ABSTRACT
What can partnership mean for employees, employers and union organisation? The British Trade Union Congress (TUC) is keen to discover the formula to effective partnerships that leads to ‘win-win’ outcomes. For the employer, the strategic imperative is to develop a set of social and political conditions, or an ecology, that despite variable organisation and sector contexts nevertheless form the preconditions for a so-called High Performance Work Organisation (HPWO) (Applebaum et al. 2000). For us, it is in pursuit of the HPWO that management (and trade union) interest in partnership is to be understood. Common to those studies emphasising the correlates of HPWO systems and workplace partnership is that they provide mutual gains for employees (Kochan and Osterman 1994). While management techniques associated with HPWOs are not new and can be found in union and non-union workplaces, increasingly companies and organisations are assembling them together as coherent systems or bundles (Huselid 1995; Ramsay et al. 2000). Thus, rather than operating independently, and in a fragmented way, new opportunities are created to improve organisational performance by integrating practices such as continuous improvement schemes, teamworking, just-intime working and the like with total quality management, business process reengineering and so-called Japanese management practices.
