Management Practices and Employee Attitudes: A Longitudinal Study Spanning Fifty Years

Abstract

This paper reports findings from a third consecutive study to re-visit a steelworks that provided a classic elaboration of the industrial enterprise as a social system. The social system of the works in the 1950s (Scott et al., 1956) was used to explain the positive orientation of steelworkers to change. A later study of the plant in 1991 uncovered a remarkably similar positive orientation to change in the plant indicating a number of continuities (Blyton et al., 1996). Despite massive changes affecting the plant between the 1950s and the early 1990s, the social system of the works – occupational structures and identities and management-union relations – were seen as having a continuing bearing on steelworkers' attitudes to work in general, and their positive orientation to work change in particular. A third study of employee attitudes in the same plant in 1999 revealed important changes had occurred during the 1990s.