Industrial Relations Journal 30:1 ISSN 0019-8692 A slow burning flame? Organisational change and industrial relations in the fire service Ian Fitzgerald and John Stirling The process of organisational change in the public sector has led to a restructuring of the employment relationship in a con- text of budgetary constraints, the introduction of performance indicators and the development of new management stra- tegies. The pace of change has been uneven and mediated by service cultures that have been resistant to innovation. Our case study of a metropolitan fire brigade explores these issues and suggests that financially driven organisational change has a major impact on industrial relations and that trade union organisation rooted in workplace culture can provide a significant challenge to restructuring. In the last two decades public sector organisations have been subject to a sustained pressure for change and reorganisation that shows few signs of abating and there can be little doubt that the motor of that change has been the severe financial restric- tions placed on public expenditure by central government. The key elements in delivering efficiency savings have been the creation of market competition, the estab- lishment of performance indicators, or a combination of both. As a response, public sector managers have adopted strategies leading to a restructuring of their organis- ations and the service delivery they provide. In broad terms, the situation in the public sector is one in which financial cuts are delivered by performance indicators and processed through organisational restructuring. Colling has argued that, during the period of Conservative government, this has been accompanied by ‘the philosophi- cal objective of breaking union power bases’ (Colling 1995: 134) This provides a very clear framework for analysing change in our fire service case study which will show how each of the key financial factors have been mediated, firstly, by an organisational culture that has a strong commitment to its own versions of service quality and secondly through a pre-existing industrial relations framework that established a ❒ Ian Fitzgerald is a Research Assistant in the Division of Government and Politics at the University of Northumbria. John Stirling is Principal Lecturer in Industrial Relations in the same Division.  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA. 46 Industrial Relations Journal