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British Manufacturing Organization and Workplace Industrial Relations: Some Attributes of the New Flexible Firm
Author(s) -
Ackroyd Stephen,
Procter Stephen
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
british journal of industrial relations
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.665
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1467-8543
pISSN - 0007-1080
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8543.00087
Subject(s) - industrial organization , order (exchange) , business , set (abstract data type) , industrial relations , production (economics) , resource (disambiguation) , key (lock) , management , economics , computer science , microeconomics , computer network , finance , programming language , computer security
The characteristics of the largest British manufacturing firms are analysed in order to argue that the form of organization adopted at corporate and plant level by such firms is distinctive. The first part of the paper looks at the characteristic kinds and types of productive activities that the largest British firms undertake. It is then suggested that there is a distinctive pattern of organization for production at plant level, described as the ‘new flexible firm’, the features of which are formally set out. The new flexible firm have some key features which help to make sense of an emerging pattern of workplace industrial relations in manufacturing. The way this new form of organization at plant level utilizes labour contradicts rather than supports the expectations of some analysts about the importance of human resource management.