ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the dimensions of a conceptual framework for the sociological investigation of industrial relations. For job control reasons any model of control must include variables for the assessment of rank and file expectations and experience of personal and occupational influence over the power to vary work regulations in areas of particular significance to them. The chapter shows that the sociologist of industrial relations should be concerned with the effects of social control in work upon the business as well as the social performance of an enterprise. The actor orientation process of control can be approached from a contextual standpoint where the referent is not so much the enterprise but its members: individual employees within their occupational groups. A system of work control is best seen as a bilateral or even a multilateral process for the establishment of practices regulating the operational performance of an enterprise and the workplace activities of its members.
