...Ashly Pinnington; Geraldine Hammersley Posits that quality circles (QCs) are a form of employee involvement (EI) which failed due to inconsistent support from management and because they were unable to cope with the realities of organizational power. The QC programme in Land‐Rover flourished during...

...Peter Ackers; Mick Marchington; Adrian Wilkinson; John Goodman British industrial relations has changed greatly over the past decade. A central development has been management′s sponsorship of new,direct forms of employee involvement (EI) such as team briefing, quality circles and profit sharing...

...Maire Brennan Despite the optimism which surrounded the advent of quality circles a decade ago, recent research suggests that there are few programmes still functioning. The data on which this article is based were collected in five organisations in central Scotland in the period 1983‐86, when...

...Michel Brossard The purpose of the article is to show, through a case study, that the reasons motivating members and non‐members of a quality circle to improve quality are not limited to those formulated in the literature. We thereby concur with Fiona Wilson who, in an article published in a recent...

...Fiona Wilson The argument in this article is put from the standpoint that employers continually need to exercise control in order to realise the capacity of employees at work. One technique for achieving this is the quality circle, a mechanism which is often celebrated in much of the managerial...

...John Black; Peter Ackers This article reports on a new strategy for labour control in a British carpet factory, brought about under the pressure of the recession. The key characteristics of this approach have a number of similarities with the Japanese model of labour relations. Quality circles...

...Michele Y. Burpeau‐Di Gregorio; John W. Dickson Quality circles have become one of the most commonly used remedies to reverse the decline in productivity in business organisations. In this article, the authors draw upon the experiences of quality circles in four US organisations in order to make...