The political economy of organizational change: industrial restructuring and industrial relations in France: Le cas Renault

This paper discusses the development of shop floor industrial relations and industrial restructuring in France in the 1980s. It argues that French companies appeared to have found a way out of their Fordist spiral, into a form of flexible mass production, but that they managed to do so only after having eliminated the labour unions. In contrast to other analyses of labour relations in France, however, this paper argues that this was not the result of explicit strategies by the companies, but the outcome of a series of unintended consequences of other policies with regard to the workforce. A detailed study of labour relations and work organisation in Renault during the 1980s provides the empirical body of the paper.