High commitment management and unionization in the UK

High commitment management, as popularized by Walton and Lawler, and trade unionism are often thought of as antithetical. The research reported here uses an index of high commitment developed by the author to assess whether indeed this is the case, or whether they do in fact co-exist, as is increasingly being acknowledged in the UK as possible. Using data from a sample of 135 manufacturing plants in the UK, the paper shows that, whilst the use of high commitment management did increase in the late 1980s, it was not more likely to be practised in the non-unionized ones. Furthermore, unionism did not seem incompatible with relatively high levels of high commitment management. Nonetheless, the rate of change of HCM between 1986 and 1990 was lower in plants with recognized trade unions, which suggests that unions have a dragging effect on HCM, but will not affect its ultimate extent. The research also demonstrates that the co-existence of unionism and high commitment management cannot be put down to managements’adopting HCM in a fragmented or ad hoc way, nor does it appear to be mediated by the state of the labour market.