The subject of employee involvement (El) has become much more central to debates about industrial relations and personnel management over the course of the last decade. Employers, confronted by increasingly competitive product markets and a greater emphasis on quality and customer care, have started to focus attention much more explicitly on attempts to develop and motivate employees, as well as aiming to draw more fully upon employee knowledge and talents. At the same time, developments within the EC — especially via the Social Charter — have caused British employers to think more carefully about how to involve employees at work. Amongst the academic community, the subject has also undergone a renaissance, with researchers questioning whether EI is really new, whether it is little more than a facade for u itarist management, or how it interrelates with human resource management or the “new industrial relations”. It is within such a context that our study of employee involvement was commissioned by the Department of Employment and commenced in the summer of 1989.

Adrian Wilkinson and his colleagues discuss the growing importance of quality management in the UK, outline the basic principles of TQM, and examine its implications for employee involvement. They suggest that there are contradictions between the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sides of TQM. This can be exemplified in the relationship between TQM and employee involvement which has not been fully explored. Drawing on a major programme of research on employee involvement, three cases are analysed. They argue that the links between TQM and employee involvement are more complex than the TQM literature would have us believe and there are tensions between employee involvement and TQM. Finally, there is a wider discussion of the subject which analyses a number of constraints on the implementation of TQM in the UK. Adrian Wilkinson, Mick Marchington and John Goodman are respectively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor in the School of Management at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. Peter Ackers is a Lecturer at Loughborough University Business School.

It is now generally agreed that there has been a growth in the extensiveness of employee involvement (El) in Britain in recent years. However, the value of this information is limited because many of the studies rely heavily on management viewpoints about the impact of El. Even when surveys of employee opinion are undertaken, however, the results are typically abstracted from the organizational context in which they are located. In this article, we present information from six organizations collected as part of a larger study on El in Britain. This illustrates that employee attitudes to El are dependent, inter alia, upon the prior experiences which employees have of El and work in general, management's approaches to employee relations, and the recent and projected corporate performance of the organization. This leads us to suggest that El is as much affected by the prevailing organizational culture and environment as it is a source of change. The authors call for more research studies of this kind to be undertaken.

One of the most enduring issues in the debate about employee involvement (EI) and workers' participation is how it survives over time, and to what extent the dynamics of E l is linked with lubour-management relations. In this article, which draws upon data collected in a two-year study of 25 organizations, it is suggested that managerial relations is a significant factor in explaining waves of EI, und one that is frequently overlooked. Waves of EIcan be assessed in terms of the twin concepts of centrality and prominence, terms that are amplified below. The introduction of El techniques is motivated by a number offorces, but one of the most important is a desire by managers to be noticed, to engage in 'impression management', via the creation of new schemes. Despite having high-profile introductions, these schemes soon tend to fade in importance, to a large extent because of problems within management such as internal political rivalries, low supervisory commitment to schemes, inadequate training provision or the downgrading of EI by management arising from conflicting priorities.

Drawing on evidence from twenty-five case studies from different sectors and parts of the country, the authors challenge Ramsay's influential 'cycles of control' theory o f participation as a managerial response to industrial relations pressures from below. Through a series of 'ideal type'scenarios, they indicate the range of management motives behind the new 'wave' of employee involvement schemes.Employee participation is a recurring theme of British industrial history. The main objective of this article is to address its latest incarnation as 'employee involvement' (EI), and to challenge the view that nothing much changes in British capitalism except the pattern on the boardroom wallpaper and the sign on the personnel office door. We argue that the new EI does not fit easily into the old theories of participation, and point to the exhaustion of explanatory concepts ~~ ~~~

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IntroductionAgainst the background of recent and current proposals in the UK for changes in unfair dismissal legislation, this paper reports on recent company/site level research into the factors influencing the incidence, or otherwise, of unfair dismissal cases. The research is based on matched comparisons of predominantly small businesses or sites in three industries. This paper seeks to review disciplinary procedures in these companies, and to examine some of the major influences on their operation, such as recruitment practices and management style and methods.

This article draws on data collected as part of a project investigating the role of workplace disciplinary and grievance procedures and their influence, if any, on employment tribunal claims of unfair dismissal. It focuses specifically on small firms and small sites of larger firms and examines the question of fairness from two perspectives-first, in relation to the managerial treatment of employees in matters of discipline, and secondly, by consideration of whether employment tribunals are unfair to small employers who defend claims.