Concepts and Transformation - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2001

This is a short report on an innovative private sector, multi-union, labor-management partnership, and on developments in public sector labor-management partnerships within the U. S. A. Broader implications for social partnerships are explored.

‘Partnership’ is a word that crops up with increasing frequency in government, trade union and management circles in the UK. For many it neatly embodies both the practice and sentiment of the so-called ‘third way’. In the workplace, a partnership approach to industrial relations has been offered as a neo-pluralist alternative to the unitarism of Human Resources Management. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) is an active proponent of partnership and the government has created a fund to support the development of partnership at the workplace. This article sketches some theoretical underpinning for the practice of partnership. To shed some light on the prospects for partnership it draws on recent UK experience and includes a case study of the development of a partnership between UNISON, the UK’s largest trade union, and Vertex Data Sciences, one of the fastest growing call centre operators in the UK.

Despite its early contributions to the development of working life research the UK has lagged behind much of the rest of Northern Europe in establishing a coherent approach to the modernization of work organization. The removal of tripartite structures by the Thatcher and Major governments and their decision to opt out of significant areas of European employment policy left the UK ill-prepared to respond to emerging economic or policy challenges in Europe. Evidence of an increasing gap between leading-edge practice and common practice in UK workplaces has emerged forcibly as a key issue for future productivity and employment. The UK Work Organization Network (UK WON) was first established in 1996 as a coalition between researchers, business support organizations and social partners, slowly building a portfolio of projects designed to support workplace innovation. More recently the creation of the Work Research Foundation, a partnership-based company with responsibility for managing the activities of the Network, firmly establishes UK WON as a significant vehicle for social dialogue and organizational change.

We illustrate the mechanisms by which speech acts structure organizational interactions. First, a comparison is established between what Greimas (1987) calls “narrative schemata” and what I propose to call “organizational schemata.” It is shown that both syntagmatic structures are organized into different phases that strictly correspond to specific speech acts (directives, commissives, accreditives, informatives, expressives). By illustrating how speech acts seem to be syntagmatically and hierarchically organized according to narrative forms, a first link between action and structure is proposed. Based on this result, a critical reinterpretation of some of Giddens’ ideas is presented, especially concerning the notion of duality of structure in its syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions.

My position in this paper is that talk is the primary medium of making sense of and constructing our social and organizational realities. In particular, I suggest we need to incorporate the discourse of everyday conversations into critical management theory because it opens up conventional research to new possibilities. Social poetics offers a way of exploring how, in the flow of our embodied dialogical activity, we link ourselves to our surroundings and make sense of our experience. As a form of inquiry, social poetics elevates everyday, imaginative ways of talking; for example, metaphors, storytelling and instructive statements. I explore how the practice of social poetics influences our research, how it may help us understand how managers live their organizational lives, and why it is important to Critical Management Studies. I incorporate extracts from research conversations with managers to illustrate this approach.