Farewell to Flexibility?
Published on 14. June 1991
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-0-631-17796-8 (ISBN)
Description
From a fashionable fad of the 80s, "flexibility" is now at the centre of the debate on the nature of contemporary restructuring. On the one hand, there are those who view flexibility as the key to management and union discontentment. On the other hand, there are those who emphasize that the most striking features of industrial and employment relations in the 1980s were continuity and stability. This volume is a contribution to that process of change. Comprising original research and theoretical contributions from a multi-disciplinary range of leading contributors, it re-evaluates key controversies surrounding the nature of employment patterns, production relations and work organization. The book asks: has the concept of "flexibility" helped or hindered analysis?"; should the policies based on the term be pursued or rejected?; and what sort of language and framework might be more useful? This book should be of interest to all those concerned with current and future employment and production issues, in particular, students of industrial relations, industrial sociology, management, politics, social geography and labour economics.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Publishing group
John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
684 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-631-17796-8 (9780631177968)
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Schweitzer Classification
Content
Part 1 Change and continuity in work and employment: the orthodoxy of flexibility, Anna Pollert; the employment strategies of large firms, Paul Marginson; task flexibility and the intensification of labour in British manufacturing during the 1980s, Tony Elger. Part 2 Restructuring rationales - productivity, cost controls or flexibility?: in a state of change - flexibility in the Civil Service, Peter Fairbrother; the fragmentation of industrial R&D, Richard Whittington; "flexible" employment in the retail and hotel trades, Tim Walsh. Part 3 Flexible specialization - a new paradigm of production?: flexible specialization and small firms in Italy - myths and realities, Ash Amin; from 1960s automation to flexible specialization - a deja vue of technological panaceas, Chris Smith; restructuring and the politics of industrial renewal - the limits of flexible specialization, Peter Noland and Kathy O'Donnell. Part 4 Employment fragmentation and the enterprise culture: survey evidence on trends in "non-standard" employment, Bernard Casey; the self-employed - small entrepreneurs or disguised wage labourers?, Helen Rainbird; franchising - a testimony to the "enterprise economy" and economic restructuring in the 1980s?, Alan Felstead; the small firm and the UK labour market in the 1980s, Steve Johnson. Conclusion: Plus ca change? - the theory of productions and the production of theory, Richard Hyman.