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Book Review: Global Management, Local Labour: Turkish Workers and Modern Industry

This book examines the extent to which modern management practices developed in industrialized countries such as total quality management, kaizen, quality circles, suggestion schemes, total productivity maintenance and just-in-time have penetrated into the Turkish setting. It provides a detailed account of the various aspects of the experience of workers in selected modern manufacturing enterprises. It delves further into the gender, age and ethnicity aspects of Turkey’s industrial relations and makes interesting observations about both management and trade unions. It tackles these issues at the level of individual plants where they are most visible. The basic research for the study was conducted in 1999 and 2000 in seven plants in Bursa, Bolu and Gebze located in the industrial heartland of Turkey. It was based on interviews with a total of 356 production workers and 353 replies received to a questionnaire sent to managers and white-collar staff, and interviews with directors and high-level managers in the seven plants. Three of the plants were in white goods, two in textiles and two in cars. The research design is heavily biased in favour of the most advanced industrial region and towards relatively large and modern plants. Six of the seven plants were export-oriented, four were joint ventures with large foreign multinational corporations, two were owned by one of the largest domestic conglomerates and only one was a large independent Turkish company. The selected plants had at least 500 employees, which easily place them in the ‘very large’ category in an industrial structure characterized by notoriously small average establishment size. Employees working in these factories, compared with the profile of Turkish labour in general, were relatively more educated and had more urban and working-class backgrounds. The book consists of five parts and 10 chapters. After a general discussion in the first part of workers’ perceptions of working in these factories and their working conditions, the second part considers the different patterns of work experience in terms of gender and ethnicity. The third part examines how managers cope with global management methods and adapt them to local conditions and provides some useful information about how workers regard their managers. Part 4 is mainly devoted to a detailed examination of the major trade union active in the plants. Finally, Part 5 conducts a prospective evaluation of workers’ perceptions against the background of the lack of development of civil society and democratic institutions in Turkey.