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When Joan Woodward died in 1971 at the age of 54, she left behind an enormous professional and personal legacy. This volume is a tribute to her work and life, to the profound effect she had on those she worked with, and to the important impact her work has had on how we think about organizations. It is also a tribute to a woman who succeeded in what was, at the time, overwhelmingly a man's world. That she was only the second woman appointed as a full professor at Imperial College London provides ample evidence of her success in the unlikely and very masculine setting of post-war Britain.

A major theme of much of the literature on Japanese transplants concerns the construction of employer hegemony on the basis of stringent selection, employee involvement and team‐ working. Many of the more critical contributions to this literature emphasise the tightness of work schedules and the narrow confines of worker initiative, but they nevertheless emphasise the capacity of management to engineer worker compliance and co‐operation, through a sophisticated mix of communications, surveillance and performance monitoring (Morgan and Sayer, 1988; Garrahan and Stewart, 1992; Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992; Graham, 1995). This paper deploys data from current research on a cluster of Japanese manufacturing ‘transplants’ in the Midlands to assess these arguments and to develop a rather different analysis of the problematical management of labour within such workplaces.

Seeks to explore the analytical rectitude of comparative culturalist approaches to the explanation of differences in the implementation of technologies in different settings. Takes theory and empirical observation from a well‐established case study of the use of information technology in the workplace as a form of worker surveillance (Kay Electronics) and examines a hitherto neglected feature of the company’s reconfiguration of the industrial labour process. Focuses on the realization that the quality monitoring system implemented to support manufacturing in the UK plant was not, as it was initially thought, a direct emulation of a system used in its Japanese sister plant, but was described by the company as a unique approach developed in response to the challenges of a UK manufacturing context.

Joan undertook the ground-breaking project originally reported in the 1958 pamphlet, Management and Technology, not at one of Britain's great universities, but at the unfashionable address of the South East Essex Technical College (then in the county of Essex but now part of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham). The Human Relations Research Unit had been set up at the college, which is now part of the University of East London, in 1953 with support from a number of agencies including funding ultimately derived from the Marshall Plan. Its express purpose was to enhance the performance of industry and commerce through the application of social science. Those readers familiar with the area will know that, at the time, it was economically and culturally dominated by the Ford assembly plant in nearby Dagenham, but it was also home to a diverse range of small- and medium-sized industrial workshops that were typical of the pre-war Greater London economy (Woodward, 1965; Massey & Meegan, 1982). It was into this diverse industrial milieu that Joan and her research team ventured (Fig. 1), completing their main study in 1958.

As we write this chapter, in the autumn of 2008, the US financial sector is in crisis – major investment banks have gone bankrupt, others have lost most of their market value, and the US Congress is considering a bailout of some 700 million US dollars (The Economist, 2008). The situation represents a clear case of the extraordinary potential for breakdown in social systems that depend on complex layers of technology and institutionalized practice – a “logistical nightmare of fixing a market whose complexity is central to the crisis” (The Economist, 2008, p. 81). More generally, we argue that it challenges prevailing images of technology and institutions as stabilizing forces and points to the fundamentally important, but often neglected, work of maintaining technology and institutions.

Joan interviewed me for my first job in 1969. Little did I realize what an opportunity I was about to be given. I was about to be offered a post with one of – if not the – United Kingdom's most eminent industrial sociologist (as we were called then) and to join the most exciting and dynamic group of young researchers in the subject at the time; a group that have all gone on to make their mark in various ways. I was recruited because I was interested in the organization and management of industrial research and development, and Joan wanted to test her ideas outside traditional manufacturing environments.

The minimum film forming temperature (MFFT) has been described as “the minimum temperature at which a waterborne synthetic latex or emulsion will coalesce when laid on a substrate as a thin film”. If there are no pigments present, such materials will form a smooth, clear, transparent film when dried at temperatures above their MFFT. At temperatures below their MFFT, drying will result in a white, powdery, cracked film. For effective use, it is therefore important that paints and coatings based on emulsions are applied only to surfaces with a temperature above that of their MFFT. This is usually derived by the manufacturer and printed on the side of the tin.