Court in a trap? Legal mobilisation by trade unions in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the idea of 'legal mobilisation', focusing particularly on the use of individual employment rights by unions to pressurise employers and to galvanise support amongst members for action on key workplace issues. Literature from north America suggests that the law can provide inspirational effects, crystallising a sense of injustice and highlighting the availability of redress, and radiating effects, where positive outcomes are diffused with a view to changing employer behaviour or mobilising broader groups of workers. Data from two critical case studies in the UK, however, highlight tensions in strategies of this kind. Minimal and complex statutory provision makes the law a cumbersome instrument to use in organising strategies. Legal mobilisation is likely to remain as a pragmatic tactic in specific circumstances, but more systematic adoption seems unlikely in the British context

The dynamics of central control and subsidiary autonomy in the management of human resources: case study evidence from US MNCs in the UK

This article revisits a central question in the debates on the management of multinationals: the balance between centralized policy-making and subsidiary autonomy. It does so through data from a series of case studies on the management of human resources in American multinationals in the UK. Two strands of debate are confronted. The first is the literature on differences between multinationals of different national origins which has shown that US companies tend to be more centralized, standardized, and formalized in their management of human resources. It is argued that the literature has provided unconvincing explanations of this pattern, failing to link it to distinctive features of the American business system in which US multinationals are embedded. The second strand is the wider debate on the balance between centralization and decentralization in multinationals. It is argued that the literature neglects important features of this balance: the contingent oscillation between centralized and decentralized modes of operation and (relatedly) the way in which the balance is negotiated by organizational actors through micro-political processes whereby the external structural constraints on the company are defined and interpreted. In such negotiation, actors’ leverage often derives from exploiting differences between the national business systems in which the multinational operates

Industrial Relations: Theory and practice

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