ABSTRACT
Ever since encountering their Japanese competitors in the increasingly integrated world markets of the 1970s and 1980s, managers, policy makers, and unionists in Western countries have been looking for ways to make labor—management relations in the workplace more “cooperative.” In the new world of post-Fordist production and competition, cooperation no longer simply means the absence of conflict. It requires rather a high degree of positive social integration, with workers accepting responsibility for high performance and willing managers delegating that responsibility to frontline workforces. Indeed, the kind of work reform seen by many today as the only possible defense against being outcompeted by the Japanese social system of production would appear to amount to nothing less than an exercise in community building: mutual acceptance of responsibilities and obligations in addition to rights and entitlements; development of a common sense of purpose and a shared long-term view; willingness to contribute and perform even where contributions and performance cannot easily be monitored; and generally the building of “trust” in the other side’s “goodwill.”
