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Pilkington Brothers is by any token a highly successful manufacturing company. From its centre in St Helens, Lancashire, this 150‐year old glass company has in the past few decades expanded very rapidly. It is now a large and complex international business. Pilkington have plants in Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina, New Zealand, and Sweden. The company is a technological pace‐setter. Glass manufacturers the world over use Pilkington‐developed processes on licence. Although still essentially glass‐producers, Pilkington have by expansion, acquisition and merger, diversified into optical glass, fibreglass, and toughened vehicle‐glass, for example. What is more, this family firm seems to have managed the process of ‘going public’ with a great deal of skill. It survived the bitter and damaging strike of 1970 emerging two years later with improved profitability. Future prospects are to all appearances excellent. Pilkington always enjoyed, and still enjoys, amongst their own employees at every level and widely amongst the British public, a high reputation as employers who treat their employees with decency and consideration, and as pioneers of modern management techniques. The strike, by common consent, certainly tarnished that image, but it still persists strongly, especially in St Helens. Certainly, senior managers of the company strive honestly and vigorously to restore and to maintain the company's reputation.

It is useful to distinguish, very broadly, three contrasting approaches to organizational design. The first of these argues, straightforwardly and persuasively, that to design for organizational efficiency, one must begin from a knowledge of the properties of the individual person. The assumption that lies behind the approach is that to the extent that the individuals who work in an organization are committed to its goals, so will they find ways to work effectively towards those goals. The problem for the designer is how to remove the obstacles that prevent commitment. Since, so the argument continues, individuals are similar with respect to the factors that blunt or sharpen their commitment, then it should be possible to produce a common design procedure for all organizations. I refer to this approach as the ‘human relations’ approach.

Most significant organisational changes originate with higher management, and are “pushed through” in one way or another. Resistance from the “lower levels” is usually expected and plans are made to overcome it. The phrase “selling the change” is commonly used to describe a process in which management attempts either to convince those affected that they are likely to gain as a result, or promises them that they will be compensated for any loss of job, pay, or status. The task of “pushing through,” “selling,” making the promises and handling the administration of the gains or compensations, often falls to the personnel people, especially the administration part.

The credibility of the comparisons that are made between wage rates and earnings in supposedly similar jobs is frequently a major factor in collective bargaining in an industry or company. This is so, whatever other arguments are used, such as productivity.

The paper suggests that traditional descriptive approaches to Personnel Management do not successfully answer the question ‘what is Personnel Management?’, nor do they explain the way in which it actually exists in work organizations. A framework for analysis is proposed, looking at work organizations from the perspective of the Personnel Manager; it is suggested that this framework may help to answer some of these questions, provide a means of exploring the phenomenon of Personnel Management and also of studying it as a subject and a meeting point of disciplines.

It is now over two years since the Engineering Employers' Federation published a research paper by Tom Lupton and Dan Gowler entitled Selecting a Wage Payment System. When first published, many managers considered it too difficult and complex to read, which in part might have been due to the authors' attempts to digest their procedure to its ‘bare bones’ (and consequently scant explanation is given). However, a major difficulty might well have been the radically different approach to selecting and evaluating payment systems and for many the ‘new’ dimensions presented for consideration, compared with the approach and factors traditionally considered by many firms.

The art of management has been defined ‘as knowing exactly what you want men to do, and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way’. F W Taylor, Shop Management, 1903.

This paper has arisen out of work done at the centre for business Research, Manchester Business School, in connection with the Wage Payment System Project under the direction of Professor Tom Lupton. In addition to all the members of the project team, the author would like to acknowledge, in particular, the extensive and invaluable help given so freely to him by Dan Gowler of Manchester Business School.

A DISTINCTION must be made at the outset between wage drift—the movement of plant‐level earnings away from centrally negotiated rates of pay; and productivity drift—the movement of plant‐level earnings away from plant productivity. In this paper, I focus on the latter, in the belief that if the factors causing earnings movements at plant level were better understood managers would be in a position, if they wished, to do something to control them.

Amid all the talk of present‐day industrial revolutions, when everything around him is becoming the subject of modernisation programmes, it is to be expected that the personnel manager and his role should come under a more intense and critical scrutiny. Criticism of the function of personnel management is not new: ever since the first personnel manager came on to the industrial scene persistent doubts have been voiced about what personnel management is all about.