Interest in the potential effects of different systems for organizing work and managing employees on the performance of organizations has a long history in the social sciences. The interest in economics, arguably more recent, reflects a general concern about the sources of competitiveness in...

Concern about job instability and insecurity has a long history and has generated a considerable body of research across the social sciences, most recently focused on whether job stability and security have declined. Internally flexible systems for organizing work, sometimes called 'functionally...

Studies of how different work practices affect organizational performance have suffered from methodological problems. Especially intractable has been the difficulty of establishing whether observed links are causal or merely reflect pre-existing differences among firms. This analysis uses a...

The author investigates the reasons for the diversity in concession bargaining experience among plants in the meatpacking and tire industries. In 1981 negotiations, about one-third of the plants in each industry engaged in concession bargaining and the others did not. The author hypothesizes...

Using data from surveys of employees and their supervisors in eight companies in 1992, the authors examine how each of two forms of employee involvement affected an important dimension of individual performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), defined as individual discretionary...

Franchise jobs are often viewed as epitomizing a "low-road" employee-management approach characterized by high turnover and several practices that are deemed unsophisticated, such as low investment in training, deskilling of work, and little encouragement of employee involvement. Research on...

Using data from surveys of employees and their supervisors in eight companies in 1992, the authors examine how each of two forms of employee involvement affected an important dimension of individual performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), defined as individual discretionary...

Franchise jobs are often viewed as epitomizing a “low-road†employee-management approach characterized by high turnover and several practices that are deemed unsophisticated, such as low investment in training, deskilling of work, and little encouragement of employee involvement....