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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb027864. When citing the article, please cite: Mick Marchington, Roger Armstrong, (1985), “Involving Employees Through the Recession”, Management Research News, Vol. 8 Iss: 3, pp. 21 - 25.

Introduction For many people, the Ford Motor Company is the epitome of forward planning in industrial relations and, in this interview, Ford's industrial relations director expresses his views on this and a number of other themes which he sees as important.

There is little doubt that the economic, political and legal context within which employee relations takes place has altered substantially over the course of the past decade. What is more interesting is whether or not this has actually produced changes in individual employing organisations and workplaces, and if so why this has occurred. Much of the discussion about the existence of an enterprise culture is highly polemical, rather stronger on rhetoric than reality, and is often based on publicised initiatives or interviews with senior managers. Clearly, from such data, it is easy to over‐exaggerate the extent of change, and to assume that real and lasting adjustments have been put into effect. What is required therefore are more in‐depth investigations of recent developments in specific organisations which can be used to tease out whether policy initiatives have led to changes in practice (see, for example, MacInnes, 1987; Marchington and Parker, 1990).

In this paper we describe the context for the three year project “Quality and the Human Resource Dimension” funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

The subject of employee involvement (El) has become much more central to debates about industrial relations and personnel management over the course of the last decade. Employers, confronted by increasingly competitive product markets and a greater emphasis on quality and customer care, have started to focus attention much more explicitly on attempts to develop and motivate employees, as well as aiming to draw more fully upon employee knowledge and talents. At the same time, developments within the EC — especially via the Social Charter — have caused British employers to think more carefully about how to involve employees at work. Amongst the academic community, the subject has also undergone a renaissance, with researchers questioning whether EI is really new, whether it is little more than a facade for u itarist management, or how it interrelates with human resource management or the “new industrial relations”. It is within such a context that our study of employee involvement was commissioned by the Department of Employment and commenced in the summer of 1989.

Research into joint consultation in the last 15 years.

Since the first Volume of this Bibliography there has been an explosion of literature in all the main areas of business. The researcher and librarian have to be able to uncover specific articles devoted to certain topics. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume III, in addition to the annotated list of articles as the two previous volumes, contains further features to help the reader. Each entry within has been indexed according to the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus and thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid information retrieval. Each article has its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. The first Volume of the Bibliography covered seven journals published by MCB University Press. This Volume now indexes 25 journals, indicating the greater depth, coverage and expansion of the subject areas concerned.

It is now commonplace to hear about the re‐forming potential of new employment practices such as employee involvement, TQM, empowerment, teamworking, and HRM. There are arguments that these have contributed to organizational success, and a feeling that these are all things to be welcomed. But not all analysts agree that these are as widely practised as the glowing reports would have us believe, and there is a contrary view that these approaches lead to greater work intensification and less satisfied employees. Many of the gurus who write about these issues implicitly assume that all can be improved by a wave of the magic wand and the slaying of a few “evil” characters along the way. Reality, of course, is much more complex. The argument here is that there are no instant solutions, but the process and achievement of change are difficult since so much depends on the quality of employee‐management relationships at the workplace.

For companies striving towards total quality management and continuous improvement it is important to be sure that employees are receiving the right messages. A new non‐scoring audit tool, developed in work with UK companies, assesses whether human resource policies are integrated with quality management processes.

Uses a longitudinal case study approach to analyse changes in industrial relations in a chemical company over the last decade. The authors argue that the concept of “waves” can be used to help understand developments during this period. The first wave related to the crisis of the early 1980s and a “turnaround project”, while the second was part of a longer term and in a sense less urgent cultural change initiative. There was thus a shift in management thinking, from emphasizing compliance with short‐term imperatives, to an attempt to develop a more fully co‐operative relationship, where commitment was seen as central to the new way of working. However, underpinning this shift to a more co‐operative relationship was a considerable shift in the balance of workplace power, a fact which explains the new relationship more effectively than increased employee understanding or the growth of consensus at the workplace. At the same time, there remained ambiguity amongst the key actors in the process. Whilst senior management strongly supported the new programme of change, middle managers and supervisors were much less enthusiastic. Unions also were ambivalent in their attitudes, given the dimunition of their role. Amongst other things, the case illustrates the difficulty encountered when management attempt to change organizational culture to achieve high trust industrial relations.