Abstract
A considerable amount of private sector employment is concentrated in large multi-plant firms with layers of management administering an industrial relations system featuring internal job ladders, elaborate governance procedures, and complex compensation packages. The determinants of the features of employment relationships (wages versus piece rates, job security, layoff policy, etc.) and their implications (for example, the effects of wage stickiness on the level of unemployment) are currently hot research areas. My contention in this chapter is that much of the recent theorizing has been misdirected. There has been an over-emphasis on the concepts of human capital in general and specific human capital in particular.[1] There has also been an unnecessary reliance on the assumption of worker risk aversion, particularly in the principal-agent and implicit contract literature.[2] In addition, concentration on the hypothesised behaviour of utility maximizing individual workers has diverted attention from the collective action of workers.
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Notes
See ‘An aging work force strains Japan’s traditions’, Business Week (20 April 1981, pp.72–85).
See Goldberg (1980b). On the extension of de jure protection to tenants in British agriculture, see Dicey (1924, pp.265–6) and Pigou (1932, pp.177–83). For a discussion of the eighteen-year battle preceding the passage of the Automobile Dealer’s Day in Court Act, see Macaulay (1966). Courts have extended protection to dealers by broad interpretation of the anti-trust statutes and by extending contract law doctrines such as unconscionability to protect dealers; see Jordan (1978).
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© 1984 Frank H. Stephen
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Goldberg, V.P. (1984). A Relational Exchange Perspective on the Employment Relationship. In: Stephen, F.H. (eds) Firms, Organization and Labour. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06663-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06663-6_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-06665-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-06663-6
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