British Journal of Industrial Relations 36:2 June 1998 0007–1080 pp. 163–183 British Manufacturing Organization and Workplace Industrial Relations: Some Attributes of the New Flexible Firm Stephen Ackroyd and Stephen Procter Abstract The characteristics of the largest British manufacturing firms are analysed in order to argue that the form of organization adopted at corporate and plant level by such firms is distinctive. The first part of the paper looks at the characteristic kinds and types of productive activities that the largest British firms undertake. It is then suggested that there is a distinctive pattern of organization for production at plant level, described as the ‘new flexible firm’, the features of which are formally set out. The new flexible firm has some key features which help to make sense of an emerging pattern of workplace industrial relations in manufacturing. The way this new form of organization at plant level utilizes labour contradicts rather than supports the expectations of some analysts about the importance of human resource management. 1. Introduction By the mid-1990s, it was becoming more and more obvious that since the late 1970s industrial relations in the UK had been transformed. Until the end of the 1980s, the view that emphasis should be placed on continuity rather than change had retained considerable appeal (Batstone 1988; Gospel and Palmer 1993; MacInnes 1987; Marchington and Parker 1990). As interpreta- tions of the evidence from the 1984 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS) gave way to work on its 1990 counterpart, however, the opposite viewpoint began to assert itself. That important changes had taken place was certainly the position taken by the WIRS researchers themselves (Millward et al. 1992). Other interpretations based on their data went along with this view (Brown 1993). Purcell (1993: 10) argued that what we were seeing was Stephen Ackroyd is in the Department of Behaviour in Organizations, the Management School, Lancaster University. Stephen Procter is at the School of Management and Finance, University of Nottingham. ¥ Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 1998. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.