ILPC 2027

This paper seeks to explore the extent to which management take ‘advantage’ of the shift in the balance of power within traditional manufacturing areas. The author suggests that entrenched communities have emerged in these areas due to the fear of changes within their working environment. The study adopts an interpretative phenomenological analytical approach (IPA) to the gathering of the data. This is a new approach in the field of employment relations however, it has offered the researcher a way of gaining ‘hidden’ rich data which has enabled the researcher to add to the body of knowledge. The aim of IPA is to access the individual lived experience and try to make sense of their world. The study includes a number of in-depth interviews with a range of individuals from these ‘entrenched communities’. The participants include a range of different ages with the hope that they can offer a variety of explanations and insights into their lived experience within these communities. The author believes that these communities, offer untapped talent which could add to the performance of organisations in the area. It is clear from the initial interviews that fear is often use to control the behaviour of individual workers. This is possible because the balance of power within these communities is held by management due to the economic structure of the country. Therefore, the study seeks to find a way in which the balance of power can be adjusted to enable management to work with the employees in partnership rather than as ‘master and servant’. The desire for increased productivity at times supports the structural imbalance in the working relationship by driving down wages and the use of scientific management and the reduction of skills. These approaches devalue the workers and demotivate them, this in turn encourages them to entrench themselves within their communities and at times supports them rejecting new ways of working. There can be little doubt that globalisation has increased pressure on organisations and management in the sense that there is a need for them to perform more effectively in order to survive. However, globalisation has also increased the localisation debate (Deshmukh and Srinivasa 2015) in which local communities and sometimes cultures entrench and isolate themselves in order to ‘protect’ them from the external environment which they do not understand. To conclude the paper seeks to add value to the body of knowledge not just through its investigation into the entrenched communities but by adopting a new research methodological approach which could be adopted in other areas of employment relations and even the field of management and leadership. References: Deshmukh, J., Srinivasa, S., (2015) “Evolution of Co-operation under Entrenchment Effects” Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Istanbul, Turkey