Institutional Stability in Management Practice and Industrial Relations: The Influence of the Anglo-American Council for Productivity, 1948-52

The endurance of institutional stability in British industrial relations and management practice during the initial post-war years rested on two factors; the international viability of the economy and the respite that victory in World War Two afforded to embedded patterns of regulation in both areas. This contribution addresses these issues through the vehicle of the AACP, specifically its British section. The AACP was created to examine the issues of management and productivity in British manufacturing. Its aim was to transform management practice and raise levels of productivity to the American average. However, although American management techniques informed the AACP, its British section diluted American proposals to afford respresentatives of British management an opportunity to secure institutional stability in industrial relations and management practice. The international viability of the British economy was not secured by an investment-led transformation that raised the economic scale of plant and equipment. Alternatively, recovery was secured by a sustained increase in output within the wider aims of the British government in its engagement with the Marshall Plan. This article engages with recent revisionist analysis to demonstrate that patterns of industrial relations are an effect of or 'end game' in the wider economic and political objectives of government which confront prescriptive mechanisms such as the AACP. The embedded nature of internal institutions in industrial relations and management practice must be positioned within the external context which underpin their stability.