Most work on high-performance work systems has examined only the direct relationship between a set of management practices and performance outcomes. This presumes that any connection operates through the incentive and motivational effects captured as 'high-commitment' or 'high-involvement' employee outcomes. No attempt has been made to examine the alternative, Labour Process conceptualization, which expects performance gains from new management practices to arise instead from work intensification, offloading of taskcontrols, and increased job strain. Using data from WERS98, we tested models based on high-performance work systems and labour process approaches. Both were found wanting, and we consider the possible implications of these failures. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2000.

This paper argues that worker participation has not evolved out of the humanization of capitalism, as is usually suggested, but has appeared cyclically. These cycles are traced over more than a century and are shown to correspond to periods when management authority is felt to be facing challenge. Participation is thus best understood as a means of attempting to secure labour's compliance. However, the framework of common interests upon which participation is premised is untenable, and in practice the efficiency of such schemes in Britain has been for the most part severely attenuated by the realities of structural conflict.

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