The effects of selected high-performance practices and working hours on work-life balance are analysed with data from national surveys of British employees in 1992 and 2000. Alongside long hours, which are a constant source of negative job-to-home spillover, certain 'high-performance' practices have become more strongly related to negative spillover during this period. Surprisingly, dual-earner couples are not especially liable to spillover - if anything, less so than single-earner couples. Additionally, the presence of young children has become less important over time. Overall, the results suggest a conflict between high-performance practices and work-life balance policies. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2003..

This paper examines how companies have sought to develop employee participation in the quest f o r business improvement, f r o m the quality circle ( Q C ) fad of the early and middle 1980s to total quality management ( T Q M ) at the end of the decade. Thirteen companies provide evidence of the strategies adopted and support previous findings that circles collapsed as the result of inadequate organizational design which encouraged managerial recalcitrance. Moreover, T Q M departs f r o m traditional 'cycles of control' and looks likely to institutionalize participation on a permanent basis, and managerial employees as well as office and shop-poor staff now have more opportunity to participate in decisions. TQM is not another passing fashion, because it can meet the interests of employees while providing top management with an effective way of organizing in the new times.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235. ABSTRACTThe analysis of the British corporate elite has been concerned with three issues. One is the relationship of ownership and control, a second is the cohesion of the upper or capitalist class, the third is the linkage between the corporate and political elites. The practical difficulties of investigating elites has restricted the information that can be collected and thus the range of researchable issues. This paper derives from an interview-based investigation among directors of major British companies and concentrates on a fourth set of issues, namely how a board of directors works as a social institution. The central activity of the corporate elite is its boardroom role and the organizational sociology of boards is a major missing link in existing analyses. The paper describes what directors do, the patterns of influence and the checks and balances within the boardroom, and the responsiveness of boards to shareholders. It discusses relevant features of directors' ideologies and world views. The analysis highlights the influence of the executive, notably the chief executive. Major shareholders are publicly committed to a more effective use of their powers of ownership and one mechanism is the reform of corporate governance, in particular an enhanced role for independent non-executive directors, in order to safeguard their interests and prevent undue executive domination of boards. This research suggests that an established boardroom culture may limit the effectiveness of the checks and balances that non-executive directors can provide. Nevertheless, against the managerialist view that executives pursue their own objectives with little regard to the interests of owners, there is evidence of much more ownership constraint than has been recognized to date. Moreover, this constraint is growing.The analysis of the British corporate elite -the boards of directors of major companies -has been concerned mainly with three issues. One is the relationship of ownership and control, in particular, where the effective control of large joint-stock companies resides, whose interests the top managers on boards of directors promote and the relationship between major shareholders and these managers. A second is the cohesion of the upper or capitalist class, which includes the corporate elite of directors. The third is the linkage between the corporate and political elites. The practical difficulties of researching elites severely restrict the sort of information that can be collected and thus the range of researchable issues, and most studies have relied on material already in the public domain, such as the published listings of company shareholdings and...

The rapid growth in nonstandard forms of employment toward the end of the 20th century has fuelled claims about the spread of “bad jobs” within Anglo-American capitalism. Research from the United States indicates that such jobs have more bad characteristics than do permanent jobs after controlling for workers’ personal characteristics, family status, and occupation. We apply a version of the bad characteristics approach to British data and find that despite some institutional differences with the United States, (notably, in employer welfare provision), the British case also supports the hypothesis that nonstandard employment (part-time, temporary, and fixed term) increases workers’ exposure to bad job characteristics.

Total quality management practices have spread widely over the last half decade, while the US and British pioneers have now been involved in TQM for more than a decade. Academic investigation of the phenomenon has lagged somewhat behind these developments, however, and this special issue of Employee Relations brings together a number of articles arising from recent research into TQM. They focus on issues of organization and the management of employee relations, and include US and Australian research as well as British cases. In this article we discuss a number of themes and issues arising out of these contributions and the wider debate over TQM. What is TQM?TQM has been a notoriously imprecise term. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that the original "gurus" of quality management have been long on prescription but shorter on analysis, and moreover, have differed among themselves. Another is that practitioners use the term to describe a very wide range of practices. A third is that the intellectual origins and part of the theoretical basis of TQM derive from statistics, and early applications were in production management, in contrast to most other contributions to management theory which derive from one of the social sciences and have different applications (Grant et al., 1994). As Dean and Bowen (1994, p. 396) observe:Perhaps the fundamental difference between TQ and management theory is in their audiences. Whereas TQ is aimed at managers in general, theory is directed to researchers …Given this difference in audiences, the language used in the two literatures differs substantially.

We evaluate a number of the claims made in the debate between the prescriptive and critical literature that surrounds `excellence', with a particular focus on human resource and quality management. The critical literature contains two positions, broadly a traditional control perspective and the other concerned with the structuring of meaning. The empirical basis of the paper is an investigation of an HRM and quality initiative in a leading supermarket company. The initiative embodies many of the prescriptions of the gurus of excellence. We present both qualitative and quantitative data collected from shopfloor and managerial staff. Our findings lend little support to the traditional criticism that, if management objectives are realised, they are achieved through some combination of sham empowerment, work intensification and increased surveillance. Our evidence lends more support to the optimistic view that modern techniques of quality and human resource management can benefit employees. We suggest that the alternative concern with the way meanings are constructed has more plausibility, because the new managerial discourse of quality has affected the attitudes of a significant number of employees towards customer service. However, there was considerable variation in how employees received the programme's message and thus its effects are by no means uniform. Moreover, we encounter an unanticipated and previously unremarked consequence of managerial discourses, that employees use these as resources in their struggles with managers in order to bring managers into line with workforce expectations.