Voices from the Shopfloor: Dramas of the Employment Relationship

Citation

Sayers, J. (2002), "Voices from the Shopfloor: Dramas of the Employment Relationship", Women in Management Review, Vol. 17 No. 6, pp. 299-300. https://doi.org/10.1108/wimr.2002.17.6.299.2

Anne‐Marie Greene has sent out a challenge to industrial relations researchers: to use more ethnographic studies at the shop‐floor level and, more importantly, extend analyses to incorporate developing, as well as developed, countries. Greene’s book is one in a series on “Voices in development management”, published by Ashgate. The aim of this series is to provide a forum in which development practitioners and others, can present their perspectives and promote neglected development issues, such as gender.

Using her own research into the “lock” manufacturing industries of England, Greene argues that ethnography needs more acceptance in industrial relations research. She sets out to demonstrate the usefulness of ethnographic approaches in filling information gaps in the findings of the predominantly statistical methodological practice (which she argues characterises “accepted” industrial relations research in Great Britain), and draws links to show the ways that more use of ethnography will help expose the artificiality of the “binary” between the developed and the developing worlds.

I must admit right up front, that I found the link between Greene’s lock study and the call for more research (particularly more ethnographic research) in developing countries, to be rather tenuous. The lock manufacturing plants she describes in the UK provide no visible or direct relation to any developing country, except in relation to a potential threat from the opening of a very large competitor lock plant in China. Greene’s modus operandi seems to be demonstrating the way ethnographic research illuminates an understanding of industrial relations through the example of the lock industry in Great Britain. Then, using the very limited ethnographic industrial relations literature available about the developing world, she argues that ethnography “plugs a gap” in existing research and provides a more appropriate methodology for use in developing countries.

Industrial relations is a complex area with room for many approaches, and I must say that I find the arguments between quantitative and qualitative research methods and which provides more access to “truth”, to be relatively pointless. The predominant view in research is that both sensitive quantitative research, and good qualitative research are needed to extend understanding in industrial relations. Although I agree wholeheartedly with Greene’s comments about the unfair perception that ethnographic research is “second‐rate”, a better way of making the argument would be to provide excellent ethnographic (or quantitative) research conducted in a developed country that seeks to communicate conditions in these factories, rather than illustrating the argument for research styles suited to developing countries with an example taken from the “developed” UK.

But these reservations aside, the lock study she reports on is very interesting, and I sense the book’s strengths lie in what it has to offer here as an insight into how actors in the industrial relations system act out their “dramas” in the employment relationship, the ways that Greene demonstrates the ambiguities and contradictions involved in practices of paternalism, for example. The main contribution of this study for readers of Women in Management Review, is most likely to be Greene’s accounts of the ways that members of the predominantly female workforce speak about paternalism, familial and community relations, and enact their gendered places within the factory and beyond the factory gates. The very real and affectionate connections felt for the factories by the workers who work in them and the local communities were conveyed well also, without sacrificing the recognition of the antagonisms and conflict endemic in the employment relationships.

For those readers interested in industrial relations in developing countries, Greene provides a good introduction to these studies, and her analysis is very sensitive to issues of gender, providing critiques of the major studies in terms of their weaknesses and strengths vis‐à‐vis their incorporation of gender in their views. I found the book to be an interesting and thought‐provoking read, notwithstanding the reservations I have mentioned, and this book adds to the growing number of gender‐sensitive industrial relations studies that are currently being undertaken.