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Is the Pendulum Swinging Back? Patterns of Skill Change in the Machine‐Tool Industry
Author(s) -
Sels Luc,
Van Hootegem Geert
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
labour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.403
H-Index - 34
eISSN - 1467-9914
pISSN - 1121-7081
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9914.00079
Subject(s) - division of labour , production (economics) , clothing , focus (optics) , division (mathematics) , industrial organization , clothing industry , industrial engineering , computer science , manufacturing engineering , operations management , business , labour economics , marketing , economics , engineering , political science , microeconomics , market economy , mathematics , law , physics , arithmetic , optics
In this paper, we focus on the results of the Belgian Trend Study. The intention of this study was to examine the prevalence of new production concepts within the widest possible range of Belgian companies in the automobile, machine tool, chemical and clothing industries. The Trend‐study aimed to answer the following questions: is the Taylorist division of labour a thing of the past ? What are the alternatives? Are shifts in the division of labour accompanied by another type of personnel policy, and do traditional industrial relations have to make way for this new approach? The methodological concept used had to guarantee that the findings at the level of each industry could be generalized. In this paper, we examine the penetration of new production concepts in the main processing fields of the machine tool industry.