Rover along the road to the so-called Japanese way, the history of itsproduct range, product reshaping and trajectory, added to what we should term thespatial politics of production, was not simply ignored so much as ran into crashbarriers. The received view is that the positives of the ‘Japanese way’ (Just-In-Time(JIT) and so forth) took Rover as far as it could but that the already flagging companysimply could not rise to the challenge. Coffey argues that, to the contrary, it was theattempt to implement a notion of JIT (the myth) that undermined Rover’s portfolio.

In chapters 6–8, Coffey wonderfully unpacks the underlying ideological underpin-nings to the myth in well-chosen terms that should be read by all willing purveyors ofthe lean fantasy. Chapter 6 (‘Rivalrous asymmetries’) highlights the pernicious effectsof the myth in creating a form of group-think-rot limiting broader social scientific andhistorical recognition of Japanese state and US Cold War interests propelling Japanin the 1980s and 1990s. Chapters 7 and 8 uncover the relationship between the ‘myth’and those vested interests, which are revealed more obviously in some approachesthan others (see his indictment of the Womack and Jones’ comical, were it not sofallacious and sociologically illiterate, understanding of craft work (pp. 155–158); see,Womack and Jones’ (2003) Lean Thinking). Typically, while the import of theseaspects of Japan’s rise are ignored (state regulation, being the most obvious) whenJapan has difficulties, as in the post-‘Bubble’ period, this oft-ignored basis of successis used against it.

Take the issue of craftwork, for instance. Craft, in the Womack and Jones’ bowd-lerized myth of the so-called German way, thrives in an environment of rework (i.e.waste, muda) and idle time is worker-driven rest (more muda) time. This is bad forbusiness and so, by contrast, lean production can establish good worker behaviour,good business outcomes and happy workforces. For Coffey, this is an ideologicaltravesty creating an empirical myth and it requires careful rebuttal. It creates a parodyof (German) craftwork in order to sustain the counterfeit of Toyota as the place ofreal and good worker-centred toil and so one parody depends upon the other. Whilethe world might be tempted by the Toyota myth, even weak sceptics may be increas-ingly less credulous when it comes to the effects of this brave new world on workers.And it is with this parody of the world of labour that the counterfeit of lean work(with its beguiling, but ultimately stupid, mantra, ‘working smarter, not harder’)undermines the very essence of the grand counterfeit itself.



I have only one issue of any real substance with the book. This is that I wouldcounsel the need to go even further than Coffey suggests. I would not go so far as toargue, as he does, that, when we strip away the ideological underpinnings and someof the other nonsensical babble from the willing dunces, that nothing remains of the‘lean’ agenda. This is because the belief in the lean mantras has, to some extent,undermined union attempts at combating company agendas for control of the labourprocess. In this respect, the counterfeit continues to work. It makes the quality drive,which is at the heart of many recent workplace changes, appear to be inevitable aswitnessed in the deteriorating experience of many car workers. In one sense, leanproduction is true to its word — the counterfeit is indeed remarkable. While mana-gerial assaults upon labour traditions are commonplace, the current combination ofsocial, cultural and economic domination in the era of neoliberalism depends uponforms of production, which require less labour, driven more determinedly, not only bytechnological innovation but also by intensification and extensification of the workingday. This is challenged when those at the receiving end, as many critical studiesindicate, refuse the counterfeit. But can the willing dunces be persuaded out of theirideological slumber? As it is a central part of Coffey’s argument that this counterfeitis hegemonic, we might have to wait for some time to pass. But if more researchersread this excellent and critical book, we can at least make some headway. The Mythof Japanese Efficiency deserves a wide readership.

Paul Stewart

University of Strathclyde

The Changing Institutional Face of British Employment Relations edited by LindaDickens and Alan C. Neal. Kluwer Law International, Alphen aan den Rijn, theNetherlands, 2006, xii + 158 pp., ISBN 9 041125418, £56.00.

This volume of essays marks the thirtieth anniversary of the establishment of theAdvisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS). In celebration, the editorsbring together contributions from a range of ‘highly regarded’ academics and seniorpractitioners with the stated aim of providing ‘a contemporary picture of the institu-tional landscape of British employment relations’ (preface, p. x), set in the context of‘political, employment relations and legislative development over the last threedecades’ (p. 1).

The editors themselves explore this context, locating the necessary historical start-ing point in Britain’s traditional self-regulatory system of ‘voluntarism’ or ‘collectivelaissez-faire’ (p. 2). Entering the 1960s, therefore, the main institutions of what wethen simply called collective bargaining and/or industrial relations were ‘trade unionsand employers and their associations, with auxiliary support from the state’ (p. 2).

By the mid-1970s — and following the Donovan Report and the largely failedexperiment of the 1971 Industrial Relations Act (with only its unfair dismissal provi-sions being salvaged from the wreckage) — the editors identify the emergence of ‘amodified, supplemented form of voluntarism’ (p. 3) and the genesis of greater legalintervention in, or ‘juridification’ of, individual employment relationships. It was inthis period that most of the institutions of modern day ‘employment relations’ consid-ered in this collection were established or emerged in clearly recognizable form,including ACAS itself, the Central Arbitration Committee, the Certification Officer,the Health and Safety Executive/Commission (HSE/HSC), the Industrial (now

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Employment) Tribunals, the Employment Appeals Tribunal and the two of the threeequality commissions (the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Commission forRacial Equality).

Among the subsequent ‘dramatic’ changes and ‘volatile trends’, the editors point to‘the end of “voluntarism” ’; the ‘withering away’ (p. 1) of strike action; the massivedecline in trade union membership (with union density more than halved from its highwater mark of 56 per cent of the workforce in 1979) and strength; the decentralizationand shrinking coverage of collective bargaining; the consistent and seemingly inexo-rable trend towards juridification of employment relationships; political differenceson how best to manage the British economy in the face of increasing globalization;shifts in the structure and composition of the workforce; and the growing influence ofthe European Union’s social policy and employment legislation.

Looking dispassionately at the content of the volume overall, it is obviously mostnotable that the traditional institutions of the voluntarist era — that is, unions andemployers’ associations — merit no discrete place in the modern institutional land-scape. Most of the individual contributions, therefore, provide an outline or sketch ofadaptation to change within the remaining institutions mentioned above, with theaddition of Brown’s chapter on the more recently established Low Pay Commission(LPC) and Hepple’s contribution on the equality commissions and the new combinedand expanded Commission for Equality and Human Rights. In addition, Freedlandand Koutouris usefully consider the fragmentation and dilution of the industrial andemployment relations functions originally (and if only briefly) carried out by theDepartment of Employment, while Keep looks at the organization and institutionalprovision of training and skills.

Among the general themes, therefore, is the impact of change on organizationalstructures, governance and/or policy and work priorities. This is nowhere more starklyillustrated than in relation to ACAS itself. While ACAS’s general statutory remitremains in theory ‘to promote the improvement of industrial relations’ (although, since1993, no longer specifically ‘the extension of collective bargaining’ or, since 1999, theresolution of trade disputes), Sisson and Taylor observe that the organization itselfrecast its mission as ‘to improve the performance and effectiveness of organizations byproviding an independent and impartial service to prevent and resolve disputes andbuild harmonious relationships at work’ (p. 26). So while superficially there may havebeen little change in ACAS’s portfolio of work — encompassing as it does collectivedispute resolution, conciliation of individual Employment Tribunal claims and theprovision of information and advisory services — its balance and focus shifted signifi-cantly. And this trajectory of repositioning has continued in the form of an ongoingstrategy dating from 2001 to ‘stretch perceptions of ACAS from being known as a[especially collective] dispute resolution service dealing with large organizations tobeing the first port of call for organizations of all sizes and sectors needing information,advice, training and services to help improve their workplace performance’ (p. 34).

Another noteworthy theme is the general decline in ‘tripartism’ or ‘corporatism’.From a situation in which employer organizations and unions had a preferred placein the structure and governance of certain bodies, in the words of the editors they nowappear ‘more in the guise of one among a number of “stakeholders” or representativesof stakeholders’ (p. 9). As Callaghan puts it in relation to the HSC, with a wider rangeof interests being represented on the Commission and a recognition by independentcommissioners that ‘the public interest was wider than agreement between the pro-ducer group members of the Commission’ (p. 40), it is ‘acting more like a non-executive board and less like a model of bargained corporatism’ (p. 41).



It is perhaps therefore ironic that one of the most apparently successful of theinstitutions covered is the relatively new LPC. Brown suggests that this success maylie, at least in part, ‘in its very deliberate “social partnership” construction, withbroadly implied roles and “balance” ’ (p. 69). He goes further in positing that theLPC’s ‘most fundamental lesson for Britain’s other regulatory institutions may be theimportance of independent enforcement’ (p. 77). By way of comment on Brown’sviews, it might be argued that while everything changes everything stays the same.Despite a constant clamour for deregulation and the currency of buzz phrases such as‘light touch regulation’, there is in the end no substitute for focused and effectiveinstitutions with teeth if workers and employees are to be adequately protected in anever-changing and globalized work environment.

In conclusion, the editors hope that this volume can be of benefit to ‘public policydebate, as well as researchers, students and other readers’ (preface). And it is undoubt-edly a useful contribution in all these respects. While some of the individual contribu-tions are possibly over-descriptive (in particular those on the Employment Tribunalsand the Employment Appeal Tribunal), the variety of approaches and content perhapsmerely reflects the current fragmentation and lack of coherence in employment rela-tions policy and practice. As a result, theorizing, research and developing constructiveways forward are almost certainly now more challenging for all of us.

Roger M. Walden

Manchester Business School

Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream by Janice Fine.ILR Press/Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2006, xii + 336 pp., ISBN 978 0 80147257 2, £13.95.

Worker centres have expanded dramatically in numbers and significance over the past15 years in the United States. Labour scholars from political science, sociology, urbanstudies and industrial relations have watched this happen but without a broader senseof its meaning and importance. While researchers have studied worker centres as casestudies in particular contexts, no one has approached the subject in a comprehensiveempirical and theoretical way — until now. Janice Fine has written what is so far thedefinitive study of worker centres, and in so doing, has done a great favour to scholarsinterested in overlapping issues of worker representation, social justice, and theinterests of low-wage immigrant workers.

In this sweeping presentation of case study-based research and comparative analy-sis, Fine charts the emergence and expansion of contemporary worker centres, exam-ines their activities, social and political alliances, internal politics and externalimpacts, and considers strengths and weaknesses along a number of dimensions. By2005, there were 137 worker centres, located in almost every large metropolitan area(with a few rural cases as well). All of them focused on the interests of low-wageworkers, most of them (122) led by and targeting the interests of immigrants. Like thesettlement houses of the early twentieth century, the centres provided services andadvocacy in both economic and political arenas. Although small in staff size andmembership, the centres often developed mobilization capacity far beyond theirnumbers. From marginal players, they developed through the 1990s and early 2000sto become significant advocates for the interests of unrepresented immigrant workers,an ‘emerging infrastructure of immigrant incorporation’.

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A great deal could be written about this excellent book and its contributions tosocial science and the understanding of contemporary labour issues. Here, I will focuson three issues: tensions between service provision and organizing efforts; relationsbetween worker centres and unions; and causal argumentation.

Based on nine in-depth case studies, participant interviews, and a survey of 40centres, reinforced by reference to the universe of 137 cases, Fine finds three centralfeatures of worker centre activity: service provision, advocacy and organizing. Almosteverywhere, worker centres provide important services to immigrant workers — fromjob search advice and legal aid to English language courses — while at the same timetraining workers to promote their own interests at the workplace and in the politicalarena. The challenges are thus considerably more demanding than those facing socialservice agencies. Labour scholars will recognize parallel challenges facing union revi-talization efforts of the past decade. Fine gets inside these tensions in great depth andwith analytical clarity. She argues persuasively that the interests of immigrant workerscannot be served along only one dimension or the other, and that organizing is anatural, if sometimes contested, outgrowth of service provision and advocacy. Herexamination of the tensions offers new insight into more and less successful resolu-tions to this dilemma, offering signposts both for leadership strategies and furtherresearch.

An obvious dilemma is the relationship between worker centres and unions, orga-nizations that fulfil similar, if distinct, functions of service provision, organizing andrepresentation. Some worker centres are union-linked and in some cases started withunion support, but most are independent organizations, existing completely apartfrom or in uneasy alliance with unions. Fine examines the relationships, positive andnegative, including cases where worker centres have worked in coalitions with unionsand other actors to advocate, for example, living wage laws and community benefitsagreements. On the one hand, unions may see worker centres as rival organizationsand would prefer to organize those workers directly; on the other hand, workercentres may or may not prioritize union-organizing efforts for their members. Ten-sions arise not only from overlapping representation functions but also from the factthat in most cases worker centres were set up by faith-based, community and othernon-governmental organizations, where unions were unable or unwilling to serve theneeds of low-wage immigrant workers.

And this brings us to the crux of Fine’s causal argumentation. Worker centresemerged because public policy, labour unions and other intermediate agencies ororganizations were not doing their job. Long-term employer-driven union declineweakened the capacity of unions to represent workers of any kind. More broadly,low-wage immigrant workers faced an institutional wasteland in which not onlyunions but a range of previously supporting political, economic and social institutionsand worker-friendly public policy had declined in influence and effect. The opportu-nity structure was clear: an absence of institutional support and a social contextmarked by growing numbers of low-income immigrants. Into the vacuum steppedleaders from religious, community and immigrant rights groups — and from withinthe immigrant workforce itself — who chose among a range of options to buildinnovative centres of support and interest representation.

The discussion above gives only a taste of the richness of this book. Fine alsosummarizes surprising similarities across geographically dispersed centres, includingstable leadership cores and requirements that members pay dues, participate in activi-ties and develop leadership skills to allow them to speak for themselves and others inworkplace conflicts. She also shows the growing importance of worker centres in



coalition campaigns aimed at policy reform — and explains why such efforts haveproduced the most substantial gains for worker centre efforts. She shows the internalworkings and external impact of these small, struggling groups that, when theymanage to frame issues in terms of morality and social justice, can attract support andmake gains that far exceed what one might expect. And in the best traditions of socialscience, she also gives well-considered policy implications: for the centres themselves,for unions, governments and public policy. The relevance of her recommendationswas quickly validated in one important case: not long after the book was published in2006, the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizationsannounced a formal alliance with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, agrouping that includes 40 worker centres. It is rare indeed for academic research topinpoint viable policy implications so accurately and in such a timely fashion.

The book is refreshingly well written, academically rigorous but free of jargon andaccessible across a range of fields. I strongly recommend this seminal study of animportant but little understood contemporary phenomenon — for political scientists,sociologists, urban studies experts and industrial relations scholars and practitionerswho share an interest in the problems and prospects of immigrant workers and therevitalization of urban labour representation.

Lowell Turner

Cornell University

What Workers Say: Employee Voice in the Anglo-American Workplace edited by R. B.Freeman, P. Boxall and P. Haynes. ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell UniversityPress, Ithaca and London, 2007, vii + 244 pp., ISBN 978 0 8014 7281 7,US$19.95; £9.95.

A recurring question during the past quarter century has concerned the state anddestiny of trade unions. Initial policy speculation and academic analysis centred onwhether the reversal in union fortunes in 1980s Britain and North America heraldeda collapse from which collective labour was unlikely to recover, or turning moreoptimistically towards historical precedent, a phase in an economic cycle whichsimply needed to be weathered until political and economic fortunes again becamemore favourable. Through the years, prognoses became increasingly pessimistic asunion membership haemorrhaged in growing numbers of western economies andunions themselves became increasingly marginalized even by their erstwhile politicalsupporters. In the newly economically liberalized air, personnel departments meta-morphosed into Human Resources, and commitment-focused and individualizedpractices such as empowerment, engagement and teamwork, accompanied byinterest-unifying employee share schemes and partnership programmes helped todissolve earlier characterizations of antagonistic ‘industrial relations’ towards unitaryagendas of interest-sharing ‘employee relations’.

So, as the pessimists predict, is it all over for labour emancipation and for thelabour movements of those Anglo-Saxon nations, which have most taken economicliberalization to its heart? And if it is, what possibilities remain for employees,individually or holistically, to exercise their interests as stakeholders in their compa-nies? These are the main issues the authors confront in this finely researched andcogently argued volume. One route, identified by advocates for the ‘knowledgeeconomy’, is provided by the labour power vested in individual highly educated

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employees. Relatively secure in their specialized knowledge cocoons, individual IT,software engineers and the like can express and advance their interests with their feetand demonstrate little need or desire for any collective protection. However, workersmay also seek influence through ‘voice’ at work, defined both through representativearrangements and through ‘various forms of participation developed directly betweenmanagement and workers’ (p. 4).

This book develops voice themes first raised in Freeman and Rogers’ much-admired 1999 volume, What Workers Want. The principal aim of the authors is ‘toidentify the voice workers have in those [six advanced Anglo-American] countries andcompare it with the voice they want’ (p. 2). The research was undertaken by estab-lished researchers in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the USAby applying a common (but individually modified) survey framework drawn fromprevious investigations undertaken in the USA and Britain. The book lays out find-ings from each individual country on a chapter-by-chapter basis and while each casestudy makes highly informative reading, the approach of describing the methodologyfor each country is rather ponderous and repetitive. Perhaps a description of themethodologies could better be presented in an appendix, allowing the reader to focuson the findings and grapple with their implications.

Moreover, the findings are highly significant as the authors effectively confrontmyths about contemporary employment, themes which in later chapters specialistcontributors then develop in terms of their significance for trade unions (Peetz andFrost), employers (Purcell and Georgiadis) and government (Kochan). The empiricalchapters demonstrate that there is still considerable latent demand by employees,expressed as a representation gap, for collective services by trade unions in all sixcountries. Interestingly, this gap, in many cases, is articulated by young workers,those whose mobility has made it difficult for unions to organize. The thesis thatunion membership is saturated is also exposed as is perceived antagonism betweenunion and non-union voice mechanisms. Indeed, the proposal that high-commitmentwork practices, which embrace participative practice, are associated with a positiveimpact on employee orientations is reinforced by many of the country findings. Thereare some areas of ambivalence. On the one hand, many people do not join unionsbecause they regard them as ineffective in dealing with management. On the otherhand, there was uniform preference for co-operative rather than antagonistic relationsbetween the parties. While making clear that co-operation does not imply subservi-ence to managerial priorities, it is sometimes difficult, from the bare bones of surveyanalysis, to assess respondents’ interpretations of co-operation and antagonism.Nevertheless, a roadmap is laid down by the surveys, which provide highly relevantguidance for the institutional partners. In at least some of the countries, joint consul-tation is viewed as a desirable and effective voice and considerable emphasis is givenin the UK context to the capacity of European Works Councils and the recent (2005)European regulations on Information and Consultation of Employees to deliver voicebenefits to employees. Past evidence of joint consultation and contemporary studieson employee representative inputs into the European Works Councils leads to pos-sibly less sanguine conclusions.

This book deserves to receive an audience that goes beyond academic interests. It isbargain-priced and there is much here for unions, employers and government officialsto digest, and indeed the concluding prescriptive chapters direct their attention tothese parties, although one suspects that it is unlikely that Australian, UK and NorthAmerican governments are going to listen too appreciatively to the appeals for a morepluralist or regulative agenda raised through the findings. This would be a pity as this



thoroughly comprehensive research clearly demonstrates that notwithstanding threedecades of employer, and in some cases, governmental indifference or opposition, thedemand by employees for services, which trade unions can provide, has not evapo-rated, nor is it likely to in the foreseeable future. If the lessons of this book are heeded,the modes of voice delivery may alter but the expressed need will not diminish.

One thing is made clear by the authors: unions’ traditional role as ‘loyal opposition’to management governance is no longer sustainable in the modern economy. Whethera more flexible and adaptive approach would lead to long-term benefits for employeesor unions remains to be seen. In Britain at least, where union weakness has beenmatched by diversity (although questionable depth) of voice approach, some signs areworrying: stress levels have reached epidemic proportions, overall levels of satisfac-tion at work have declined, and rampant managerialism has extended to sectors oncetypified by collegiality and co-operative working. It is not a criticism of this thought-provoking book to suggest that we also need to know more about what workers feelor what workers experience to gain a fuller understanding of the potential directionsfor employee voice to take.

Jeff Hyman

University of Aberdeen

The Firm as a Collaborative Community — Reconstructing Trust in the KnowledgeEconomy edited by Charles Heckscher and Paul S. Adler. Oxford UniversityPress, Oxford, 2006, 592 pp., ISBN 0 19 928603 5, £50.00.

This book deserves attention because it tries to trace a wide variety of elements oforganizational change that could — if the contributors to this volume are right — leadto a new form of capitalism, significantly different from last century’s system ofcapitalist production generally, and the neoliberal model in particular. Heckscher andAdler have brought together a relatively diverse — although exclusively North Ameri-can — group of eminent scholars who share the same research interest. Some of themlook at new forms of collaboration within the firm, others look at strong forms ofco-operation between firms and yet others choose a more conceptual approach toanalysing what is new in the post-bureaucratic practices of organizationalco-operation.

The editors of this volume clearly appear as the thought leaders in this researchperspective, especially with the first chapter, which is the longest and sets the scene forwhat follows in 12 other chapters. In this chapter, Heckscher and Adler claim that‘. . . in the last few decades, a form of community — we call it collaborative community— has emerged that points the way beyond the classic antinomy of individual vs.collective, of tradition vs. freedom, of Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft . . . ’ (p. 13). Theyreject the pessimistic Weberian view on the processes that erode traditional forms ofcommunity in modern society and bureaucratic organizational contexts as well as theconservative hopes that traditional values and practices can be restored. Rather, theysuggest that a new era is dawning because ‘. . . community based on organic solidarityand value-rationality has become a practical economic imperative’ (p. 23), and go onto argue that today’s knowledge-intensive economy is developing a new ethic, whichbuilds on two principles: ‘. . . contribution to the collective purpose, and contributionto the success of others’ (p. 39). In the wake of such reorientations among employeesand managers, even a redefinition of property rights seems necessary to Heckscher

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and Adler. If they are right, (liberal) capitalism as we know it will soon be dead andburied. The question, of course, is whether their claims hold true.

In order to answer the latter question, nothing is more helpful than empiricalinvestigations and this is what most of the following chapters do. The firms in which theauthors of this book find their examples range from IBM and Mayo Clinic to Nestléand various software firms. Having thought through all the arguments of chapters 2–13and especially the examples that they provide, I have to admit that — despite my initialscepticism — I became more and more persuaded that there might indeed be somefundamental changes that modern capitalism is currently going through.

In two chapters, which together with the long introductory chapter by the editorsform part 1 of the book, Sabel and Maccoby investigate the concept of collaborativecommunity mainly in conceptual terms. Sabel analyses the differences between theclassical organization and what he calls the ‘pragmatist organization’, whereasMaccoby analyses the process ‘from bureaucratic to interactive social character’, as hepromises in the title of this chapter. The latter chapter, in particular, adds to theintroductory chapter as it argues that organizational loyalty, paternal authority,primarily national markets, families with one wage earner, etc., all these elements ofthe post-Second World War capitalist system, have become largely obsolete. Today,the social character of the interactive personality is characterized by consumerist andentrepreneurial orientations, flexibility, innovation and the erosion of the traditionalreproduction institution (i.e. the family). While the bureaucratic social characterfeared the loss of the self, today’s threats are burnout and anomie. This is certainly apicture in which we find our time portrayed all too well, and a chapter, which ispointing to dramatic changes but with a considerably less optimistic undertone thanall the other contributions.

Five chapters form part 2 of this volume: Galbraith’s chapter describes how largefirms deal with complexity and what this means with regard to the internal structureof the organization. Personal relationships, he argues, are still important in keepingthe organization running. In the next chapter, Adler suggests that the loss of theautonomy that characterizes the work of today’s software developers is a source ofnew forms of solidarity in this profession. Maccoby’s second chapter in this volumeprovides encouraging examples of a ‘transparent learning culture’ (p. 269) in not-for-profit healthcare organizations. The chapter by Quan-Haase and Wellman is aninstructive case study of a high-tech firm’s practices in using advanced communica-tion technologies. As a result, they suggest that ‘. . . hierarchy needs to be reconsid-ered in the context of knowledge-based settings’ (p. 288). Rubinstein’s chapterconcludes part 2 of this book. Also drawing on extensive empirical research, he findsthat ‘union participation in managerial decision making [is on the rise and] addseconomic value to the organization’ (p. 337).

In part 3, Applegate looks at interesting network-based relations between competi-tors in the healthcare, automobile and financial services industries. And MacDuffieand Helper report on supplier relations in the Japanese and US automobile industriesclaiming that ‘. . . the level of collaboration between automakers and suppliers hasincreased’ (p. 420) and that the times of aggressive practices of squeezing suppliersbeyond any sensible level are long gone in the US auto industry.

The fourth and final part of this book comprises three chapters: Maccoby andHeckscher contribute a short chapter on leadership in which they prevent us fromutopian misunderstandings about leadership within this new paradigm by makingclear that where collaborative community prevails, leaders must ‘. . . act to satisfycontinuing needs for authoritative protection and direction’ (p. 477). Heckscher and



Foote’s chapter reports on experiences with practical interventions geared to stimu-lating collaboration within organizations, and Boncheck and Howard, finally,describe a case in which a large firm systematically involved its customers — at topmanager level — in their product innovation processes.

Overall, this is an interesting volume that presents a wealth of conceptual ideas andempirical cases. Whether collaborative community will fundamentally change thebusiness world may remain an open question. But the fact that we have increasinglybecome aware of phenomena of strong forms of co-operation between otherwisestrongly competing firms in the last one or two decades rightly leads to reflections onalternative concepts of organizing relationships in advanced capitalist economies. The‘reconstruction of trust’ may — as the subtitle of this volume suggests — play a keyrole in the new business world. Unfortunately, this book does not anywhere thor-oughly analyse this concept despite mentioning it throughout. The latter leaves onewondering whether the huge literature on organizational trust is dealing with amarginal phenomenon or whether a central part of the authors’ argument somehowslipped through their fingers in this book. In any case, this is an interesting volumeand the editors present a thought-provoking collection of articles, which, no doubt,will find a wide audience.

Reinhard Bachmann

University of London

The Making of Women Trade Unionists by Gill Kirton. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006,xiii + 183 pp. ISBN 0 7546 4569 X, £50.

This is an interesting and engaging book, which contributes to an under-researchedarea of industrial relations: women’s activism in trade unions. The author is skilledand undoubtedly expert in her field and this contributes to this well-structured bookbeing written in an accessible style. It sets out to consider how women develop as tradeunion activists. It is largely an empirical exploration of women-only union educationprogrammes. The focus is on the social processes involved, rather than the content ofthe programmes, and the effects of the experiences on participants’ lives, identitiesand subsequent engagement with the union. To achieve this, the book first considersfeminist contributions to our understanding of industrial relations, before moving onto examine the existing literature relating to women and trade unions. Rightly, theauthor points out that most previous studies have focused on paid women tradeunionists and on union policies; few studies focus specifically on women activists. Thisbook aims to address that gap.

After presenting an overview of the changing membership levels of women tradeunionists and the changing attitudes and policies to women’s participation andwomen-only education provision, the book moves on to three chapters that presentthe empirical data. They focus in turn on: how the women interviewed came into tradeunionism, their experiences of the women-only education programmes and the sub-sequent paths of their trade union involvement. A brief final chapter attempts to bringtogether the themes of the book and to summarize the main findings.

The book is largely successful in achieving the aims it sets itself. It is a welcomefocus on women trade unionists in a field that has a strong tendency to take maleactivism as the norm. It succeeds in giving voice to the participants and the reader isleft with a strong sense of the motivations, barriers and trajectories of these women’s

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activism. The messy complexity of the women’s multiple roles and the consequencesfor their union activism is competently explored. Similarly, the confidence gained bymany of these women as a result of their union work and union education is examinedeffectively. More widely, the book makes a clear case for the value of women-onlyeducation provision and women’s separate organizing, while recognizing the limita-tions of such policies.

However, there are a number of criticisms that cannot be passed over. On a minorlevel, it is notable that the precise meaning of the term ‘union career’, which is usedconsistently, is not developed at any stage — although it is clear from the outset thatthe author is exploring activism rather than paid union work. ‘Union career’ seemssimply to mean anything more than being a passive member. This is problematic giventhat some of the participants were inactive members both before and after theirinvolvement in the education programmes. It suggests that the only facet of their‘union career’ was participation on an education programme — which seems a ratherweak definition of a ‘career’.

But this is a minor criticism. A more major criticism is the lack of justification of theresearch methodology. The empirical data that make up much of the content of thebook are taken from case studies of two large, male-dominated unions. But there islittle discussion of the selection of these unions. The similarities and differences oftheir policies is referred to in the early chapters, but the author seems keen toemphasize that explanations of similarity and difference of process and outcome aredifficult to attribute directly to policy issues; rather, she seeks explanatory potential inthe experiences and lives of the women involved. This is a reasonable argument, butwithout sufficient explanation of the methodological approaches, it is difficult for thereader to make judgments about this analysis. Similarly, the research method islimited. The research is based on extensive periods of observation of women-onlyeducation programmes in the two unions, but much of the data reported are from 29interviews. The small sample means that inferences and arguments are necessarilyconstrained and the efforts to broaden the focus of the research in the final chapterare, inevitably, cautious and constrained.

These methodological and methods issues were particularly relevant in relation tothe women who became less active in their unions after their involvement in theeducation programmes. The author reports that ‘circumstances relating to the work-place [rather than time issues or balancing trade unionism with other roles] were by farthe dominant cause of the cessation of union participation’ (p. 129). This is a fasci-nating finding, which contradicts previous studies. But it is difficult to assert with anygeneralizable certainty with the methods employed. In fairness, the author is carefulnot to overstretch her data, but in doing so, leaves a number of important questionsunanswered.

A final criticism relates to the centrality of the notion of the establishment, devel-opment and expression of ‘union identities’ and ‘gender identities’ (i.e. an individualparticipant’s identity as a ‘woman’ and/or as a ‘trade unionist’). The argument is madethat these ‘identities’ are fluid and complex, and that they interact in different, andsometimes, conflicting ways. This is a strong argument, well supported by the evi-dence presented, but it is presented in a largely atheoretical manner, which is, in myview, one of the most problematic aspects of the book. Extensive studies exist in otherfields that attempt to theorize these processes and the consequences of particularidentity formations. While I am not suggesting that the author necessarily wants toalign herself with these, it seems a major omission that she has not engaged with thisliterature. In my opinion, this is something of a lost opportunity. A robust, feminist



industrial relations critical engagement with these theories would be a welcome exten-sion of existing literature, to which this study seems to lend itself particularly well. Asa result, the lack of theorization (critical or otherwise) on the topic of ‘identities’rather weakens some of the final conclusions.

Despite these criticisms, there is much of interest here for anyone interested inwomen in trade unions, and particularly in women’s activism. The book develops andextends our understanding of women-only education provision, and the complexitiesof the lives (and identities) of women activists.

Melanie Simms

University of Warwick

Worker Representation and Workplace and Safety by David Walters and TheoNichols. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK, 2007, vi + 177 pp, ISBN 0 23000194 7, £55.00.

This is a relatively short, dense but well-written book on an important subject. Itexamines the current state of worker representation in Britain, trying to chart changessince the 1980s and critically assess evidence on the role and effectiveness of partici-pation. The establishment of an institutional and regulatory architecture to empowerworkers to have some input into conditions that determine their health, safety andwell-being at work represented a major advance towards civilizing work in manydeveloped countries in the last third of the twentieth century. The need to empowerworkers in occupational health and safety (OHS) is to be found in InternationalLabour Organisation conventions (notably 155) and has been emphasized in a recentreport on employment conditions and health inequalities prepared for the WorldHealth Organisation (Benach et al. 2007). Nonetheless, the coverage and effectivenessof the participatory architecture found in Britain, other western European countriesand elsewhere, has been weakened by a mixture of neoliberal policies (privatization,outsourcing/competitive tendering, etc.), business practices (increase use of elaboratesupply chains, contingent workers, subcontracting to small business) and uniondecline.

Walters and Nichols’ book represents a carefully constructed analysis of workerpresentation and workplace health and safety drawing on previous research, includingtheir own, and two industry case studies. Although the case studies are based in theUK and the policy focus is on the British context, the issues addressed are broad onesthat apply elsewhere. Indeed, the authors make frequent reference to the experience ofother countries or observations that apply well beyond Britain. This makes the bookvery relevant to a non-British audience.

A review of this book warrants some comment about the authors. Both are out-standing and accomplished academics who have made a major contribution to ourunderstanding of occupational health and safety. Nichols helped to pioneer socio-logical research into how work organization influences workers’ safety and hisresearch has continued to extend the boundaries of knowledge in this area. Waltershas done perhaps more than any other scholar to explore worker involvement in OHSand he also has an intimate knowledge of European regulation and the British OHSinspectorate. Both have adopted an explicitly international approach to their researchand in many respects this book builds on the foundations of their earlier impressivescholarship.

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Thus, for example, the book carefully assesses earlier research on worker involve-ment as a starting point for its own contribution. For the reader unfamiliar with theterrain, this helps put the book in a broader context, while for the reader alreadyfamiliar with the area, it sets a solid foundation for evaluating Walters and Nichols’own case studies of the chemicals and construction industries. Using Sandra Dawsonand her colleagues’ (1988) influential book Safety at Work: The Limits of Self-Regulation — which covered these same industries — also provides a reference pointand the opportunity for building bodies of knowledge over time that is too oftenignored in the field of industrial relations.

Walters and Nichols make the case for worker involvement and critically assess theevidence on its effectiveness. Their analysis is rigorous and methodical, identifyinglimitations in studies that have been widely accepted and whose findings they aresympathetic to. Thus, their analysis of previous research advances scholarship inevery sense, pointing to methodological flaws and so helping to guide future research,and not overstating the evidence. The case studies of chemicals and construction arewell executed and serve to set the basis for a chapter on implementing effective workerrepresentation. In both this and the final concluding chapter, there is a strong policyemphasis. Walters and Nichols are comfortable with theoretical analysis but they alsosee research as having a role in changing policy, if not the world of work. Some oftheir findings about which models of worker participation are more effective (notablythe importance of representative models) do not fit increasingly dominant managerialorthodoxies about individualized direct consultation. Such unfashionable observa-tions need to be made precisely because these fashions are rooted in ideology ratherthan evidence. Indeed, I would predict that there will be mounting evidence on thepotentially catastrophic limitations of more manipulated forms of worker involve-ment or no involvement whatsoever (see, e.g., the recent inquiry into the explosion atBP’s Texas City refinery, Baker 2007).

In their final observations, Walters and Nichols specifically address the challengesto the existing participatory architecture identified at the beginning of this review.They identify areas where regulation and enforcement policies need to be revised inthe light of the fracturing of the labour market. They also point to examples of waysof addressing worker involvement in small or non-unionized workplaces (such as theroving safety representative model). At the same time, the need for broader collectiverepresentation is acknowledged. Unions provide pivotal logistical support for workerrepresentation. Walters and Nichols note that OHS issues actually provide a signifi-cant avenue for trade union renewal but limited evidence suggests remarkably littlerecognition of this (despite some outstanding examples of success in this regard Icould nominate including the Transport Workers Union and Clothing Textile andFootwear Union in Australia — both of which have secured pioneering forms ofsupply chain regulation on OHS grounds). For unions and industrial relations as anacademic field, the challenge of embracing and incorporating OHS remains largelyunfulfilled. For this reason alone, those in the field who see OHS as an unfamiliar,foreign or arcane technical terrain should read this book.

Michael Quinlan

University of New South Wales



References

Baker, J. (2007). Report of the BP US Refineries Independent Safety Review Panel. Washington,DC.

Benach, J., Muntaner, C. and Santana, V., eds. (2007). Employment Conditions and HealthInequalities. Prepared by the Employment Conditions Knowledge Network (EMCONET) forthe Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, World Health Organisation. Availableat http://www.who.int/social_determinants/resources/articles/emconet_who_report.pdf.

Dawson, S., Willman, P., Bamford, M. and Clinton, A. (1988). Safety at Work: The Limits ofSelf-Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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http://www.who.int/social_determinants/resources/articles/emconet_who_report.pdf

worker representation and workplace and safety – by david walters and theo nichols

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