Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Industrial productivity – Great Britain – History'
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Gottwald, Carl H. "The Anglo-American Council on Productivity: 1948-1952 British Productivity and the Marshall Plan." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc279256/.
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The United Kingdom's postwar economic recovery and the usefulness of Marshall Plan aid depended heavily on a rapid increase in exports by the country's manufacturing industries. American aid administrators, however, shocked to discover the British industry's inability to respond to the country's urgent need, insisted on aggressive action to improve productivity. In partial response, a joint venture, called the Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP), arranged for sixty-six teams involving nearly one thousand people to visit U.S. factories and bring back productivity improvement ideas. Analyses of team recommendations, and a brief review of the country's industrial history, offer compelling insights into the problems of relative industrial decline. This dissertation attempts to assess the reasons for British industry's inability to respond to the country's economic emergency or to maintain its competitive position faced with the challenge of newer industrializing countries.
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Grinevich, Vadim Vladimirovich. "Sectoral patterns of productivity growth and the university-industry interface : a cross-regional comparison for the UK, 1998-2002." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609978.
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Bottomley, Sean David. "The British patent system during the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1852." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/252288.
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Withall, Caroline Louise. "Shipped out? : pauper apprentices of port towns during the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1870." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:519153d8-336b-4dac-bf37-4d6388002214.
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The thesis challenges popular generalisations about the trades, occupations and locations to which pauper apprentices were consigned, shining the spotlight away from the familiar narrative of factory children, onto the fate of their destitute peers in port towns. A comparative investigation of Liverpool, Bristol and Southampton, it adopts a deliberately broad definition of the term pauper apprenticeship in its multi-sourced approach, using 1710 Poor Law and charity apprenticeship records and previously unexamined New Poor Law and charity correspondence to provide new insight into the chronology, mechanisms and experience of pauper apprenticeship. Not all port children were shipped out. Significantly more children than has hitherto been acknowledged were placed in traditional occupations, the dominant form of apprenticeship for port children. The survival and entrenchment of this type of work is striking, as are the locations in which children were placed; nearly half of those bound to traditional trades remained within the vicinity of the port. The thesis also sheds new light on a largely overlooked aspect of pauper apprenticeship, the binding of boys into the Merchant service. Furthermore, the availability of sea apprenticeships as well as traditional placements caused some children to be shipped in to the ports for apprenticeships. Of those who were still shipped out to the factories, the evidence shows that far from dying out, as previously thought, the practice of batch apprenticeship persisted under the New Poor Law. The most significant finding of the thesis is the survival and endurance of pauper apprenticeship as an institution involving both Poor Law and charity children. Poor children were still being apprenticed late into the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Pauper apprenticeship is shown to have been a robust, resilient and resurgent institution. The evidence from port towns offers significant revision to the existing historiography of pauper apprenticeship.
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Halton, Maurice J. "L. Gardner and Sons Limited : the history of a British industrial firm : a study with special reference to markets, workplace industrial relations, and manufacturing engineering technology, 1955-1986." Thesis, University of Bolton, 2010. http://ubir.bolton.ac.uk/263/.
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Investigating a range of commonly asserted characteristics relating to British family firms, this study concluded that, although they retained ownership and control and did not adopt mass-production, no persuasive evidence was found to suggest that the family managers of L. Gardner and Sons behaved unprofessionally or irrationally during the first eighty-seven years of the firm?s existence. Analysed from the perspective of markets and workplace industrial relations, it was found that the Gardner family managers coped reasonably well with most of the macroenvironmental shifts that occurred between 1955 and 1975. However, two serious errors were made: the first, which caused a short-term loss of revenue and a long-term loss of market leadership, was a result of negligence, the second stemmed from an outdated authoritarian approach to industrial relations that resulted in intense discord in the workplace, alleviated only after the management was replaced by a more astute and enlightened regime. A third error occurred after Gardner was sold to Hawker Siddeley, a large British industrial group, in 1977. Based on a perception that Gardner's plant was outdated, the new owners invested in expensive computer controlled manufacturing systems, and increased the volume of subcontracted components, strategies that caused disruptions to production schedules, eroded quality standards, and failed to improve output. As a result, Gardner's superlative reputation for reliability and service became tarnished and its market share plummeted. In 1986, when mounting trading losses became unacceptable, the firm was sold-on to a competitor and production effectively ceased. This thesis asserts that, as a family firm, Gardner traded profitably and provided incomes for thousands of employees for more than a century. Moreover, the sale to Hawker Siddeley conferred wealth on the family shareholders and financial security on their descendents. Gardner was not therefore, a failure either between 1898 and 1955, or before 1978.
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Redman, Lydia Catherine. "Industrial conflict, social reform and competition for power under the Liberal governments 1906-1914." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708257.
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Tan, Hock Beng. "The changing character of research associations in the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1989 and beyond." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/25420.
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The main purpose of this study has been to establish the chanoino character of the RAs (Research Associations) in the UK from 1970 to 1989 and beyond. The last major piece of research carried out on the RAs was the Bessborough Report which was undertaken in 1972. One of the main problems encountered was the availability of secondary data on the RAs. Most of the data, especiall y statistical ones, had to be generated from primary sources e.g. Annual Reports of RAs, internal papers of RAs and interviews. Consequently, a great amount of time and effort went into the accumulation of data. The thesis is divided into five parts. Part 1 consists of the research methodology. Part 2 and 3 provide the necessary background information in order to map out the changes in the RAs over the two decades. Part 4 forms the core of the thesis and it presents the results of the research model used. Part 5 presents the conclusions and recommendations of the study.
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Lyddon, Dave. "Craft unionism and industrial change : a study of the National Union of Vehicle Builders until 1939." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1987. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/67116/.
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This thesis is about how the members of a long-established multi-craft union, originating in the coachmaking trade, coped with the massive changes in the means of transport, culminating in the dominance of mass production motor car firms. Part I explores changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with the rise of railways and motor cars. In both, some coachmaking skills were made redundant, while others were very necessary. The rise of the motor industry, far from destroying coachmaking unionism, wrenched it out of a long period of stagnation. Part II focusses on the interwar period, which witnessed major changes in car body production. Brush painting and varnishing was. replaced by cellulose spraying; wooden framed bodies were replaced by all-steel ones; assembly lines came into use, and the division of labour greatly increased, with large numbers of semi-skilled workers employed in the biggest firms. Analysis of the main technical changes, and the changing state of the car industry, shows that, despite massive unemployment among its members, and a membership decline of over one third, in the early 1930s, the RUVB did not suffer "technological unemployment". Although there was a material basis for craft unionism in much of the car body industry in the 1920s, and in the rest of vehicle building during the whole interwar period, the union still tried to organise semi-skilled workers. But when an "Industrial Section" was created in 1931, it was a response to the union's financial crisis caused by unemployment payments, and no serious recruitment of mass production operatives took place. The contrasting experiences in Coventry and Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s are analysed in detail. The study is not a conventional head office-based union history, instead favouring case studies of the organisation of work, technical developments, industrial structure, and local union organisation.
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Moses, Julia Margaret. "Industrial accident compensation policies, state and society in Britain, Germany and Italy, 1870-1925." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609115.
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Marfella, Claudia. "Art, industrial design, science and popular culture : modernism and cross-disciplinarity in Italy and Great Britain, 1948-1963." Thesis, Kingston University, 2015. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/33746/.
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Conceived inside a chronological frame, which starts in 1948, the year the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London founded, and ends in 1963, when Gillo Dorfles wrote a crucial essay on industrial design, concluding more than a decade of discussions, the thesis aims to examine some artistic and cultural phenomena identified in Italy and Great Britain, and seen as the acknowledgement or as the reaction to modernity. Topics and fields taken in consideration within the thesis are technology, science (fact and fiction), vision of the future, the relationship between arts and the awareness of industrial design as a new discipline. All these aspects, that might seems unusual in relationship with visual arts, are perceived as the expression of a second phase of Modernism. The British personalities included in the thesis are Reyner Banham, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson, all members of the Independent Group. With the presence of architects, visual artists, photographers, critics and, in a broader sense, designers, the group encompassed a variety of popular interests, with the inclusion of mass‐produced goods. The Italian figures presented in the thesis – Gillo Dorfles, Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass and Giuseppe Pinot‐Gallizio – focused on industrial design objects, viewed as a new artistic branch, to promote, to plan or to question. Other recurring figures analysed in the thesis are Max Bill, Asger Jorn and Tomás Maldonado, who give international connections to the themes and British and Italian personalities examined. In order to provide a wider understanding of the 1950s and their crucial function in the story of post‐war Europe, the thesis aims to emphasise the role played at different level by British and Italian visual artists, designers and critics, and explain the reasons that, in the following decade, would push Italy in its industrial miracle and Great Britain at the peak for its popular culture, pop music and fashion creativity.
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Mackenzie, Angus. "West of Scotland industrial and commercial elites and their social, political and economic influence in the inter-war years." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5033/.
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Scotland struggled to come to terms with the collapse in the heavy industries in the early 1920s and the prolonged period of economic dislocation which followed. The pervasive sense that this was a nation in decline sapped self-confidence. This thesis examines the response of the leading West of Scotland industrialists to the extended inter-war trade depression. Focusing on their championing of a series of self-help initiatives firmly rooted in Scotland itself, the thesis reimagines Graeme Morton’s work on Unionist Nationalism for the more challenging conditions of 1930s Scotland, introducing a much stronger economic dimension to Morton’s original argument. Echoing Morton, the rationalisation of the staple industries and the creation of new institutions to aid recovery owed much to the associational culture of West of Scotland business. The Scottish National Development Council and the Scottish Economic Committee - two significant stepping-stones in the rise of corporatist planning - represented a confident assertion of a distinctly Scottish voice and provided a link between business and the increasingly autonomous Scottish Office. The explicit articulation of a Scottish national interest within the parameters of the existing union and imperial relationships sat easily with the progressive, pro-statist views of many inter-war Unionists, helping to consolidate the consensus within ‘middle opinion’. The thesis focuses on the actions of a trio of West of Scotland industrialists: Lord Weir of Eastwood, Sir James Lithgow and Sir Steven Bilsland. It will be suggested that their advocacy of Scottish solutions for Scottish problems represents a more muscular and far-reaching economic Unionist Nationalism which transcends the narrow vision of Morton’s nineteenth century urban Scotland, but also questions Colin Kidd’s dismissal of early twentieth century unionism as ‘banal’.
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St, John Ian. "A study of the problem of work effort in British industry, 1850 to 1920." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:72e07126-716e-47d1-9d97-04725e128098.
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The thesis investigates the factors determining the effort put forth by industrial workers in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Why was so much energy and of such kinds put into work, and neither more nor less? What was the contribution of culture and institutions? And in which ways, if any, did the conduct of labour change over time? Labour effort contributes significantly to productivity differentials, between factories and across nations, and its study thus sheds light on that slackening of Britain's economic performance which historians have detected in the late Victorian period. Yet it is, additionally, a subject of interest in its own right. Work was the preponderating element in a man's daily experience, and much of the wide range of factory life found reflection in the matter of how hard he laboured and in what way. Indeed it is the contention of this thesis that an explanation of the level and forms of effort in the late nineteenth century must make reference to the workshop environment and its associated customs and social relationships. These arguments are illustrated by detailed studies of the shoe and flint-glass trades. Despite obvious contrasts between these industries, important similarities are found to exist in the issues surrounding labour effort. In both industries operatives limited output; shoe and glass employers alike contributed to the failure to fully realise the productive potential of their establishments; the social equilibrium of both industries was subject to mounting competition from overseas - a challenge compounded in the shoe trade by rapid technical change; and in each case these disruptive tendencies eventuated in industrial confrontations which, however apparently successful for employers, left the fundamental characteristics of industrial organisation unchanged. These themes were common, not merely to glass and shoe manufacture, but to a range of major industries. The culture of output limitation was, we conclude, widespread in industry in this period, and emerged from similar reasons out of similar contexts.
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Saunders, Julia Edwina. "White slavery : Romantic writers and industrial workers, 1790-1840." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:655d1502-34a7-4bf7-b0e6-fa8a85a31b43.
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In this thesis, I argue the case for putting the industrial revolution back into literary accounts of the Romantic period. Writers of fiction played an important part in disseminating knowledge about the changes to technology and society, as well as helping to form the image of the newest social class: that of the industrial workers. Literature aspired to educate and integrate this class, as well as to influence the parallel process of educating the upper classes about the advent of the new manufacturing order. I have taken as the governing metaphor for industrialization that of 'white slavery', drawing the contrast to the contemporary movement to abolish black slavery. To illustrate the thesis, I have chosen six writers: three Romantic poets - Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth - and three women educationalists - Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth and Harriet Martineau, each of whom represents a significant philosophical approach to a manufacturing society and who each made an important contribution to imaginative literature. Whilst the Romantic poets analysed industrialization as a divisive and demoralizing phenomenon and looked to the past for solutions, the educationalists responded to the challenge presented by the factory system by suggesting new visions of social relationships which bound moral and economic behaviour together. The thesis aspires to restore the voices of neglected women writers in the industrial debate with the aim of promoting a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the Romantic period and a fuller comprehension of its creative expression.
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McAllister, John Francis Olivarius. "Civil science policy in British industrial reconstruction, 1942-51." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1987. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7132d335-2637-470a-99dd-0e2b4ce3357c.
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During the Second World War science came to play a large role in the British government's plans for postwar reconstruction of industry. The planners sought to improve industry's labour productivity and capacity for RandD. They drew on the consensus which had developed among scientists, industrialists and politicians favouring a great increase in state aid to universities and industrial RandD and increased government direction of research. The postwar Labour government, impressed with scientists' contributions to the war effort and faced with grave economic difficulties, was eager to enlist science in raising industrial output. By 1951, however, it had implemented few new programmes in this area. More money was being spent on the pre-existing Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and industry's co-operative Research Associations; the universities had doubled their output; the National Research and Development Corporation had begun in 1949; some publicity campaigns had raised public awareness of productivity's significance; and the economy, in the postwar boom, was performing much better than prewar. But overall the Attlee government did much less to raise industry's scientific level than it had planned. Almost every new programme was inadequately funded and staffed, and the few which survived had no realistic chance of reaching into individual factories to achieve the scientific renaissance which was necessary to return Britain to the front rank, by international standards, of innovation and industrial performance. The thesis examines that portion of civil science policy which aimed to improve industrial RandD and productivity, from the planning stage during the Coalition through implementation by the Attlee government. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 covers the work of wartime ministerial and official reconstruction committees; party differences and business opposition meant that reforms favouring a greater government role in RandD and industry generally were shelved until postwar. Chapter 3 examines the Attlee government's efforts to improve industrial RandD, particularly the formation of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, a failed attempt to create a British MIT, and several schemes, mostly unavailing, to vitalise DSIR, the RAs and private RandD. Chapter 4 examines postwar productivity policy, particularly the work of the Board of Trade, the scientifically-orientated Committee on Industrial Productivity, various government publicity campaigns, and the Anglo-American Council on Productivity. Chapter 5 briefly sketches post-1951 developments and finds that there has been little basic change in the policies suggested for arresting British industry's technical decline relative to its competitors, despite recurrent disappointment with the results of those policies.
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Epstein, Katherine Cranston. "Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex: Torpedo Development, Property Rights, and Naval Warfare in the United States and Great Britain before World War I." The Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1311692950.
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Lane, Jacqueline Ann. "A watershed decade in British industrial relations, 1965 to 1974? : the Donovan Commission Report, 'In Place of Strife', and the Industrial Relations Act of 1971." Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2017. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/34157/.
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The Donovan Report (1965-1968) is often seen as one of the great failures in the overall attempt to deal with the thorny problem of the contentious nature of industrial relations in post-war Britain. This thesis re-examines that report and subsequent governmental responses, using numerous sources, many of which have barely been used by previous authors, in order to establish where it all went wrong. Such an examination is important to inform future governments on some of the problems of trying to legislate on industrial relations matters. This thesis addresses the central question addressed by the Report – the validity of employing legislation to deal with the problems within industrial relations, asking what contribution had legislation made to the ordering of industrial relations in the past, and what lessons future governments could take from that? Why did both the Labour Governments under Harold Wilson and the Conservative Government under Edward Heath choose to go beyond Donovan in their attempts to alter the role of the state in industrial relations Finally, could the Industrial Relations Act 1971, had it survived, have been to the benefit of trade unions in time? This thesis suggests that legislation had an important role to play in the ordering of industrial relations, and that collective bargaining alone, although effective in many areas, was unable to address issues which had wider implications, such as those relating to health and safety or the reconciliation of differences due to the laws’ interference with trade unions’ rights to defend their members and their own collective rights. Both the Labour and Conservative Governments chose to go beyond the measures proposed by Donovan because economic and political necessity demanded a greater measure of control over strike action. However, the inquiry had undoubtedly focused the debate on whether or not legislation could ever be the most appropriate tool for controlling industrial relations, and therefore acted as a catalyst for the reforms that followed. The Industrial Relations Act 1971 failed to bring about the hoped-for industrial peace. Its repeal in 1974, however, did nothing to prevent further rises in strikes after 1974. Piecemeal legislation in the 1980s and 1990s did bring about a greater level of industrial peace, but this suggests that it was not legislation per se that was the wrong strategy for controlling industrial relations, but rather the method and pace of implementation. Other means of maintaining industrial peace were experimented with and could have been successful if the political will had been there and the unions and employers had engaged more fully,but the seeds had been sown for legislative control and it was impossible to hold back the tide of restrictive legislation which followed these early forays into the concept of law as a means of controlling industrial relations. The Donovan Report did indeed represent the thin end of the legal wedge and opened the floodgates to the many enactments designed to control and emasculate the trade union movement which the Conservative governments of the 1980s and early 1990s were able to introduce. The collective failures of the Donovan Report, In Place of Strife and the Industrial Relations Act to bring about industrial peace were, however, only indicative that legislation was not the most appropriate means of achieving this goal at this particular point in time. Alternative attempts to reduce strikes and engage trade unions in closer working relationships with employers and their associations, and with the government, did meet with some success in the 1970s and may be usefully attempted again in the future. This will, however, depend on whether government is able to keep an open mind on the utility, or perhaps futility, of legislative controls such as those attempted in the years between 1965 and 1975.
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Webb, Jane Alexandra. "An analysis of the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835-6 : anatomy, Benthamism and design." Thesis, University of Wolverhampton, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/2436/89095.
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Gibbs, Ewan. "Deindustrialisation and industrial communities : the Lanarkshire coalfields c.1947-1983." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2016. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7751/.
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This thesis examines deindustrialisation, the declining contribution of industrial activities to economic output and employment, in Lanarkshire, Scotland’s largest coalfield between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. It focuses on contraction between the National Coal Board’s (NCB) vesting in 1947 and the closure of Lanarkshire’s last colliery, Cardowan, in 1983. Deindustrialisation was not the natural outcome of either market forces or geological exhaustion. Colliery closures and falling coal employment were the result of policy-makers’ decisions. The thesis consists of four thematic chapters: political economy, moral economy, class and community, and generation and gender. The analysis is based on archival sources including Scottish Office reports and correspondence relating to regional policy, and NCB records. These are supported by National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area and STUC meeting minutes, and oral history testimonies from over 30 men and women with Lanarkshire coalfield backgrounds, as well as two focus groups. The first two chapters analyse the process of deindustrialisation, with the first offering a top-down perspective and the second a bottom-up viewpoint. In chapter one deindustrialisation is analysed through changes in political economy. Shifts in labour market structure are examined through the development of regional policy and its administration by the Scottish Office. The analysis centres upon a policy network of Scottish business elites and civil servants who shaped a vision of modernisation via industrial diversification through attracting inward investment. In chapter two the perspective shifts to community and workforce. It analyses responses to coalfield contraction through a moral economy of customary rights to colliery employment. A detailed investigation of Lanarkshire colliery closures between the 1940s and 1980s emphasises the protracted nature of deindustrialisation. Chapters three and four consider the social and cultural structures which shaped the moral economy but were heavily altered by deindustrialisation. Chapter three focuses on the dense networks that linked occupation, community, and class consciousness. Increasing coalfield centralisation and remote control of pits from NCB headquarters in London, and mounting hostility to coal closures, contributed to an accentuated sense of Scottish-ness. Chapter four illuminates gender and generational dimensions. The differing experiences of cohorts of men who faced either early retirement, redundancy or transfer to alternative sectors, or those who never attained anticipated industrial employment due to final closures, are analysed in terms of constructions of masculinity and the endurance of cultural as well as material losses. This is counterpoised to women who gained industrial work in assembly plants and the perceived gradual attainment of an improved economic and social position whilst continuing to navigate structures of patriarchy.
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Hunt, C. J. "Alice Arnold of Coventry : trade unionism and municipal politics 1919-1939." Thesis, Coventry University, 2003. http://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/609ddb54-f370-3cd0-e706-e01689025023/1.
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The central focus of the thesis is Alice Arnold (1881-1955), women's organiser for the Workers' Union in Coventry between 1917 and 1931 and Labour councillor on Coventry City Council from 1919. The adoption of a local, biographical approach highlights the need to move beyond generalisations about 'Labour women' and encourages examination of the diverse political experiences of women who worked within trade unionism and municipal labour politics in interwar Britain. Within the context of Coventry's early twentieth century industrial and political development, Arnold's politicisation is explored and her experiences compared with those of men and women activists who worked in the industrial and political wings of the Coventry Labour movement. Additionally material that allows comparisons to be made with national figures as well as those from other localities is employed. As well as emphasising the influence of factors including gender, class and political affiliation upon Arnold's position within the male dominated labour movement between the wars, there is consideration of the effect that her status as a single woman had upon her career. The thesis advances what is known about the development of regional labour politics and emphasises the effects that local political, economic and social factors had upon both the involvement of women and on the attitudes of male colleagues towards women's participation. The study is situated within a tradition of feminist history that seeks not merely to draw attention to what women did but questions their motivations for doing it and how they were able to pursue their political ambitions. Through analysis of a range of primary sources, it examines the effects that gendered perceptions and sexist stereotypes had on the ways in which women were able to work within trade unionism and municipal politics. It places women's interests first in an area of history that has traditionally been dominated by accounts of men's involvement and it challenges the construction of historical accounts that have ignored or marginalised women. The influence of masculine epistemology on the ways in which women's political work has been recorded both nationally and at a local level is examined throughout the thesis.
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Gilmour, Alison Julia. "Examining the 'hard-boiled bunch' : work culture and industrial relations at the Linwood car plant, c.1963-1981." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1830/.
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This thesis investigates the nature of work culture and industrial relations at the Linwood car plant during the period 1963-1981. In Part One, Chapter One provides an overview of the historical debate over the use of oral testimony as well as introducing the methodology employed within the oral history project encompassed within the thesis. Chapter Two provides an analysis of the nature of work at the Linwood car plant and the ways in which this impacted on behaviour and attitudes in the workplace. This is further developed in Chapter Three where the focus is on organisational mischief, and consideration is given to the nature, consequences and explanations for this behaviour. The analysis developed in Part One, focuses on the dominant explanations for problematic industrial relations based on the notion of a ‘clash of work cultures’ due to an absence of intrinsic rewards in automated assembly-line work. Within the thesis such dominant narratives are not entirely supported by the Linwood sample, as a wide variety of attitudes towards work are exhibited, leading the thesis to question the validity of the categories of intrinsic and extrinsic reward. In Part Two of the thesis there is a shift in focus as the analysis concentrates on structures of authority at Linwood and the impact on industrial relations. Chapter Four gives consideration to the influence of historical contingency on management decision-making. Part of the 1976 government rescue package was a Planning Agreement incorporating employee participation in management decision-making that articulated with the Labour government’s manifesto commitment to industrial democracy. Yet throughout the different phases of ownership, interactions between management and workers at the Linwood plant explored in this thesis reveal a dichotomy between the rhetoric and reality of industrial democracy and worker participation. The final chapter of the thesis offers an exploration of shop floor industrial politics, and causes of strikes, to highlight the narratives of tension underpinning interactions at Linwood. The thesis provides a nuanced approach, highlighting variety of experience and importantly a complex interplay of interests shaping work culture and the nature of industrial relations in the car plant.
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Ellis, Vaughan. "From commitment to control : a labour process study of workers' experiences of the transition from clerical to call centre work at British Gas." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/369.
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Despite their continuing importance to the UK economy and their employment of significant numbers of workers from a range of professions, the utilities have received scant attention from critical scholars of work. This neglect represents a missed opportunity to examine the impact of nearly twenty years of privatisation and marketisation on workers, their jobs and their unions. This thesis aims to make a contribution to knowledge here by investigating, contextualising and explaining changes in the labour processes of a privatised utility in the United Kingdom. The research is informed by oral history methods and techniques, rarely adopted in industrial sociology, and here used alongside labour process theory to reconstruct past experiences of work. Drawing on qualitative data sets, from in-depth interviews with a cohort of employees who worked continuously over three decades at the research site, British Gas’s Granton House, and on extensive company and trade union documentary evidence the research demonstrates how British Gas responded to restrictive regulation and the need to deliver shareholder value by transforming pre-existing forms of work organisation through introducing call centres. The call centre provided the opportunity for management to regain control over the labour process, intensify work and reduce costs. In doing so, the study identifies the principal drivers of organisational change, documents the process of change evaluates the impact on workers’ experience. Thus, as a corrective to much recent labour process theory the research offers both an ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ account of change over an extended time. The contrast between workers’ experience of working in the clerical departments and in the call centre could not be starker. Almost every element of work from which workers derived satisfaction and purpose was abruptly dismantled. In their place workers had to endure the restrictive and controlling nature of call centre work. The relative absence of resistance to such a transformation is shown to be a consequence of failures in collective organisation, rather than the totalisation of managerial control, as the postmodernists and Foucauldians would have it.
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DORMOIS, Jean-Pierre. "Des machines ou des hommes? : etude des differentiels de productivite entre la France et la Royaume-Uni avant la Premiere Guerre Mondiale." Doctoral thesis, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/5785.
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Defence date: 12 March 1994Supervisor: A. Carreras
First made available online on 4 September 2018
L'histoire de la croissance et du développement et de leur conséquences exerce une fascination sur le chercheur en histoire économique. Joël Mokyr la qualifie de “the issue of issues” [Mokyr, 1990: 3]. En dépit de la masse de documents et d'interprétations accumulés, à propos de l'industrialisation en Europe occidentale depuis que la discipline acquît son autonomie, il semble que ce soit encore le domaine qui occupe le plus les chercheurs. La réalité (et la documentation) est si riche que les analyses et les synthèses s'y succèdent et s'y opposent dans des débats sans fin. L'étude comparée de la croissance en France et en Grande-Bretagne au cours des trois derniers siècles a pris, dans ce contexte, des proportions de cas d'école sur lequel plusieurs auteurs éminents, depuis Marx, ont livré leurs réflexions. Contre toute attente, le sujet semble encore loin d'être épuisé, peut-être parce que l'enjeu du débat a une portée qui dépasse l'aire géographique qu'il représente. Sans aller jusqu'à affirmer avec McCloskey que "l'histoire britannique guide les autres histoires” [McCloskey, 1990: 40], on doit reconnaître, -c'est une fait qui s'impose à nous- que les sociétés avec l'histoire la plus longue et la mieux documentée ont tendance à acquérir le statut de modèle qui pourrait, par exemple se résumer dans une formule simpliste comme "l'Angleterre a produit une révolution industrielle sans connaître de révolution politique et la France une révolution politique sans révolution industrielle". Avant même l'apparition des possibilités offertes par la comptabilité nationale le couple France, Grande-Bretagne était devenu un paradigme.
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Paterson, Carla Susan. "From fever to digestive disease : approaches to the problem of factory ill-health in Britain, 1784-1833." Thesis, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7536.
Full textAbstract:
In the early decades of British industrialization, the ill-health of textile factory
workers attracted considerable public interest and provoked discussion and debate
among a growing number of medical men, operatives, manufacturers, and social and
political commentators. Guided by previous studies of the “framing” of disease, this
dissertation examines how such ill-health was conceived, designated and responded to in
the period from 1784 to 1833.
The dissertation reveals that workers themselves held a relatively constant view
of their condition. In the early part of the nineteenth century, they drew attention to a
variety of ailments and throughout the period they saw a clear link between their
maladies and the conditions of their labour. By contrast, medical understanding shifted
significantly, and as it traced a course more or less at odds with that of popular
comprehension, the nature and causes of worker suffering were substantially redefined.
In the 1780s and 1790s, doctors identified the illness of factory labourers as
“low, nervous fever,” an acute contagious disorder generated by the crowding and
confinement of human bodies. A generation later, in the period from 1815 to 1819, the
ill-health of mill workers was conceptualized, by a portion of the medical community,
as “debility,” a poorly-understood state of constitutional feebleness attributed to aspects
of machine work. In the early 1830s, medical authorities regarded factory workers’
sickness primarily as “digestive disease” and located its source in habits and diet.
The reconceptualization of worker ill-health yielded an ultimately optimistic
assessment of the consequences of industrial growth, failing to offer strong support to
demands for legislative restriction of factory operation. It also served to sanction
changing social relations through providing evidence of the physical and moral
distinctness of the manufacturing population.
As medical theory altered, so, too, did practices of relief and assistance. While
mill owners, and doctors, became increasingly unwilling to assume responsibility for
the well-being of the industrial workforce, operatives engaged ever more extensively in
practices of self-help. The expansion of the textile industry, however, ensured the
continuation of their affliction and incapacity.
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NI, LOCHLAINN Aoife. "A question of allegiance? : ideology, agency and structure : British-based union in Ireland 1922-1960." Doctoral thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/5915.
Full textAbstract:
Defence date: 25 November 2005Examining board: Prof. Alan S. Milward, UK Cabinet Office, London (Supervisor) ; Prof. Colin Crouch, University of Warwick ; Prof. Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin ; Prof. Dermot Keogh, University College Cork
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017