IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-04503-7_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Antagonistic Constitutionalism: The Electric Traction Co

In: Good Industrial Relations

Author

Listed:
  • John Purcell

Abstract

The Electric Traction Co. fits fairly closely to the popular image of an American multinational with its emphasis on control systems, budgetary and performance targets and constant pressure to maximise efficient working time. This is partly corporate style: ‘the pursuit of excellence’, passed down from New York; and partly a conscious need to maintain control over unit costs while pressing for high-quality standards in order to survive in the highly competitive world-wide market of agricultural machinery. Corporate style and the competitive market place have always been major influences on the conduct of industrial relations in this company. A further factor was the way in which the company developed in the postwar years. The three production plants (the UK head office is in London) opened one after the other over a period of seventeen years as demand grew. The first plant — the No. 1 Works — opened just after the war in a northern industrial town (referred to as Brother ton) and now employs approximately 2250 manual workers, including 400 in the foundry. Unionisation grew gradually in the 1950s but the company refused to give full recognition.

Suggested Citation

  • John Purcell, 1981. "Antagonistic Constitutionalism: The Electric Traction Co," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Good Industrial Relations, chapter 5, pages 124-152, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-04503-7_5
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-04503-7_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-04503-7_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.