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Book Reviews : Labour Law in Britain

to innovation may lead managements to assert their ’rights to manage’ more openly (pages 144-5) and weaken their commitment towards consensus. The third part devoted to the post office unions’ response to change suffers from the occasional questionable generalization. For example, at page 188, the authors state that ’in the private sector, unions’ success rests ultimately upon the ability to endanger the employer’s profits’ whereas public sector unions’ success ’rests primarily upon the ability to influence the political environment’ (page 188). The main interest of this part, however, is its informative analysis of how the postal unions adopted a more ’industrial’ strategy in response to commercialism and how unions believed that they might fare better if the sector were autonomous from government. The political skills of the unions were also used to influence politicians to influence management strategy and, on occasions, were used by management in coalition to put pressure on government. The conclusion summarizes the arguments presented and offers some broad theoretical conclusions and directions for further research. The varying notions of ’commercialism’ within different political environments are analysed, which is very apposite for the current Australian debate on privatization. The main message of the book, however, is that labour strategy ’cannot be identified merely by observation of those parts of management’s organisation ostensibly to do with such matters’ (page 284). Labour strategies emerge from many management functions that have little to do with industrial relations. Thus the link between management objectives and labour relations strategies is more complex than first thought. The weakness of the ’bureaucratic control’ concept in the labour process literature is attacked by the authors, who spend six pages criticizing the model of R. Edwards in Contested Terrain (Heinemann, London, 1979). One looked in vain for further, larger theoretical lessons. The book is a successful pioneering attempt to increase our knowledge of how labour relations strategies in the public sector are formed. Advocates of privatization could also note the final point in the book: ’the increase in efficiency that ... privatization may bring ... is often secured at the expense of the provision of social need that market forces cannot take fully into account’ (page 304).