Patterns of Union Recognition in Scottish Electronics¹

Labouring under an illusion? The labour process of software development in the Australian information industry

“…Despite this demographic messiness electronics or microelectronics are at the heart of this industry. A range of labour process aspects have been addressed in studies of hardware and/or electronics firms (see for example Causer and Jones, 1996;Dickson, MacLachlan, Prior and Swales, 1988;Findlay, 1992;1993;Lowe and Oliver, 1991;MacInnes and Sproull, 1989;Shadur, 1997;Sproull and MacInnes 1987) or firms in the nebulous 'high technology' industry (see for example Beaumont, 1986;Beaumont and Harris, 1988;McLoughlin and Gourlay, 1995). Despite these being interesting they do not address the main game.…”

Enterprise Without Unions: The Management of Employee Relations in Non‐union Firms

“…The extent of non-unionism in the sector has recently been disputed. In a survey of Scottish electronics plants Sproull and MacInnes (1987) and Sproull and MacInnes (1989) found that six out of ten employees worked in unionized workplaces and four out of ten employees were trade union members. This, they argued, suggests that the extent of union organization in high technology industries such as electronics is greater than often portrayed because the majority of employees are employed in unionized establishments, even though the majority of establishments do not recognize unions.…”

“…More specifically, the extent of non-unionism and the prevalence of HRM policies in high technology industries, and indeed the validity of the concept of a high technology sector,"] has been questioned (e.g. Morgan and Sayer, 1988;Sproull and MacInnes, 1987;Sproull and MacInnes, 1989). However, the phenomenon of the non-union firm in general, and more specifically employee relations in high technology industries, have remained largely uninvestigated by industrial relations researchers.…”

The North‐south Divide in Britain: The Case of Trade Union Recognition

“…(The basic problem with using the 2-digit level is that with such a small sample, many regions are by definition going to have a very different industrial structure to that of the largest regions and the nation as a whole.) For an exception see Sproull and Maclnnes (1987). 4Note, in our subsequent statistical analysis, we do not attempt to estimate a simultaneous model with both union density and union recognition as the dependent variables primarily because the latter is dichotomous, and such a model would present various econometric problems.…”