IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/bushst/v41y1999i3p134-160.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Restrictive Practices of Capital: Employer Commercial Opportunism, Labour Militancy and Economic Performance in the Engineering Construction Industry, 1960-80

Author

Listed:
  • Marek Korczynski

Abstract

The engineering construction industry, 1960-80, apparently provided a classic example of the British Worker Problem. The industry was host to widespread military and suffered very poor performance. Public reports at the time made a causal link between the two. Research, however, shows the importance of employer commercial opportunism, or restrictive practices, in generating the poor performance. Examples of this opportunism included contractor firms withholding information from clients, underbidding, and deliberately slowing production in order to force extra payments from clients. This commercial opportunism also played an important part in setting the context for high labour militancy. While labour militancy was not the central cause of poor performance in the industry, the militancy did serve to consolidate the approach of contractors which focused on profit through commercial opportunism.

Suggested Citation

  • Marek Korczynski, 1999. "The Restrictive Practices of Capital: Employer Commercial Opportunism, Labour Militancy and Economic Performance in the Engineering Construction Industry, 1960-80," Business History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(3), pages 134-160.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:bushst:v:41:y:1999:i:3:p:134-160
    DOI: 10.1080/00076799900000310
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00076799900000310
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00076799900000310?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:bushst:v:41:y:1999:i:3:p:134-160. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/FBSH20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.