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Labor and Employment Practices: the Rise and Fall of the New Managerialism

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Abstract

Since the beginning of industrial capitalism, labor resistance and control have been central problems for management. Yet these problems have varied considerably, in large part depending on the context within which the employment relation is embedded and particularly the broader political economy characterizing it. Workplace and management practices have tended to develop in reflection of this context, while forming an important component of it, with social as well as economic consequences. This chapter addresses these practices, the conditions under which they have developed from the 1950s to present, and what some of their consequences have been.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Arguably, much of the management literature on Japanese practices was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why the Japanese system actually appeared to work The Japanese system has traditionally been characterized by a collectivist (almost feudal) orientation, with strong norms privileging worker (“member”) interests over those of shareholders, a strong belief in relative equality, and noncompetitive (within Japan) markets. This could not be more different than the US case, yet is something that business schools academics seemed unable (or unwilling) to process (e.g., Dore 2000).

  2. 2.

    I need to emphasize “typically.” The so-called “Harvard” version (Beer et al. 1984, 1985) did pay attention to labor-management relations, as did an “MIT” version (Kochan and Barocci 1985). Yet these variants seem to have been rapidly eclipsed by a more unitary, performance driven version, dominated by psychologists with little concept of labor unions or why they exist (Godard 2014; Beer et al. 2015).

  3. 3.

    It suggests positive effects for various categories of work and HRM practices, and for a combined overall measure labeled as “high performance work systems” – which now seems to have become a generic term that includes any and all HRM and nonbureaucratic work practices rather than those associated with the high performance paradigm as initially formulated. As for other meta-analyses, however, this analysis included such a potpourri of measures, from studies of such varying quality that it is difficult to know what the authors really found. It also suffered from a number of the problems associated with these sorts analysis (see Jiang et al. 2012: 1278–79).

  4. 4.

    This section is largely speculative and calls for a more thorough analysis than is possible here. Such analysis would likely be most effectively informed by some variant of regulation theory and couched in terms of the end of neoliberal globalization as a “regime of accumulation,” drawing parallels with the end of “Fordism.” However, I am struck by just how much the analysis in this and the preceding section is consistent with Karen Legge’s analysis more than two decades ago (Legge 1995a, b, esp. 286–340). I had not read this carefully until putting the final touches on the present chapter.

  5. 5.

    Although it would appear that the so-called gig economy amounts to only a tiny percentage of jobs (in the USA, less than 1.0%: Hall and Krueger 2018: 708), the available evidence suggests that roughly one in six workers in the USA is now either an independent contractor, an on-call worker, a temporary help agency worker, or a contract firm worker. It further suggests that these jobs have accelerated since the mid-2000s, increasing by from 60 to 70 percent between 2005 and 2015 (Katz and Krueger 2016).

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  1. University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

    John Godard

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  1. John Godard
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Correspondence to John Godard .

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Godard, J. (2020). Labor and Employment Practices: the Rise and Fall of the New Managerialism. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Management History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62348-1_41-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62348-1_41-2

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  1. Latest

    Labor and Employment Practices: the Rise and Fall of the New Managerialism
    Published:
    27 January 2020

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62348-1_41-2

  2. Original

    Labor and Employment Practices: the Rise and Fall of the New Managerialism
    Published:
    20 December 2018

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62348-1_41-1

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