Industrial Relations Journal 28:4 ISSN 0019-8692 What would be a ‘Good’ firm? The ‘human development enterprise’ Guy Standing Labour markets function in and around ‘firms’, and their labour and employment practices help shape society. Of course, not everybody works in identifiable firms, let alone large well-established firms. Yet large firms continue to shape the production and distribution system of most economies. ‘Globalisation’ and ‘flexibility’ reflect open economies, more diversified technological options and more managerial options for changing the location and type of production. In labour and social policy terms, it is an era of experimentation, in which old protective policies and institutions have been enfeebled, while there is no consensus on what should be put in their place. Old forms of statutory protection and national welfare and labour market policies seem to suffer from an inca- pacity to protect the vulnerable and an inca- pacity to promote efficiency and flexibility. In that context, we need to think more about three questions: What sort of labour market would we regard as ‘Good’? What sort of regulatory system is feasible and desirable for such a labour market? What sort of ‘firm’ should be promoted to be con- sistent with the answers to the first two questions? Answers to the first two questions are attempted elsewhere. On the first, suffice it to note that because flexible labour markets ❒ Guy Standing is Director of Labour Market Research at the International Labour Organization, Geneva.  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA. What would be a ‘Good’ firm? 331 produce greater inequality and fragmen- tation, a Good Labour Market should be defined in terms of seven forms of security, as summarised in Table 1. A caveat is that security should be coupled with mechanisms for promoting efficiency and flexibility. On the second question, suffice it to state a belief that redistributive justice will depend on achieving a better balance between the forms of labour regulation (statutory, market and voice) and on reducing the current excessive faith in market regulation, so that statutory regulation more effectively establishes basic standards of decency and so that there are adequate measures to promote voice regu- lation, which means mechanisms to enable all groups to put pressure on the powerful to redistribute gains of growth. This article is concerned with the third question—identifying exemplary practices that combine profitability with the extension of human capabilities and improvement of distributive justice. Of course, firms exist in local, national and international spaces, and labour markets are broader than encom- passed by the firm as the nexus of decisions. Practices of a good firm must be comp- lemented by policies and institutions to pro- vide security and flexibility in the surround- ing labour market. Concern about institutional structures and processes has been inadequately addressed by mainstream economics in recent years. The dominant school of supply-side econom- ics gives institutional concerns minimal atten-