The Impact of TQM Strategy on Worker Roles and Competence at Cadbury

Abstract

One of the most important debates in industrial sociology during the mid to late 1980s concerned the possibility of industrialised economies moving away from the production of standardised products with their concomitant narrow job specifications, and low skill requirements, to economies based upon customised products oriented to market demands requiring higher levels of skills and responsibilities from shop floor workers. The emergence of more highly skilled workers, it was argued, could be identified in countries such as West Germany, as it was then known, and several regions of Italy (Piore and Sable 1984, Kern and Schumann 1987). According to Lane’s (1988, 1989) comparative analysis of Britain, France and Germany, the institutional systems of training and industrial relations in Germany facilitate the emergence of new types of worker, whereas in Britain, the corresponding institutional systems hinder such an emergence. However, there is a growing body of literature in Britain attesting to the need for new types of skills in manufacturing. In contrast to the belief in a general tendency to de-skill workers in order to gain control over the labour process (Braverman, 1974), recent surveys suggest that employers are increasing the skills of their existing work force and harnessing them to the new microprocessor based technologies (Daniel 1987, Batstone and Gourlay 1986).