Book reviews 355

Managing Change in the Workplace: New Approaches to Employee Relations. Alan Cave, Coopers & Lybrand, Kogan Page, London, 1994, ISBN 0 7494 1007 8, 215pp. &25 hardback.

The scope of Managing Change in the Workplace is impressive in that it examines those factors at macro level that have influenced the way work is structured in the 1990s and the impact these changes have had on the way the employment relationship is managed within organizations. The first part of the book consists of a succinct and valuable overview of the driving forces influencing the reshaping of work, although the impact of the loss of full-time employment opportunities and the constant presence of job insecurity for a significant proportion of the working population appears to have been under-valued in the overall analysis.

Chapter 3 considers the different strategic approaches to managing change in the workplace, with Chapter 4 focusing on the development of human resource management as an alternative approach to more traditional personnel management. A concise summary of the present state of the industrial relations system in the UK follows, but it is not until chapter 6 which provides a perceptive analysis of employer choice in practice and clear insights into the ambiguity and ambivalence surrounding the concept of empowerment and other initiatives aimed at develop- ing employee involvement and commitment that the author moves away from the rather descriptive nature of the early text.

Cave’s use of case studies to illustrate the strategies available to employers provides a welcome link between theory and practice and will make the book more accessible to the postexperience student. The final chapters consider the future role of the trade unions and conclude with a thoughtful and concise summary which draws the main themes together in a most effective manner, to the extent that the overall impression gained is that the sum of the book is rather better than its individual parts.

A difficulty with Managing Change in the Workplace is to identlfy exactly who its likely readership will be. In certain aspects it is not sufficiently detailed to be a key text for professional personnel management courses but it is also rather too broadly focused for masters level students who are specializing in the study of human resource management. The very wide overview provided by this book would probably make it most useful as a text for students following postgraduate courses who need to develop knowledge and understanding of the context and issues of managing employee relations within the UK in the 1990s.

LynetteHarris Nottingham Business School, UK

Journal of Strategic Change, December 1995