Abstract
This chapter introduces the key elements of our comparative study. We set out two broad hypotheses: first, that an understanding of the economy and working conditions is incomplete without knowing what happens within and across workplaces; and second, that ‘local’ factors play a key role in shaping the practice of workplace employment relations, but in a more nuanced way that is ordinarily portrayed in the literature. The chapter situates our study within the existing comparative literature, provides a brief portrait of the two economies, and introduces the WERS and REPONSE survey data that provides the basis for our comparative analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In the language of Edwards (2008), we seek to establish the extent to which ‘workplace regimes’ correspond with the broader systems of governance in the two countries.
- 3.
When discussing official statistics, we typically must focus on the UK rather than Britain (thereby including Northern Ireland). We intentionally give statistics for 2011, where feasible, in order to align the portrait of the two economies with the dates of the latest WERS and REPONSE surveys.
- 4.
The two countries are furthest apart on the OECD’s subindicator of ‘state control’, covering state ownership and state involvement in private sector business (e.g. through price controls and market regulation). They are closer on ‘barriers to entrepreneurship’ and ‘barriers to trade and investment’.
- 5.
See Whitfield et al. (1998) for a lengthier discussion of the relative strengths of surveys that have been harmonised by design and those that have been designed separately but which can be subject to comparative secondary analysis (as in our case).
- 6.
WERS and REPONSE also offer surveys of employee representatives, but very limited use is made of these data in our analysis because the selection criteria and questionnaires are less comparable across the two countries.
- 7.
A more detailed comparison of the topic coverage of the two surveys is provided in the Technical Appendix to the book.
- 8.
The 2011 WERS excludes workplaces with fewer than 5 employees, whilst the 2011 REPONSE excludes those with fewer than 11 employees. The trading sector is here defined as the private sector plus trading national corporations.
- 9.
The omission of low-tenure employees has slightly larger implications in Britain as job tenure is shorter, on average, than in France. One further consequence is that our employee samples underrepresent employees on temporary contracts. Analysis of the Labour Force Survey for Britain indicates that, among all those employees in the WERS workplace population, the omission of employees with less than 1 year of tenure from the WERS employee sample serves to exclude 60% of employees on temporary contracts (compared with 14% of employees on permanent contracts). The equivalent figures in France are 50% and 8%.
- 10.
Table A.6 also shows how our survey populations differ in either country from the full populations of all employees in all workplaces.
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Amossé, T., Bryson, A., Forth, J., Petit, H. (2016). Managing and Working in Britain and France: An Introduction. In: Amossé, T., Bryson, A., Forth, J., Petit, H. (eds) Comparative Workplace Employment Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57419-0_1
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