Affiliation:
1. IIMV Platz der Luftbrücke 1808 BERLIN 62
Abstract
In the course of economic crisis, the initiative in industrial relations shifts to employers. This paper does not present employers' recent industrial relations initiatives in detail, but rather tries to reconstruct the general strategic problem to which they are responding. This problem is to find ways of managing an unprecedented degree of economic uncertainty deriving from a need for continuous rapid adjustment to a market environment that seems to have become permanently more turbulent than in the past. This requires an increasingly close (re-)integration of industrial relations and industrial strategy in the context of a comprehensive manufacturing policy. Institutional barriers which insulate industrial relations from concerns for, and changes in, economic performance need to be dismantled, and `flexibility' is a key concept. However, the management of uncertainty remains incomplete and beset with contradictions due to profound uncertainties of management regarding the structure and function of a flexible industrial relations system. These uncertainties are linked to wider problems of industrial strategy whose resolution partly depends on the strategic decisions of other actors, in particular trade unions.
Subject
Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management,Economics and Econometrics,Sociology and Political Science,Accounting
Cited by
153 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献