Employee Relations: An International Journal

Wallington, Peter

1988 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/eb055113

The miners' strike of 19845 does not lend itself easily to general conclusions. It was, and it is hoped will remain, unique. Nevertheless, it laid bare some significant trends and developments in the policing of industrial disputes, which have, in several respects, been reinforced by subsequent events. My purpose in this article is to identify and analyse what happened in the policing of the strike in that context, in an attempt to highlight the implications of contemporary techniques of policing disputes and of the context in which policing takes place. My central thesis is that recent developments in policing disputes are potentially dangerous for civil liberties, for the police themselves and for industrial relations.

Stora, Benjamin; Cooper, Cary L.

1988 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/eb055114

Are top executives stronger and more resistant than the firm's managers they are leading Is there a human cost in terms of psychic and psychosomatic trouble linked to the successful top manager Until now, studies related to the top managers were confined to strictly neutral observations observers did not dare talk about the mental equilibrium of the top executive under stress. It always was the corporate strategy, the implementation of the strategy, the as if approach to management which prevailed. Organisations were preferred to managers in fact these taboos inhabited the corporate shrine. Top managers were individuals specifically to be protected from the watchful eye of academic organisational researchers.

Kirkbride, Paul S.

1988 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/eb055115

In two previous articles, this author drew attention to the importance of the linguistic resources of legitimising principles, and the uses of ideology and rhetoric in bargaining and negotiation. It was argued that if we are fully to understand the processes of power in organisations generally, and in industrial relations in particular, we need to study in more detail the nature and uses of ideology, legitimising principles and rhetoric, and the ways in which these are used continually to reinforce and reproduce structures of power and domination. Illustrative material from an engineering company, Bettavalve Placid, was used to demonstrate the nature of some of these processes.

Barrar, Peter; Sullivan, Terry

1988 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/eb055116

This article draws from institutional labour economics and mainstream industrial relations, but differs from the more usual uses of their ideas in a number of ways. For example, the observation we make, that wages and prices are sticky downwards and that labour markets respond to falls in demand by employment and quantity adjustments, is not new. Similarly, the idea that labour markets are different from normal commodity markets is not of recent origin Hence, while Clay and Hicks were making such observations and speculating on the labour relations consequences of them, Keynes was using the concept of wage rigidity stickiness as a central building block in his General Theory which dealt with the conditions for macroeconomic equilibrium.