Are the practices in Japanese plants really prototypical of a universal commitment-maximizing approach, or do they largely mirror local conventions? The research reported here aims to address this question by comparing the personnel practices of Japanese manufacturing plants in the UK and a...

The authors use British workplace data for 1980-98 to examine whether increased human resource management (HRM) practices coincided with union decline, consistent with the hypothesis that such practices act as a substitute for unionization. Two initial analyses show no important differences...