Manajemen | Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji 2003 1 (35)

BOOK REVIEWS

THE LABOUR DEBATE: AN INVESTIGATION
REALITY OF CAPITALIST WORK

INTO THE

THEORY

AND

Edited by Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002, x + 245 pp.,
£42.50 (hardback)

This book is a collection of papers written from a Marxist perspective on
theories of capitalist work and resistance. It seeks to progress the Enlightenment
inquiry (allegedly originating with Thomas More) into labour as a process that
produces value and, at the same time, produces individuals and society. As such,
it is an interesting counter-point to the mainstream industrial relations literature.
Although it nominally treats the same raw materials—social relations at work,
the deployment of labour power, workers’ consciousness and the global restructuring of capitalist production—both the level of abstraction and the questions

posed create a book that is radically different from the type of industrial
relations literature most of us are familiar with. The entire book is interesting
and relatively clearly written, though some may find the specialised Marxian
language forbidding. Not all readers will find the material to be directly relevant
and useful to their immediate concerns, but The Labour Debate offers a welcome
chance to consider industrial relations phenomena from an abstract perspective.
Many of the chapters are situated within current debates between neo-Marxists
and post-modernists about the centrality of capitalist work to human existence,
and about the relationship of workers’ collective organisation to so-called ‘social
movements’. As a result, the book constitutes an excellent introduction and
up-date on recent theoretical developments in Marxism, and on the writings of
people such as Kelly, Moody, Waterman, Postone and Negri, as well as those
of the contributors themselves.
The first three sections comprise a debate between John Holloway and Simon
Clarke. It concerns the issues of how central Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism
is to the development of a critique of capitalism as a whole, and (following from
this) how best to conceive the role of intellectuals vis-à-vis the working class in
producing critique. Werner Bonefeld’s Chapter 2 is a discussion of ontology in
the context of theorising class relations. He argues that class is ‘not an affirmative
category but a critical concept’ and rejects definitional approaches such as

‘sociology dressed up as Marxism’ (page 67) that lead to an objectification of
‘the working class’.
Chapter 3 deals with the much-treated ‘problem’ of working class subjectivity
under capitalism. How is it that, subject to the alienating and oppressive
conditions of capitalism, workers develop only partial and contradictory
critiques of their conditions? Graham Taylor’s answer is that separation
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between objective reality and subjective consciousness is an essential product
of the social form of labour in capitalism. Therefore, the Leninist aim to
effect transcendence of partial or fragmentary consciousness is idealist; the
struggle rather is to ‘abolish labour as the central mediating category of the
social constitution’ (page 105). More concretely, Taylor points hopefully to
the new anti-capitalist alliances formed between workers and other marginalised
or disadvantaged groups, especially where these have taken an internationalist
form.

Massimo de Angelis’ chapter ‘the Global Work Machine’ is one of the most
interesting and original. It addresses the commodification of ever greater aspects
of everyday life under capitalism, and in particular what he calls the ‘imposition
of work’ in the face of the incipient ‘refusal of work’ by workers and students in
the 1960s and 1970s. The originality lies in the combination of metaphors he
uses to interrogate this phenomenon: namely, Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and
Hayek’s free market. Drawing on Foucault’s well-known work on the panoptican,
de Angelis argues that the free market is a strikingly similar ‘mechanism of
coordination’ that relies on individual free choice but within a very rigid and
given set of constraints (about which there is no choice). With globalisation,
according to de Angelis, has come an intensification of the role of markets
that assume the place of Bentham’s watchtowers within a global panoptic
structure—devices to inspect and enforce labour discipline in increasingly
dispersed locations.
Rikowski’s chapter on labour power (‘the fuel for the living fire’) mounts
an argument for repositioning our understanding of education and training
systems to see them as systems for producing capitalist labour-power, with
the inherent contradictions this entails. Resistance to schooling is, in this
argument, ‘a resistance to becoming capital, human-capital’—and highlights
the all-encompassing way that education has today become focused on producing

labour-power. The treatment in this chapter of the special properties of labourpower as a commodity, and the (often contradictory) pressures on capitalists to
maximise both the quality and the quantity of actual labour that workers
produce is of direct relevance to those working on or within a human resource
management paradigm.
Two chapters (one by Harry Cleaver and one by Michael Neary) consider how
to best conceptualise capitalist work itself. Both grapple with the fact that specifically capitalist forms of work, as well as resistance to these forms, have moved
‘outside the factory’ and now occur ‘at the level of society’ (page 163). Cleaver’s
is a short piece that asserts ‘work is still the central issue’ against those who
suggest that other human activities like consumption have, today, more salience
as a basis for social organisation. He further argues that ‘class struggle’ remains
an appropriate concept for understanding resistance to the capitalist imposition
of work across all forms of social life. But in imagining the future, Cleaver believes
‘we need new words to talk about the new realities we create’ (page 146),
pointing to the way some ecologists and feminists have sought out a new
language. Neary’s chapter focuses more on forms of collective organisation, with
an empirical account of how South Korean workers became subsumed within

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capitalist social relations, despite their heroic resistance to them (which he
chronicles).
The focus of Dinerstein’s elegant chapter is on unemployment, rather than
work, and seeks to challenge the idea of unemployment as a form of social
exclusion. She does this theoretically by drawing on Marx’s distinction between
the formal and the real subsumption of labour under capitalism. Metaphorically,
Dinerstein evokes the ‘roadblock’ struggles undertaken by the Argentinians
marginalised during the 1990s in their fight against the effects of neo-liberal
economic ‘stability’. Unemployed workers are not excluded from capitalist
production, but rather are experiencing the full effects of capitalism’s form of
existence—the fact that they can be defined as ‘surplus labour’ is itself due to
the dominance of capitalist logic in society, subjecting people whose labour
is not useful on the market to feeling that they are in a no man’s land. This

recognition is important for Dinerstein in ‘regaining materiality’—making the
link between abstract economic requirements and concrete people. In the same
way, she argues, the Argentinian roadblocks were a physical representation of
the fact that although the IMF-imposed neo-liberal order produced temporary
‘stability’ for capital, for people, it ‘created the most unstable forms of existence
with no future’ (page 220).
The book ends with a post-script by the editors attempting to theorise anticapitalist and globalisation movements and, in so doing, establishing a position
different from those of other ‘globalisation’ theorists and commentators such as
Giddens, Bourdieu, Bauman, Touraine and Naomi Klein. The Labour Debate is
a relatively brief, tightly argued compilation of papers made internally coherent
by the fact that they share a common theoretical language and ideas. It is well
worth reading and studying, and not just for nostalgic reasons.
ACIRRT, SYDNEY

NEGOTIATIONS

CAROLINE ALCORSO

AND

CHANGE: FROM

THE

WORKPLACE

TO

SOCIETY

Edited by Thomas A. Kochan and David B. Lipsky. Cornell University Press, Ithaca
and London, 2003, xi + 353 pp., US$35 (hardback)

This book arose from a conference held in honour of Robert McKersie, the
co-author of the seminal text, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations (New York,
McGraw-Hill, 1965), and author of much more besides. The papers, which are
conveniently summarised in the editors’ introduction, start with the negotiation
model developed by Walton and McKersie, proceed to a number of papers on
workplace change issues, then broaden further to see how the Walton and
McKersie model might be applied in other contexts. Given the focus of this

Journal, the concluding chapters which explore negotiation in other arenas have
not been included in this review.
Two chapters focus on negotiation as a process. Greenhalgh and Lewicki
examine the way in which the Walton and McKersie model has been developed,
making the point that their attitudinal restructuring process now needs more

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attention in recognition of the relational context of a negotiation being as
important as the substantive transaction. Cutcher-Gershenfeld provides practical
insights into the interest-based bargaining model which is akin to Walton and
McKersie’s integrative bargaining approach. They got it right in 1965; we just
use different terminology now.
However, this is not really a book about negotiation. Rather it is a collection
of papers examining issues, particularly workplace issues, where negotiation
might be an appropriate process. There is an underlying premise here that the
workplace is a place of teams, and therefore managers, supervisors—indeed all
employees—have to be negotiators. For example, Klein argues that supervisors

need to be rather more strategic in their relationships with their employees in
contrast to the older style of deal-making supervision, and Rousseau suggests that
evolving forms of psychological contracts will call for far more negotiation skills
than traditional ‘work for wages’ or lifetime employment arrangements. We are
aware that the workplace, with or without teams, is a ‘negotiated order’; what
might have been a useful addition here would have been a chapter on compliance
gaining techniques used by managers. What we do have in this section of the
book is a chapter on even more flexible forms of teams by Goodman and Wilson
and an overview by MacDuffie of the spread of teams and other work forms
in the auto industry, both of which will be a valuable resource for HRM and
IR practitioners and academics. Coming from a different angle, Rowe and
Bendersky’s chapter on developing processes for maintaining workplace justice
focuses more clearly on life in the workplace from the employee’s perspective
and argues for a range of procedural options, in effect giving the employee the
opportunity to negotiate their way through to a fair and just outcome.
A second, related theme is that managements and unions create some form of
partnership and there are useful review chapters on the US (Rubinstein and
Heckscher) and the UK (Beaumont and Hunter). Whereas Cutcher-Gershenfeld
explains the ‘how’ of negotiating a partnership, these two papers give more
attention to the question, ‘why partnerships?’ and what might be needed to

make them work. Perhaps the question should be ‘why bother?’, given the slow
take up of partnership type arrangements and their typically short duration once
established. Indeed, it is not all that clear what has changed in the context of
work that will now lead to any partnership arrangements being more durable.
Rubinstein and Heckscher make a telling point in suggesting that ‘another role
for employee bodies is to pressure employers to live up to their own rhetoric’
(emphasis added). Some might argue that this is the role of employee bodies;
that no matter how much change there is in the form of the management-union
relationship the enduring feature is that unions are there to keep managements
honest. In the same way we might argue that no matter how much the form of
the psychological contract changes, the enduring feature is still that someone
is doing work for someone else. If there are no legislative obligations on
management to negotiate, then any management-union relationship is profoundly
assymetric. The BATNA (best alternative to the negotiated agreement) or
bottom line position for the union is ‘to keep the bastards honest’, while the
BATNA for management is ‘to get rid of the bastards’. A truly mixed-motive!

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A contribution from Europe exploring the dynamics of management-union
relations in the context of social partners legislation might have been instructive
here. However, even this might not have provided the positive answer that some
look for if the chapter by Wever is any indication. In a short but challenging
chapter she reflects upon the failure of the European system (the legislative framework and unions) to deliver equality in the workplace, arguing that the processes
of political lobbying and collective bargaining need to be more coordinated if
progress is to be made on this issue.
Given the acknowledged problematic nature of partnership type relationships
it is appropriate to consider the scope for unions to have influence at the higher
level of strategic organisational decision making. Preston’s chapter outlines
the possible structural frameworks while McKersie’s own chapter on union
nominated directors is full of practical insight. McKersie makes an interesting
point about company boards not wanting to proceed unless they are unanimous,
a notion of decision making perhaps more familiar in Japanese rather than
Australian or American workplaces, even team-based ones.
To summarise, what we have in this book are some useful chapters which cover
a wide range of workplace issues: the form of the employment contract, the nature
of supervision, the evolution of teams and other forms of work organisation,
the management of grievances, interest based bargaining, management-union
partnerships, and union nominated board members. This list looks like the
topics for an HRM or workplace relations course. The underlying theme that
negotiation is tacit in the outworking of many of these issues (which indeed it
is) becomes equally tacit in many of the chapters themselves. They are no less
useful for that but the up-front emphasis on negotiation may mean the book gets
bypassed by potential readers who do not realise that it has a lot to offer through
its review of current changes in the workplace. There are no startling insights
into theory, nothing on Australia but certainly a fertile ground for comparative
material, for practical insights and for generating useful research topics into the
evolution of Australian workplaces.
UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: THEORY

RAY FELLS

AND

PRACTICE (2ND

EDITION)

Edited by Paul Edwards. Blackwell, Oxford, 2003, xiv + 538 pp., $96.80 (paperback)

This is an edited text—generated by the Industrial Relations Research Unit
at Warwick University—which sets out to provide authoritative coverage of
current practice and its theoretical setting. Each chapter is a substantial
scholarly contribution to the subject area, with an appeal much wider than the
national setting of its studies. The authors are mostly connected to Warwick
University, even where they work at other institutions, and this makes the
volume an important reference point in the development of industrial relations
as an academic subject in the UK. In doing so it reveals the continuing relevance

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of the field to practitioners as well as students, and will undoubtedly be widely
studied and cited.
Hugh Clegg is said to have once remarked that there are no industrial relations
in non-union settings. The organisation of the current work reflects the many
changes of the last 25 years, taking as its point of departure the nature and management of the employment relationship more generally. Thus, in addition to an
analysis of the institutions of collective bargaining, significant space is given to
the management of labour and pay with or without unions, and the consequences
of the long decline in voluntarism. Throughout, attention is given to the implications of supra-national regulation and the debates generated by ‘globalisation’,
the impact of inward investment (though less on the outward kind), the development of HRM, and a renewed emphasis on the underlying forces of the labour
market.
The picture that emerges is necessarily complex, and a brief review cannot
cover adequately all the themes in the book, not least because such a large
collection of essays makes a unifying narrative difficult. Nevertheless, the whole
can be characterised by a cautious reaffirmation of the pluralist perspective
that has been the dominant mode in British industrial relations scholarship.
Edwards’ introductory chapter provides a useful map of the contributions, and
argues that industrial relations remains rooted in the ‘demonstrable characteristic’ of an exploitative employment relationship, and thus better able to analyse
the changing world of work than the broadly unitary assumptions underlying
writings in the field of HRM that neglect the ‘dynamic interplay between the
state, employers, unions and employees’ (page 26).
A striking feature of the whole work is the degree to which many of the
individual essays depict what can best be described as the consequences of
class conflict. To be sure, this conflict often bears little relation to more familiar
concerns of collective action and ‘disorder’ in industrial relations, but it has
long been a failure of the pluralist view that class struggle is seen as something
done by workers to employers. It is equally something done by employers to
workers.
Hyman argues that the Conservatives after 1979 did not have a clear industrial
relations strategy, but that they operated on the general assumption that a ‘fundamental shift in the balance of power between employers on the one hand, [and]
unions and workers on the other’ was essential (page 53). Aside from the
abandonment of voluntarism, Hyman details the rejection of full employment,
and the proposition that collective bargaining was central to all the UK’s
economic ills. The ‘project’, as we have learned to say in another context, was
the re-empowerment of employers. The practical acceptance of this neoliberalism by Labour was summed up in Mandelson’s assertion that ‘in the
urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product
and labour markets, we are all ‘Thatcherite’ now’ (The Times, 10 June 2002).
This has led, Hyman argues, to a parodic version of Donovan’s ‘two systems’
characterisation of UK industrial relations: one, a besieged system of collective
bargaining, limited in both extent and scope, and another which consists of ‘almost
unrestricted’ managerial autonomy.

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In Chapter 19, Nolan and O’Donnell confront the argument about the role
of unions in a detailed and highly critical analysis of the links between industrial
relations, HRM and economic performance. They proceed by an assault on the
theoretical assumptions and empirical ‘evidence’ used to accuse unions of being
‘the prime cause of underperformance’, and question how workplace bargaining
in particular could be such a deadly ‘blocking power’ for, in some accounts, over
a century. Instead of attributing blame to unions or the system of collective
bargaining they highlight the investment, management and other failings of
British capital, and argue, following the Chicago School (and Donovan too, in
one reading) that these failures include the limited ‘voice’ afforded to employees,
a limitation set to become worse to the extent that unionisation falters.
It is a pity that this analysis is separated from Nolan and Slater’s account
(Chapter 3) of changing labour markets. This chapter is important not only for
its systematic analysis of changing patterns of employment and their link to
economic performance, but also for its rejection of the comfortable ideology
of the ‘new economy’ and the dissolution of ‘long-standing hierarchical and
conflictual employment relations’ (page 77) said to accompany it. In addition,
their treatment of the balance between internal and external labour markets
highlights the ambiguous approach of employers, and the experience of workers
subject to increasing pressures for deregulation and flexibility. The results are
shown to have eroded many of the social and economic gains obtained by
workers in the early post-war period, as well as an increasing gap between the
life experience of those at the top end of the jobs hierarchy and the growth of
low-paid and unskilled employment at the bottom.
Colling (Chapter 14) adds to this picture in his discussion of collective identity
and changing employment patterns. He rejects the idea that the changing occupational and sectoral distribution of work automatically ensures a secular decline
in workers’ attachment to collective organisation. Instead he makes two important
points. Firstly, that workers’ connection to both union and employer is complex
and contingent, even in ‘old labour’ strongholds. Secondly, he denies the view
that the decline of manufacturing in general, and of manual work in particular,
have led to the empowerment of individual workers, and thus a realisation of a
benign individualism. His refusal to be ‘dazzled by the shift to service sector
working’ (page 387) echoes Nolan and Slater, making the point that service work
may depend on manufacturing, includes manual labour, and is subject to the same
labour process pressures as manufacturing. The consequences for joint regulation
are thus to be found in both labour and product markets, and the attraction for
managers of what Colling calls ‘procedural individualisation’ lies in the same
power relationships that characterise wage labour in general.
These developments in labour markets and managerial autonomy are central
to a consideration of the future of trade unions and collective bargaining. The
changed power relationships between workers and employers, and the decline
in the effectiveness of decentralised, autonomous workplace union organisation
is the theme elaborated by Terry (Chapter 10). His central conclusion, arrived
at in large part from a review of survey data, is that the future for effective
employee representation ‘lies principally with governments, national and

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supra-national, and their legislative interventions’ (page 282). This is
problematical, not least because it neglects to identify the sources of political
mobilisation required for such an outcome, given that employer hostility, and
Labour as well as Conservative policy and analysis, is inimical to any but the most
unitary conceptions of worker representation. Perhaps this represents a reaction
to the rather uncritical treatment of shop steward organisation by many radical
pluralists and Marxists in the 1970s.
Terry revisits not only the general problem of all union organisation—the
tendency to identify with the interests of the individual employer in the context
of capitalist competition expressed most fully in business unionism—but the
particular characteristics derived from voluntarism and decentralised bargaining
said to make ‘factory chauvinism’ an ‘immanent characteristic of ‘classical’ shop
steward organisation’ (page 268). In the absence of embedded legal rights, shop
stewards are weakened by both management preference for consultation (if that)
over bargaining, and stewards’ own narrow horizons and lack of expertise. In
contrast, he argues, Germany’s IG Metall has the resources to formulate union
alternatives to managerial policies, and an institutional framework to pursue these
in the workplace.
There are problems with this analysis. Firstly, more needs to be said about the
connections between management policy, labour markets and neo-liberalism.
These represent more than complementary pressures on workplace organisation;
they are part of the long struggle of capital to regain control of the labour process
and to reinforce the subjugation of labour. Both industry level bargaining in
the UK and the Works Constitution Act in Germany were designed to insulate
managerial prerogative from union influence. In Germany, under different legal
structures, the same struggle appeared; even where unions ‘captured’ the Works
Council system, many argued that the Works Councils had in fact ‘captured’ the
unions. It was the relative failure of industry bargaining to provide this insulation
that drove UK employers to a policy of decentralisation, incorporation and, where
possible, neutralisation. The ‘frontier of control’ is thus both a metaphor for
workplace relations and wider class relations.
Nevertheless, Terry’s concern with the nature of the connection between
workplace and national union is a key issue, and one that really needs to be considered in conjunction with Waddington (Chapter 9) on trade union organisation. That the two arguments are treated separately is understandable, but is in
some ways a hangover from the policy concerns of the 1960s and 1970s.
Waddington’s argument is that union renewal depends upon the articulation of
local and national activity, rather than on either a spontaneous regeneration of
unions from below, or by political and organisational measures at national
level alone. Waddington finds it difficult to draw up a balance sheet. The
usual models on offer (social partnership versus adversarialism or servicing
versus organising) do not really encapsulate the range, one might say muddle, of
union initiatives and responses. Accordingly the argument is sometimes diluted
by attempts to ‘tick off’ successes and failures from a disparate range of issues,
from ‘male dominance’ to dual channel representation, and a list of prescriptions
for modernisation.

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This returns us to the introductory chapter. Edwards usefully characterises the
ideological roots of the unitary, pluralist and radical views of the employment
relationship. He places the radical perspective in an analysis of ‘shop floor
discontent that seemed immune to all attempts at institutionalisation’ (page 11),
but sensibly refuses to simply discard it in face of the decline of shop floor
organisation. Edwards asserts that British pluralism proved flexible enough to
accommodate the radical critique, and that few significant differences remain. In
this he is both right and wrong.
He is right to the extent that both were concerned with the competing claims
of ‘order’ and ‘welfare’, as Hyman puts it, if from different perspectives, and
that the disappointment of what was in many ways a syndicalist view of steward
organisation focused discussion on a common set of policy concerns, particularly
in respect of labour and employment law. But he is wrong to the extent that
pluralism, or even ‘an appropriately explicated radical view’ (page 11), still have
fundamental differences with the Marxist approach—even though the radical
view owes a huge debt to Marxism.
The difference is rooted in the understanding of the employment
relationship, and the connection of this relationship to class. Pluralists agree
with Marxists that conflict at work is inevitable, but the essence of pluralism is
a critique of political sovereignty that replaces a ‘final authority’ with ‘continuous
compromises’, in which government is seen, not as the representative of
class interest, but as the arbiter between interest groups, none of which is
sufficiently powerful to dominate the whole. The pluralist analysis of industrial
relations both ‘borrows’ this theory for its own field of study, and assumes its
truth for society as a whole. As many have argued, conflict is endemic, but
the parties may have an interest in the ‘survival of the whole of which they
are parts’.
How then to explain what jumps out of nearly every chapter in this book: the
simultaneous itemisation of a political, institutional, and economic assault on
workers with a reluctance to spell out a unified analysis, and to place this within
a theoretical framework that can acknowledge the unity of the elements of that
assault? What the Marxist view brings to the debate is the explicit identification
not only of employer power, but of the power of the employer class, an issue
that Edwards does not address. It is this analysis, of a material, political, and ideological power, whatever its internal dissensions, that can provide the necessary
narrative. The reliance on ‘employee voice’ as a pluralist proxy for countervailing
worker power is really an insufficient tool, even to maintain the old pluralist goal
of decently managed conflict.
Arguably, this view is reinforced in an excellent chapter from Dickens and
Hall on labour law and industrial relations. Tellingly, they note that while
Labour does not display the same hostility to collectivism as their Conservative
predecessors, ‘there has been no sign from New Labour of the general commitment to the democratic case for trade unionism and collective bargaining’
(page 151) that was the heart of the pluralist analysis. In fact, workers find a ‘voice’
to the extent that they are able to consolidate and generalise a view of their own
interests as a class, and to actualise it in independent, powerful, collective

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organisation. In face of the developments of the last 25 years the oftenpowerful analyses in this volume are curiously undersold by its cautious
pluralism.
KEELE UNIVERSITY

STRATEGY

AND

COLIN WHITSTON

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

By Peter Boxall and John Purcell. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2003, xii + 287 pp.,
£25 (paperback)

The last two decades have witnessed an enormous growth in academic and
practitioner interest in strategic management and human resource management
(HRM). The authors argue that this growth of interest has not been accompanied
by ‘sufficient concern for integrating these two important fields of theory and
practice’ (page vi). The book is concerned with the relationship between strategy
and HRM, and the implications for building sustainable competitive advantage
in modern organisations. The authors set out to build a framework for goal
setting in HRM, arguing for the centrality of key HRM issues in any credible
notion of business strategy. In this very readable book, they further set out to
explore ways in which HRM can be used strategically to achieve business
success. This is a novel synthesis of UK and US industrial relations, HRM and
strategic management research and practice. It is refreshing to see an HRM text
that is structured around contemporary HRM issues rather than the traditional
personnel functions.
The central argument of the book is that HRM decisions are embedded within
societies and industries. Boxall and Purcell explore the debate between the role
of context (‘best fit’) and universalism (‘best practice’) schools of management
thought. Despite arguing the centrality of the ‘best fit’ approach to HRM, they
assert that ‘best practice’ approaches also play an important role in the theory
and practice of HRM. This is because they exemplify HRM techniques that are
sensible methods of generic practice as opposed to those that are dysfunctional.
This argument is in line with the earlier work of others, suggesting that the two
approaches are complementary. They argue that the universal approach
helps researchers and practitioners document the benefits of HRM across all
contexts, while the contingency perspective helps to look more deeply into
organisational phenomena in order to derive more situation-specific theories.
Boxall and Purcell contend that this debate is best understood by a surface
and underpinning layer; that is, surface layer HRM policies are influenced by
context, and generic HRM processes and general principles are best understood
by an underpinning layer.
The theme of ‘best fit’ is developed through the book. I found the discussion
and integration of the tension between ‘best fit’ and ‘best practice’ and implications for strategic HRM, the transformation of work systems, and modes of
employment to be the most enjoyable and interesting part of the book. This is

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both an important and timely argument, which is generally lost in many other
contemporary HRM texts. Other writers have advocated the urgent need for
greater research in understanding the precise nature of fit and synergy, and how
HRM practices and policies generate value. In fact, Susan Jackson and Randall
Schuler, for example, have previously concluded that there is no one best way
to manage an organisation’s human resources. Over time, organisations evolve
practices that fit their particular situation. These findings send out a note of
caution regarding the universality of policy prescriptions from an academic field,
which is still ‘mapping’ the area.
Boxall and Purcell believe that there are three domains that are important in
the strategic management of people: labour productivity, organisational flexibility
and social legitimacy. They set out to critically analyse and review contemporary
management theories, frameworks and empirical research to elucidate the
relationship between strategy and HRM. As such, the book is organised in
three parts: connecting strategy and human resource management, managing
people and searching for general principles, and managing people in dynamic
and complex business contexts. With a sound theoretical base and clear analytical
structure, Boxall and Purcell set out each chapter to reflect the current issues
facing management today. Each chapter is based on three interrelated elements—
theory, research and illustration—bringing the story to life with an array of
interesting cases and vignettes.
Strategy and Human Resource Management is extremely practical, exploring
many of the fundamental challenges facing many organisations, such as the
HRM implications of mergers and acquisitions, and building high performance
work systems. In the final chapter, implications are drawn for the management
of firm processes and the design of HRM planning principles and their implementation through ‘balanced scorecards’ and ‘strategy maps’. I would like to
have seen further integration of the ‘best fit’ perspective within the concluding
chapter. Its importance seemed lost in the discussion of balanced scorecards
and strategy maps. It would have been interesting to see the authors take their
analysis a little further and integrate the ‘best fit’ approach more carefully into
the design of the HRM planning process and its implementation. The authors
conclude that the strategic goals of HRM should be understood in a broader sense
and that the integration of strategy and HRM is crucial to building effective
and sustainable organisations. Boxall and Purcell surmise that there are three
critical factors associated with the business success of HRM: productive exploitation of current strategy, the building of organisational flexibility, and the
construction of social legitimacy.
This book is compulsory reading for a wide audience including advanced
undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and practitioners interested
in the role of strategic HRM in business success. The analytical and multidisciplinary approach of this book is an important contribution to the field
of HRM.
LA TROBE UNIVERSITY

TIMOTHY BARTRAM

BOOK REVIEWS

THE CHANGING PATTERNS

OF

557

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Edited by Farhad Analoui. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002, xi + 283 pp., £42.50 (hardback)

This publication is the result of a conference on human resource management
(HRM) organised by Farhad Analoui at the University of Bradford. The focus
of this edited volume is the changing nature of HRM and the challenges faced
by organisations in its transformation from personnel management. The aims of
the book were to compare HRM from the organisational and national perspectives
in relation to ‘the international perception of its roles’ and to ‘provide the very
challenge of defining its boundaries and ultimately how HRM can realistically
benefit the people and organisations as a whole’ (page x). The contributors in
this book adopted a critical perspective in their assessment of HRM in both
public and private-sector organisations in regions as diverse as South East Asia,
the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. The book has
18 chapters in total.
The first two chapters summarise the challenges faced by the HRM profession
in the changing business environment. The focus is on HRM at the organisational
level. These chapters also considered the implications of HRM in developing
economies. The next two chapters then shift the analysis to examine how firms
integrate HRM with the process of strategic management, focusing on the status
of strategic HRM in multinational corporations in the ASEAN region and British
Airways, respectively. The remaining 14 chapters then shift from a macro to micro
perspective, as indicated by a collection of papers on the practice of HRM at the
firm level in different national contexts. There is an eclectic collection of
papers here, ranging from a literature review on techno-stress to career
management and women police officers in Pakistan. For those interested in
HRM in developing and less developing countries, this book definitely provides
some interesting observations and empirical evidence of the changing patterns
of HRM across the world. However, this is where the positives ended.
The Changing Patterns of Human Resource Management has structural and
formatting problems. First, some of the chapters have no proper headings and
argument structure. Not all of the chapters followed proper academic format,
such as introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion and conclusion.
Second, the whole collection of papers lacks proper structure, especially in the
ordering of chapters according to some sort of theoretical or logical sequencing.
The exception is the grouping of the first four chapters which review and
summarise the challenges faced by the HRM profession. There is a lack of
an overall framework which integrates the various papers. Relatedly, the book
is basically a collection of conference papers which does not provide the reader
with any sense of integration of the challenges identified in the first four
chapters on the changing patterns of HRM. If this text is to be considered as
an academic publication, an introductory chapter and a concluding chapter
would make the structure much more meaningful, especially by initially
presenting and then synthesising the key themes and findings discussed by
the various contributors. The absence of an index is also disappointing. In
addition, there are some obvious examples which highlight the lack of editorial

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and proofreading effort; there are basic errors which should have been
identified prior to publication.
In conclusion, this edited volume provides much needed empirical evidence
regarding the challenges of HRM in developed, as well as developing economies.
This reviewer feels that the title should reflect this as it currently lacks clarity
and is therefore misleading to the reader. It is appropriate for anyone interested
in the teaching, research, and practice of HRM in the international context, but
it is certainly not without its problems.
UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, SYDNEY

STEPHEN TEO

UNDERSTANDING EUROPEAN TRADE UNIONISM: BETWEEN MARKET,
CLASS AND SOCIETY
By Richard Hyman. Sage, London, 2001, xi + 196 pp., $69 (paperback)

Richard Hyman has spent much of the last two decades pondering on comparative
European industrial relations and, in particular, the national characteristics and
evolution of trade unionism across Europe. This short book addresses one theme
that has emerged in his work on Europe—the notion of a triangulation between
market, class and society—which helps to understand the trade unionism of three
countries (Britain, Germany and Italy). The argument is expressed in terms of a
simple diagram; a triangle, with market at one point, society at another and class
at the third. Britain is broadly represented by the side connecting class and
market, Germany by the side connecting market and society, and Italy by the
side connecting class and society. Following a brief introductory chapter, three
chapters consider respectively the role of trade unions as economic actors, trade
unions and class struggle, and trade unions in civil society. Thereafter, three
chapters explore each case in terms of its particular duality, leading to some
brief conclusions.
The ‘eternal triangle’ metaphor is an effective way to discuss the three most
frequent models of trade unions—as vehicles for class action, for social integration,
or for economic cooperation with business. Hyman notes carefully that, in
practice, any trade union movement will normally reflect elements of all three
models, but that there is a tendency for some combination of two to be significant in any particular trade union movement. The importance of this warning
becomes clear in subsequent chapters.
His discussion of the three models is striking for the range of ideas and literatures drawn upon in three relatively short chapters. In his discussion of trade
unions as economic actors, Hyman bases his account of business unionism on
the less than perfect operation of markets. Markets, he argues, are subject to three
conflicting determinants—the forces of supply and demand, policy interventions
by government (to sustain the long run viability of market relations), and the
social norms that influence market actors. These determinants result in markets
being only partially free, which in turn substantially undermines simple trade
union economism and gives rise to what Hyman has described elsewhere as

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‘political economism’. In discussing trade unions and class struggle, Hyman concludes that however real class relations are, and however hard trade unionists
seek to use trade unions as a vehicle for class action, trade unions perform very
different roles within the existing system. Effective class-based trade union action
becomes elusive when confronted by the demands of day-to-day regulation of
the employment relationship. In his third thematic chapter, Hyman provides a
succinct and helpful discussion of trade unions in civil society. The initial
emphasis is on the emergence of an anti-socialist, ‘integrative’ trade unionism,
illustrated by the confessional union traditions and by the development over time
of the social partnership tradition. Hyman then addresses the post-1970s debates
about civil society and social movements, tellingly concluding with reference to
Peter Waterman’s view that trade unions with declining power must see their
future in terms of a labour movement allied to broader political agendas.
The three thematic chapters are notable for their succinctness, clarity of expression and breadth of coverage. Their structure and content suggests that Hyman
may have had a sub-text in mind when writing this book. If the main target of
the text is the scholarly debate around European trade unionism, a subsidiary
target may well be pedagogic. Many contemporary students would benefit from
exposure to Hyman’s melding of histories and literatures, some of which have
been too frequently displaced in contemporary thinking. As a result, this text
will be a welcome addition to both advanced undergraduate and postgraduate
reading lists.
The three case study chapters on Britain, Germany and Italy illustrate the
historical commitments by each country’s trade union movement to one duality
or the other, whilst also illustrating how those commitments have come to
be challenged by others. Thus, in the case of Britain, the class-market duality
which historically defined trade unions is now qualified by a social partnership
impetus in some union thinking and beyond. Indeed, the role of unions in
employer-employee partnerships is not a given in modern British Labour Party
thinking. In the case of Germany, the society-market emphasis from the days of
Adenauer is now qualified by a class-based rhetoric from some trade unionists
who confront increasing demands for restructuring and improved employee performance. In Italy, restructuring pressures in the 1980s and 1990s have challenged
the dominant class-society duality. As a result, integrative and class action-based
unions have converged in terms of identity, even though the role of unions
(bargaining agent, social partner, or agent of class action) is still contested. These
chapters are again succinct and provide the reader with a useful introduction to
trade union development in the three countries.
Hyman concludes with some brief comments on the ‘variable geometry’ of
trade unionism. He notes tendencies towards convergence in national trade
union movements but warns against their exaggeration. He suggests that the
‘end of the road’ was reached by political economism when confronted by
neo-liberalism. Here, Hyman leaves much to the imagination of the reader, for
in identifying the demise of political economism and the harsh questions facing
unions about their future role and nature, he makes a leap to a discussion of the
opportunities for supra-national organisation within Europe. Such organisation

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would have to transcend mechanistic formulations about, for example, regional
collective bargaining and create a European level ‘moral economy’ upon
which a European civil society can emerge and in which a European system of
industrial relations can develop. In many ways, the last few pages of this book
are by far the most profound, for they provide some tantalising ideas about
how the future of national industrial relation systems may develop in an
internationalising world.
As one would expect, this is a well-crafted, literate and absorbing account of
European trade union development. Established scholars and advanced students
will enjoy the discussion of theory and cases. No doubt, the eternal triangle
metaphor will be subjected to critical appraisal in terms of its application to
national trade union movements, but, like many good metaphors, it is likely
to find a long-term home in industrial relations vocabulary. We should all
look forward to Hyman’s future work on supra-national industrial relations
systems.
UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

NIGEL HAWORTH

INTERNATIONAL LABOR STANDARDS: HISTORY, THEORY
OPTIONS

AND

POLICY

Edited by Kaushik Basu, Henrik Horn, Lisa Roman and Judith Shapiro. Blackwell
Publishing, Oxford, 2003, xiii + 342 pp., $92.40 (paperback)

If this volume is judged on the basis of its title and declared aims, it must be
deemed a major disappointment with one very significant saving grace. The title
suggests the focus is international labour standards and the fact that this is
the centre of the book is reinforced by the editors who declare they wish to
contribute to the debate surrounding the demand that labour standards should
be ‘internationally agreed and enforced’. The editors further note that this
demand has been the source of heated discussion and suggest the dialogue has
now reached an impasse. The latter is a claim that is debateable given the US is
presently internationalising labour standards at a rapid pace by incorporating
labour provisions into bilateral trade agreements. This is a development of
which the editors appear unaware. This unawareness is a critical development
that diminishes the book’s central questions.
The primary research questions are: What can we learn from economic
history? How did the labour standards movement evolve in the past, both
domestically and internationally? What do contemporary economic theories tell
us about the possible impact of international labour standards? So much has been
written about child labour, but what solid empirical evidence do economists have
about its incidence, causes and effects? Finally, what kinds of global institutions
do we have, or need, to enforce any agreement on labour standards? In particular,
what should be the role of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the
World Trade Organisation (WTO)? The editors hope that by providing answers
to these questions they will produce a book useful to both students of trade,

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development, international relations and labour economics, and to policy
makers in government and international organisations.
Given the foregoing, and being one who teaches trade policy and is interested
in history and