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I. INTRODUCTION In this monograph we point out and analyse various dimensions of bargaining structure, which we define broadly as the institutional configuration within which bargaining takes place, and attempt to provide some guidelines for management action. We look at the development, theory, and present framework of bargaining structure in Britain and then examine it in terms of choices: multi‐employer versus single employer, company versus plant level bargaining, and the various public policy issues involved.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

To date, grievance research has made little use of behavioural concepts developed in the literature on organisational conflict. Such concepts form the basis for a model of grievance behaviour that relates the sources of grievances to grievance actions and outcomes. Sources of grievance conflict are explored by analysing interviews with Belgian and American employees concerning their complaints in the workplace. As an alternative to the limiting substantive classifications traditionally used, a categorisation of grievances is presented that corresponds to grievants′ own formulations of the causes of conflict. Applying this categorisation scheme to the interview data revealed that most grievances have multiple sources and that a grievant typically distorts public statements concerning the sources of the grievance. Behavioural analysis of grievances can benefit researcher and practitioner by providing insight into the organisational function of conflict and into employees′ most basic beliefs about their organisation′s values.

Senior managers of industrial relations in large multi‐plant companies are faced by both centrifugal and centripetal forces and ask: “How can we achieve the benefits of decentralisation while at the same time maintaining centralised control?” In response to these countervailing pressures, senior managers create the appearance of autonomy for plant managers but in reality exercise centralised authority over major industrial relations decisions. To achieve this, managers at head office promote an ideology of decentralisation while actually practising central control. Local managers' autonomy on major industrial relations issues is largely a myth, perpetuated by formally decentralised management and bargaining structures, and techniques designed to enhance the independence of each plant. Central managers' authority is exercised by making all major decisions at head office and by co‐ordinating plant industrial relations through a variety of measures. Two factors are examined to explain this inconsistency between the levels of decision making over important issues and the level at which collective agreements are made—first, the changes in bargaining structure, and in particular the move towards single‐employer bargaining, and, second, developments in organisational structures and control techniques, especially those associated with divisionalised organisations.

Employee participation is conceived as a four‐stage process (interaction, communication to and from management, influence by and on management, employee effect on decisions). Eighty‐two lower supervisory managers perceived the four stages as highly related except for influence by management. Further, the four processes of participation were found in approximately equal amounts (except for managerial influence). An examination by decision type showed that employee and managerial influence were inversely related on corporate and departmental decisions, but were unrelated on departmental employee and operational decisions. Employees engaged most in participation on departmental employee decisions and least on departmental staffing decisions. This difference in participation was greater for organisations of small size.

Since 1970 the British industrial relations system has been injected with an unprecedented volume of law relating to employment. We have had the Equal Pay Act, 1970 and Sex Discrimination Act, 1975 which have spawned an Equal Opportunities Commission; the Industrial Relations Act, 1971 was passed and subsequently repealed by the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act, 1974 (TULRA); the provisions of this latter act have been further buttressed by the Employment Protection Act, 1975 (EPA); dealing with a very much neglected area of industrial relations we have had the Health and Safety at Work Act, 1974; finally the Bullock Commission which was set up to inquire into the way worker directors could increase employee participation in industrial affairs reported to the Minister in February, 1977. The government have promised legislation on ‘industrial democracy’ sometime in 1977 or 1978.

In this paper, we argue that discussion of worker participation in decision‐making is very limited in its usefulness unless the analysis looks at the structure of decision‐making, particularly in terms of centralization, in the organization concerned. The issues of worker participation are not instructive per se. If there is decentralization, it may assist the effectiveness of participation structures at lower levels, but the problem remains of the degree to which the costs of some decentralization are traded‐off by the ‘dominant‐coalition’ in the corporation against the benefits of centralization of decision‐making in the areas of finance and senior personnel.

This article derives from a research project supported by the Social Science Research Council, the results of which appear in a book, Rule Making and Industrial Peace. The article is an account of industrial relations in a large multiplant footwear manufacturing company and a discussion of the factors, including personnel management initiatives, which appear to make for stable industrial relations in circumstances which from experience in some other industries commonly seem conducive to conflict, e.g. a high proportion of the labour force employed on payment by results, variable piecework earnings and disparities of earnings between factories.

This paper proposes a definition of industrial relations policy and suggests an analytical framework to help towards an understanding of such policy. The framework draws on three crucial distinctions: that between the “espoused” policy and the “operational” policy; that bet ween the different roles management may play in in dustrial relations policy as instigators, implementers and facilitators; and, finally, between the “content” and the “features” aspects of policy. Case study material il lustrates these distinctions in both on‐going and change situations. Finally, some conclusions are drawn from the analysis.

A much quoted observation of Phelps Brown in the late 1950s was that “when British industrial relations are compared with those of the other democracies they stand out because they are so little regulated by law”. However, the position has changed so substantially since then that Lewis was able to comment that “in 1975 it would seem that the one indubitably fundamental and irreversible trend is the ever‐increasing extent of the legal regulation of the British system of industrial relations”. In view of this substantially changed state of affairs a fundamental task for industrial relations researchers to undertake is that of explaining variation in the impact of industrial relations legislation at the level of the individual employment establishment.