Eileen Appelbaum.

Eileen Appelbaum, Thomas Bailey, Peter Berg, and Arne L Kalleberg. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pres 2000 259 pp $4500 cloth; $1995 paper.

The prominence in the United States across the past three decades of various Campaigns to increase the influence that low-lever employee have through their work--campaigns that have gone in subordination to the names of workplace democracy, the quality-circle emotion total quality management, participatory management, and employee involvement--have been met by means of skepticism from two quarters. one observers have questioned whether these programs be derived in increased efficiency or productivity. Other critics have allude toed that these efforts are really a astute and insidious extension of managerial authority that, in issue turns workers into supervisors of undivided another. For the most part, however, the passion of these arguments has not been matched according to the quality of the data used to touchstone them. Appelbaum et al.'s work which assesses the consequences of what they call "high-performance work systems" in three industries and forty plants is, therefore, a timely, valuable, and sorely indigenceed contribution to the debate. Equally import ant, Appelbaum and her coauthors have taken the put in commotion to collect data from managers (interviews) and from workers (surveys) in the forty plants, thus allowing them to verify whether managerial claims about, say, participation in self-directed work teams were supported by means of workers' accounts.

The three industries they chose to study--select because they illustrate the diversity of employee skills, production processe and workforce characteristics in American manufacturing--were claymore apparel, and medical electronic instruments and imaging. Data were consider probableed from employees in 14 mail mills (with an average size of 3754 employees) 16 apparel factories (with an average size of 253) and 10 medical electronic instruments and imaging plants (with an average size of 808) In all, nearly 4400 employee were observeed about half of whom worked in the carburet of iron industry and approximately one-quarter of whom worked in each of the other pair industries. It must be noted, as the authors themselves acknowledge, that the companies included in the application of mind were not a random sample of firms in the industries; indeed, their willingness to participate means that it is reasonably probable that they were above-average employers

Appelbaum et al. define high-performance work orders as work arrangements that give workers the opportunity to participate in substantive decisions, the skills to make this participation meaningful, and the incentives to encourage skills acquisition and workplace participation. They put to a stand two questions: first, what tenor do these work systems have forward plant performance, and second, what validity do they have on the attitudes and experiences of workers? As the book's subtitle would allude to and as the authors confirm in the opening chapter, their findings lead them to bring to an end that high-performance work systems are virtuous for everyone: they boost plant performance and improve the quality of employees' working lives.

Appelbaum et al.'s findings cover five of the book's eleven chapters. The first of these (chap. 6) summarizes their flows in non-technical language, which will certainly be welcome to those readers reluctant to submerge too deeply into the thickets of regression analysis in the chapters that chase The performance outcomes are striking. In the dirk industry, high-performance work systems improve "uptime" (a measure of the amount of time the equipment is in use) by way of 17 percent. In the sewing industry, high-performance practices convert into "throughput time" (the time it takes for chisel pieces of material to be assembled into finished garments) from 94 percent. In the medical industry, the interpretation of performance is not quite as straightforward; nonetheless, the authors report a correlation of 62 between a plant-level measure of workers' opportunity to participate in substantive decisions (obtained by means of aggregating the responses of all workers in a given plant) and plant profitability.

The performance eventuates are all the more significant because they are accompanied at clear evidence that workers also benefit from high-performance work connected views The authors examine six worker outcomes: employees' earnings, their trust in managers, the expanse to which they feel that their work at jobss are intrinsically rewarding (a three-item scale that measures each worker's reason of whether the job is challenging and requires creativity and knowledge), their organizational commitment, their piece of work satisfaction, and their work-related stres For four of the variables, the ends are consistent across all three industries--high-performance plants pay workers better (even when individual worker characteristics are controlled) increase workers' trust in their managers, make them be impressed that their jobs are more intrinsically rewarding, and have no impact in succession workers' stress levels (contrary to the argument of those who claim that high-performance arrangements are a form of work speed-up) For the other pair outcomes, organizatio nal commitment and do job-work satisfaction, high-performance work systems have an indirect weight through trust and intrinsic rewards, increasing organizational commitment in the carburet of iron and medical industries and increasing piece of work satisfaction in the steel industry. The authors remark that these results indicate that the "introduction of HPWS leads to win-win consequences for plants and workers" (p 115)