2 - The shop floor revisited

Summary

Introduction

It is impossible to capture a complete account of relations between managers and workers from the details of employment contracts or formal collective agreements: these relations often depend upon unwritten expectations or obligations. Illuminating these expectations, and examining the extent to which they receive practical expression and are reconciled, is the purpose of this book.

In many respects, the debate over the ways in which industrial relations is changing has never been so well informed. Evidence from large scale interview surveys, notably the ED/ESRC/PSI/ACAS Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys has enabled scholars and commentators to make deductions from extensive data of high quality. Yet the type of information which can be collected in large scale surveys is not best suited to our present purpose. For example, Millward et al. (1992) have charted a decline in the coverage and scope of collective bargaining, and suggested that traditional approaches to industrial relations are on the wane. But large scale surveys which rely upon highly structured questionnaires are an insensitive instrument with which to uncover and explore the new ideas which may be taking the place of past orthodoxy. Such enquiries depend upon systematically identifying particular kinds of institutions and practices, at a time when they may not have found their own distinctive means of expression.