Bad Work Practices and Good Management Practices: The Consequences of the Extension of Managerial Control in British and Japanese Manufacturing since 1950

Abstract

Although the existing academic literature on management practices contrasts national styles, it does not pose or answer key questions about the effectiveness of different approaches. Industrial relations specialists and engineers both offer highly specialized work that provides little detailed analysis of the productivity and profit results of changes in production techniques or of the interaction between the two. The applied economics literature on profit and productivity is equally unhelpful, because it relates differences of output to general differences in factor input, rather than to the detailed organization of production. This article provides some tentative answers to new questions about the efficacy of different approaches to production management, and it contributes to the ongoing debate about whether the significance of the “labor problem” has been over-rated in Britain.