Labour Flexibility: securing management's right to manage badly?

Michie, Jonathan; Sheehan, Maura

Abstract

Frank Wilkinson’s classic piece on ‘Productive Systems’ opens with a warning against the ‘increasingly dogmatic reassertion by a growing proportion of economists of the beneficial effects of the invisible hand of market forces’. These reassertions, Wilkinson argues, ‘are based not on a careful examination of how economies actually work and have developed but on abstract, a priori reasoning about how they should operate’ (Wilkinson, 1983, p. 413). The attempt by the Thatcher Governments in Britain to shift the balance of forces in favour of the market – in other words, in favour of those who have the upper hand in ‘free market’ processes – was best illustrated, indeed justified, by the ‘need to reassert management’s right to manage’. The idea was that managers in British firms were constrained by trade unions, by Government regulations and by other institutional arrangements. Given a freer reign – that is, more power – they would do a better job at managing. This begs a number of questions, the most obvious one being whether it is true that the weaker the constraints within which management manages, the better the outcomes? In other words, if managers are given a greater freedom to manage, how will their behaviour change, and will any such change be to the benefit or detriment of the organisations that they manage and the economy more generally?

Citation

Michie, J., & Sheehan, M. (2003). Labour Flexibility: securing management's right to manage badly?. In B. Burchell, S. Deakin, J. Rubery, & J. Michie (Eds.), Systems of Production: Markets, Organisations and Performance. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203987179

• Publication Date: 2003
• Deposit Date: Feb 24, 2020
• Publisher: Routledge
• Book Title: Systems of Production: Markets, Organisations and Performance
• Chapter Number: 10
• ISBN: 9780415282833
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203987179
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2537472