Labour management in today’s large corporations: the intersection of bureaucratic and market-driven models

In this paper, we therefore undertake the challenge of examining labour management practices ‒ a generic term for the systems put into place by departments of human resources, information, and management control ‒ to determine the context in which they emerged, their objectives and how they have affected the work of skilled employees. How is work managed in today's large corporations? What has changed? With what results? These are the questions we will try to answer. To begin, we examine the links between strategy, human resource management (HRM) and salaried work. Using a contingency approach, we focus on large corporations, a ‘field' in which we have conducted several studies since the early 2000s, with interviews of about 80 managers working for 15 listed multinational firms. Our thesis is that, in the current context of financialisation, globalisation and transformed employment relations, the very nature of work has radically changed. The management orthodoxy that has seemingly reigned for the past three decades has in fact been considerably ignored, tucked away and even twisted by the overriding need for short-term profitability. In the first section, we define the neo-Fordist firm in order to analyse how and why work in this type of firm has profoundly changed. In the second section, we show that the foundations and practices of HRM in the neo-Fordist firm have prompted major transformations in the nature of work.