Correlates of Specialisation and Training among Personnel Managers in Britain Available to Purchase

The decade of the 1970s is widely regarded as one in which the personnel management function in Britain enjoyed substantial gains in authority and status within organisations. These gains were typically attributed to three basic industrial relations developments, namely, the passage of a substantial volume of employment legislation, the sizeable increase in the overall union density of the work force (and associated structures and behaviour) and the movement away from multi‐employer industry‐level bargaining arrangements to single‐employer bargaining structures at the plant and company level. As evidence of such gains, reference can readily be made to a number of samples of personnel managers reporting a rise in their own status over this period. However, whether such self‐reported status improvements have been matched by, or reflected in, more objective tangible indicators of such change has been much less thoroughly investigated; certainly, one recent industry‐specific study found little evidence of such a relationship.