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The recruitment of young, “green” workers has long been recognised as a defining characteristic of the greenfield site. Extends understanding of how person‐centred recruitment, with its emphasis on employee acceptability, disadvantages the older greenfield applicant. Whether it be a new high commitment or customer service site, worker age is shown to combine with the conventional recruitment criteria of skill, class and gender to constitute an excluded labour segment. In its superior capacity to shape workforce composition, greenfield person‐centred recruitment is shown to be important to understanding the ways in which managerial control is pursued and exercised more widely than within the labour process. Leopold and Hallier’s framework of greenfield types is also modified to encompass new customer service sites where acceptability recruitment is critical to greenfield employers’ labour relations strategies. Concludes that person‐centred recruitment should be studied as a critical feature of greenfield workplace politics and practices.

The authors discuss the typology of personnel officers in the National Health Service. On the basis of a survey of Scottish Health Boards they conclude that NHS personnel officers are “insiders” rather than “outsiders” bringing their specialist skills from elsewhere.

Reviews the concept of a “greenfield site” within human resource management (HRM) and shows that the ways in which distance is conceptualised or measured in describing greenfield sites needs to be made explicit. This is particularly important when comparing different studies and in attempting generalisations about the introduction of new HRM practices on greenfield sites. The distance factors which may impose a constraint on the introduction of new HRM practices at a greenfield site are the site’s distance from a firm’s existing operations, its distance from geographical concentrations of similar economic activities and its distance from regions with traditional patterns of management‐employee relations. Concludes by arguing that it is inappropriate to treat the greenfield factor as a dichotomous variable and that there are various shades of green.

The 1965 Redundancy Payments Act was amended by the 1975 Employment Protection Act to give substantial rights to trade unions to challenge managerial decisions on redundancies. These included advance warning of impending redundancies, the right to make representations to the employer, and to receive the employer′s reply. Cabinet ministers, introducing the legislation, felt that it would generate negotiations either to quash the redundancies or to provide alternative solutions to impending job losses. In investigating 74 incidences of redundancy, covering 10,500 workers, it was found that these rights have, for the most part, merely oiled the process of managerial decisions over redundancies, by enjoining trade unions to such decisions; decisions on which they have no real impact. Rights for trade unions, then, in practice translate to gains for employers. An important caveat to this situation occurs where an agreement on redundancies exists, generally giving workers substantial benefits, although there are still too many trade union officials and employers who do not wish to sign such agreements.

A recent OECD report on labour disputes noted that there has been a considerable increase in strike activity in the public sector of a number of member countries in recent times. Moreover, it was noted that strikes have started to occur in the traditionally “quiet” parts of the public sector in various countries. There is little need to stress this point in the last few years as the strikes that are attracting attention throughout the world are virtually all in the public sector; witness, for example, the air traffic controllers' dispute in the United States, the campaign of selective industrial action by civil servants in Britain and the postal and telecommunications disputes in Australia in mid‐1981.

One possible management response to problem drinkers is the introduction of referral and treatment policies; other possible responses would be to tolerate them, dismiss them or try and screen them out through an intensive recruitment process.

Explores employee experiences of HRM within a division of a non‐unionised Korean owned MNC, which comprised a mix of greenfield site and brownfield site factories. Explores employee perceptions of the effectiveness of communication and consultation within the company. Incorporates a consideration of the role that gossip, rumour and the grapevine play when formal systems for communication and consultation are not trusted. Examines the conditions that led to a disjunction between the existence of “sophisticated HRM” systems for communication and consultation and positive outcomes in the workplace. Concludes that management action and behaviour were more important in determining HR outcomes than “typical” greenfield site variables such as a brand new factory or a “new” employment philosophy.

The decade of the 1970s is widely regarded as one in which the personnel management function in Britain enjoyed substantial gains in authority and status within organisations. These gains were typically attributed to three basic industrial relations developments, namely, the passage of a substantial volume of employment legislation, the sizeable increase in the overall union density of the work force (and associated structures and behaviour) and the movement away from multi‐employer industry‐level bargaining arrangements to single‐employer bargaining structures at the plant and company level. As evidence of such gains, reference can readily be made to a number of samples of personnel managers reporting a rise in their own status over this period. However, whether such self‐reported status improvements have been matched by, or reflected in, more objective tangible indicators of such change has been much less thoroughly investigated; certainly, one recent industry‐specific study found little evidence of such a relationship.

Introduction In Britain, discussions of the role of third parties in industrial relations have almost entirely concentrated on Government or quasi‐government bodies concerned with administering incomes policy or offering conciliation and arbitration services. Such discussion has rarely, however, been extended to include private third parties, such as consultants and lawyers. This deficiency seems somewhat surprising, not to say unfortunate, as one would expect that both consultants and lawyers have considerably expanded their role in the British industrial relations system from the 1970s, largely as a consequence of the increased legal regulation of the system. This is not, of course, to suggest that such individuals did not play an often important role in some situations, prior to that decade. For example, consultants certainly figured in the build‐up to the Fawley productivity agreements, although according to Allan Flanders,