“…In attempts to be as flexible and lean as the Japanese, European economies have to make the best of what they have to hand but significant national differences which exist in both structures and cultures wi11 make some responses easier for some and not for others. In Germany the prospects were good: there was a high level of skills, an industrial union structure, and a harmonistic plant tradition engendered by 40 years of industrial democracy [55]. In the UK, in contrast, there was a tradition of low trust relations and of con-tested craft control in key sectors such as engineering [56].…”