Between Control and Consent?: Corporate Strategy and Employee Involvement in Ford UK Available to Purchase

Management strategy within the Ford Motor Company has been going through a quiet revolution in the last decade. From being a utility car producer understanding competitive advantage exclusively in cost terms and equating management with control Ford have adopted a long‐term strategy of design‐led product innovation and promoting high trust labour relations. At the heart of this change strategy are the twin thrusts of ‘Participative Management’ aimed primarily at the executive level and ‘Employee Involvement’ for salaried and hourly employees. Both projects were borne of the watershed, if inherently flawed, ‘After Japan’ initiative of the early 1980s. ‘After Japan’ represented Ford's assimilation of the organisational — as well as economic — challenge thrown down by Japanese manufacturing. But what began as an ambitious attempt to impose Japanese factory institutions such as quality circles on a suspicious workforce rapidly degenerated into a conventional cost‐cutting exercise. From this experience, however, Ford's strategists moved towards a more processual, less mechanistic, understanding of organisational change. We shall examine the results of the ‘El’ process in a variety of settings and the impact of ‘PM’ on decision‐making processes within Ford UK.