Manufacturing Matters: Organization and Employee Relations in Modern Manufacturing

• Published in: Management research news 1997-02, Vol.20 (2/3), p.7-9
• Main Authors: Delbridge, Rick, Lowe, Jim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Automobile industry; Capitalism; Deindustrialization; Employment; Engineering firms; Global economy; International; Labor unions; Management; Manufacturing; Organizational change; Reforms; Supply chains; Total quality
• ISSN: 0140-9174; 2040-8269; 1758-6135; 2040-8277
• DOI: 10.1108/eb028519

The period since the mid 1970s has seen dramatic changes in the economies of the industrialized nations with the vast majority of OECD countries experiencing a reduction in growth of industrial production and a marked reversal in employment trends in the industrial sector (Rowthorn and Glyn, 1990). This process of "deindustrialization" has attracted the attention of academics and commentators from a variety of disciplines and been variously heralded as evidence of the advent of "post-industrial" society (Bell, 1974), "post-Fordism" (Piore and Sabel, 1984), "disorgan-ized capitalism" (Lash and Urry, 1987), and the "postmodern world" (Clegg, 1990). These authors have described discontinuous shifts in the pattern of industrial society with broad changes in regimes of accumulation and regulation which involve socio-cultural and political as well as economic change. Economists have described the failure of Keynesian economic policies in the West to sustain rapid growth and high employment as the "end of the golden age of capitalism" (Marglin and Schor, 1990).