British Manufacturing Organization and Workplace Industrial Relations: Some Attributes of the New Flexible

AbstractThe characteristics of the largest British manufacturing firms are analysed inorder to argue that the form of organization adopted at corporate and plantlevel by such firms is distinctive. The first part of the paper looks at thecharacteristic kinds and types of productive activities that the largest Britishfirms undertake. It is then suggested that there is a distinctive pattern oforganization for production at plant level, described as the ‘new flexible firm’,the features of which are formally set out. The new flexible firm has some keyfeatures which help to make sense of an emerging pattern of workplaceindustrial relations in manufacturing. The way this new form of organizationat plant level utilizes labour contradicts rather than supports the expectationsof some analysts about the importance of human resource management.1. IntroductionBy the mid-1990s, it wasbecomingmoreandmoreobviousthatsincethelate1970s industrial relations in the UK had been transformed. Until the end ofthe 1980s, the view that emphasis should be placed on continuity rather thanchange had retained considerable appeal (Batstone 1988; Gospel andPalmer 1993; MacInnes 1987; Marchington and Parker 1990). As interpreta-tions of the evidence from the 1984 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey(WIRS) gave way to work on its 1990 counterpart, however, the oppositeviewpoint began toassert itself. That important changes hadtakenplace wascertainly the position taken by the WIRS researchers themselves (Millwardet al. 1992). Other interpretations based on their data went along with thisview (Brown 1993). Purcell (1993: 10) argued that what we were seeing was