Calling themselves industrial anthropologists, UCLA professor Wilms and a team of graduate students embarked six years ago upon a unique study of the changing relationship between management and labor. The study, which involved working as factory hands, focused on four then-floundering companies: Douglas Aircraft, Hewlett-Packard's Santa Clara division and two joint ventures, General Motors with Toyota and U.S. Steel with the Korean steelmaker POSCO. The researchers found the companies transforming themselves in an era of downsizing, robotization and globalization. Managers were listening to ideas from labor; unions were less confrontational. In the case of the two joint ventures, people were overcoming barriers of language and culture. Budgets, employee rosters and inventories were all leaner, as speed and productivity increased. But none of the above was seen as lessening the national trauma of losing millions of factory jobs. Education (after fundamental school reform), says Wilms, now holds the key to restoring prosperity. But will it replace all those jobs? Wilms offers no easy answers.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Wilms (Graduate Sch. of Education and Information Studies, UCLA) indicates that management theories such as total quality management (TQM), reengineering, and sociotechnical systems (work design) in themselves do not solve complex union, business, and labor-management problems. In this industrial anthropology, he has generated or evolved a set of workplace rules for reform and a better future. The author and a research team of graduate students analyze four companies including Douglas Aircraft and a division of Hewlett-Packard in terms of the company's history and the events leading to the problems, obstacles to success, and corporate actions and their results. In the concluding chapter, the author discusses how these particular companies' experiences can be applied to other circumstances. Similar works include Michael Hammer's Beyond Reengineering (LJ 9/15/96) and David I. Levine's Reinventing the Workplace (LJ 4/1/95). This is an important book for the transformation and reeducation needed (with no magic elixir) to move us out of the defunct mass-production era.?Joan A. Traugott, Amityville P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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