 The Uncertainties of Management in the Management of Uncertainty: Employers, Labor Relations and Industrial Adjustment in the 1980sWolfgang Streeck
Work, Employment & Society, 1987, vol. 1, issue 3, 281-308 Abstract: In the course of economic crisis, the initiative in industrial relations shifts to employers. This paper does not present employers' recent industrial relations initiatives in detail, but rather tries to reconstruct the general strategic problem to which they are responding. This problem is to find ways of managing an unprecedented degree of economic uncertainty deriving from a need for continuous rapid adjustment to a market environment that seems to have become permanently more turbulent than in the past. This requires an increasingly close (re-)integration of industrial relations and industrial strategy in the context of a comprehensive manufacturing policy. Institutional barriers which insulate industrial relations from concerns for, and changes in, economic performance need to be dismantled, and `flexibility' is a key concept. However, the management of uncertainty remains incomplete and beset with contradictions due to profound uncertainties of management regarding the structure and function of a flexible industrial relations system. These uncertainties are linked to wider problems of industrial strategy whose resolution partly depends on the strategic decisions of other actors, in particular trade unions. Date: 1987 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:1:y:1987:i:3:p:281-308 DOI: 10.1177/0950017087001003002 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association |
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