ABSTRACT
As the Introduction to this volume suggests, after years of being virtually ignored, in recent years employers have come to occupy centre stage in the industrial-relations literature. This is above all true of the British literature: the prevailing wisdom seems to be that it is the exceptionalism of British employers that explains a wide range of industrial-relations phenomena. Thus, British employers are compared with their West German or Swedish counterparts-to show how lacking in collective solidarity they have been in dealing with trade unions and how this has made for a disorderly system of pay bargaining; with their US counterparts-to show how weak they have been in protecting the exercise of managerial prerogative in the workplace from the incursions of shop stewards and how this has contributed to a relatively poor productivity record; and, more recently, with their Japanese counterparts-to show how inept they have been in failing to adopt integrated human-resource management strategies and how this has led to a failure to secure comparable levels of employee commitment. At first sight, the case appears pretty strong-especially if the tendency to shift the point of comparison to suit the argument is ignored and it is forgotten that British employers have not always been regarded as so weak or lacking in foresight.
