ABSTRACT
One surprise in the British industrial relations literature is the seeming fail ure of established relationships in the principal data set available to research ers-the Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys (WIRS) and the Workplace Employee Relations Surveys (WERS)—to hold up through time; specifi cally, when effecting a comparison between the 1980s and the 1990s. Al though the major focus of interest has been the attenuation of union effects, for which there are a number of potential explanations, there are other em pirical irregularities concerning such factors as information and consulta tion, participation, and financial involvement that are fundamentally more opaque and that therefore continue to cast a shadow on easy interpretations of the former.
