Well-managed employment relationships can be a secret to business success, yet this factor is relatively poorly understood when it comes to small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s). Written by active researchers with teaching experience, this book brings together the fields of entrepreneurship and human resource management for the first time, providing entrepreneurship students with a solid grounding in HRM as well as a platform for further critical engagement with the research. The concise and authoritative style also enables the book to be used as a primer for researchers exploring this under-developed terrain. As the only student-focused specialist book on human resource management in entrepreneurial firms, this is vital reading for students and researchers in this area, as well as those interested in small business and management more generally.

OOPEC 891109

Reference is often made to small companies, but little is known about them, especially regarding industrial relations. How can small companies be defined? Is their small size a sufficient feature for them to be considered the same? If they are different from each other, what makes them so? Is the distinction between them and other companies - big ones - relevant? In what way is life organised in such units, where employer and employees are in very close contact with each other? In order to answer these questions, the authors of this innovative book carried out surveys together in France, Sweden and Germany. They met employers, employees, union members and industrial relations specialists. Comparisons of these three national cases show that small companies do have common features that transcend frontiers. They do, however, also have national characteristics. They, therefore, warrant being analysed and understood in something other than merely negative terms. It thus appears that small companies are not so far off resembling big ones...

Originally published in 1989, this book analyses the economic and political position of the small firm in the 1980s, and in particular the relationship between small and large firms in an advanced capitalist economy. Focusing on the printing and clothing industries, it examines the industrial relation practices in these two contrasting sectors and shows that apparent industrial relations harmony – for example, the lack of strikes – should be put down to the powerlessness of the workforce rather than to contentment.

Well-managed employment relationships can be a secret to business success, yet this factor is relatively poorly understood when it comes to small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s). Written by active researchers with teaching experience, this book brings together the fields of entrepreneurship and human resource management for the first time, providing entrepreneurship students with a solid grounding in HRM as well as a platform for further critical engagement with the research. The concise and authoritative style also enables the book to be used as a primer for researchers exploring this under-developed terrain. As the only student-focused specialist book on human resource management in entrepreneurial firms, this is vital reading for students and researchers in this area, as well as those interested in small business and management more generally.

This revised edition of Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice follows the approach established successfully in preceding volumes edited by Paul Edwards. The focus is on Britain after a decade of public policy which has once again altered the terrain on which employment relations develop. Government has attempted to balance flexibility with fairness, preserving light-touch regulation whilst introducing rights to minimum wages and to employee representation in the workplace. Yet this is an open economy, conditioned significantly by developing patterns of international trade and by European Union policy initiatives. This interaction of domestic and cross-national influences in analysis of changes in employment relations runs throughout the volume.