Book Reviews 883

begs the question whether a closer relationship could stem the tide of union decline
and voter disenfranchisement from left-of-centre parties.

MARK BERGFELD
Queen Mary University of London

New Worlds of Work: Varieties of Work in Car Factories in the BRIC Countries by
Ulrich Jürgens and Martin Krzywdzinski. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016,
368 pp., ISBN: 9780198722670, £55.00, hardback.

New Worlds of Work examines the organisation of work in auto companies in Brazil,
Russia, India and China (the so-called BRIC countries), refreshingly moving beyond
previous research on employment relations and work in the auto industry that
predominantly focused on Western countries and Japan. However, production and
employment levels have stagnated or declined in these old industrial centres in the
21st century, while they have strongly grown in the BRIC countries, and China has
become the largest auto producing country, making this book a timely contribution to
understanding contemporary employment relations and work organisation in the auto
industry.
The empirical research undertaken for this book is superb. The authors and
their collaborators in each of the countries conducted 353 interviews, focusing
on Toyota and Volkswagen, as well as one home-grown car producer respectively.
The core empirical chapters focus on a number of substantive aspects of work
– recruitment and vocational training, employee development, pay systems,
work organisation and industrial relations – and compare developments and outcomes
between companies within and across countries. Each of these chapters consists of
four country case studies, which are based on the research across the companies.
These empirical chapters are clearly structured and easily accessible. The country
case studies have succinct summaries and the overall conclusion delivers the main
findings and comparative lessons. The five empirical chapters are independently
suitable for teaching in comparative employment relations, international
HRM and international management at both undergraduate and postgraduate
level.
Theoretically, the book returns to the convergence debate that has been
considered in the literatures on employment relations, international management, lean
production, high performance work systems and work organisation. It inquires as to
what extent global production and manufacturing systems can be implemented in
different countries and examines constraining factors such as national institutions,
historical legacies and culture. The convergence and divergence arguments have come
in ebbs and flows and early seminal accounts emphasized industrialization as a
driving force for the convergence of management and work organisation (Kerr et al.
1962). However, detailed country studies by institutionalists pointed to continuing
diversity across countries (Dore 1973; Streeck 1992). These institutionalist accounts
were challenged though by sweeping globalisation and lean production convergence
arguments (Womack et al. 1991; Ōmae 1999). More differentiated arguments were
developed subsequently, whereby the French research group GERPISA (Groupe
d’Etude et de Recherche Permanent sur l’Industrie et les Salariés de l’Automobile)
argued that new hybrids emerged when production systems met foreign conditions
(Boyer 1998); while Katz and Derbyshire (2000) observed a ‘converging divergence’,


C 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
884 British Journal of Industrial Relations
pointing to the same diverging employment patterns within countries that, however,
emerged across a wide range of countries.
Jürgens and Krzywdzinski’s book is the most important contribution to the
convergence debate since the early 2000s. Drawing on their unparalleled empirical
work, the authors detail to what extent multinational companies (MNCs) were
able to implement their global production system, work organisation principles and
employment relation standards across countries. The authors express surprise by
the degree to which Toyota and VW were able to implement their training system,
pay principles, employee development and shop-floor organisation in a very similar
fashion across the BRIC countries. In this sense, MNCs seem to have more degrees of
freedom to implement standardized work and production systems across borders than
was recognised in previous institutional or cultural literatures. The crucial differences
are not within MNCs across countries but between companies as Toyota and VW
pursue distinct work and production strategies. Most importantly, Toyota and VW
have different approaches with regards to labour representation. Toyota seeks to keep
unions at arm length, while VW attempts to implement variations of the German
works council system across the world. In the area of labour representation differences
between countries remain the strongest due to different labour laws, union traditions
and historical legacies. Despite these differences in the functioning of employment
relations, they only marginally influence the implementation of global work and
production standards.
The book also contributes to the literature on high-road versus low-road work,
examining the impact of MNCs and whether they contribute to an upgrading or
deterioration of working standards in BRIC countries. For examining this, the authors
develop the notion of ‘worlds of work’. The main focus is on the shop floor realities
and work outcomes, but one of the introductory chapters goes beyond this and also
considers the life of car workers outside of the factory. Even though these empirical
stories are rather brief, they provide interesting insights into the lives of car workers in
BRIC economies.
Auto-workers are described as being part of an emerging middle-class. They benefit
from extensive training provision and, compared to the predominant service sectors in
these countries, receive high wages and have stable employment contracts. However, to
what level this translates into decent living standards depends very much on the social-
economic context, in particular housing and commuting seem to crucially matter. The
interviewed car workers in Brazil owned their mortgage-free house and conveniently
lived in close proximity to the plants, while living standards for Chinese and Russian
auto workers was worse through the lack of affordable housing and lengthy commutes.
Further, auto workers in the BRIC countries operate in booming markets, which result
in regular overtime and extra-shifts, resulting in higher incomes and less family time.
Overall, the book is cautiously optimistic that auto plants contribute to the
upgrading of work in BRIC countries. Hereby, the extensive investments of MNCs
in training and development of employees are crucial. Interestingly, training is not
only organized within companies, but MNCs such as Volkswagen collaborate with
public bodies and training institutions and help them to develop and upgrade. This
collaboration is certainly beneficial for VW, but in the process valuable knowledge,
standards and expertise are transferred to public training institutions, contributing
to economic development in the BRIC countries. Despite these positive MNC
contributions, I was left wondering to what degree the examined MNCs outsource
work and if exploitive work practices can be observed at suppliers and within close by
supplier parks, but this was beyond the scope of the study.


C 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Book Reviews 885
Overall, New Worlds of Work is a wonderful addition to comparative research in
work and employment relations, making important contributions to the convergence
and low road versus high road employment relations debates. Jürgens and
Krzywdzinski use a bottom-up approach, building a strong foundation through
impressive empirical research on the shop floor realities and work organisation in
the BRIC countries and then they move upwards to develop carefully calibrated
generalizations. The result is a fine-grained, in-depth analysis of contemporary worlds
of work, which will stay with us and enrich academic debate for years to come.

MARCO HAUPTMEIER
Cardiff University

References

Boyer, R. (1998). Between Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer and Hybridization
of Productive Models in the International Automotive Industry. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Dore, R. P. (1973). British Factory, Japanese Factory: the Origins of National Diversity
in Industrial Relations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Katz, H. C. and Darbishire, O. (2000). Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in
Employment Systems. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kerr, C., Dunlop, J. T., Harbison, F. H. and Myers, C. A. (1962). Industrialism and
Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth.
London: Heinemann.
Ōmae, K. (1999). The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy.
New York: HarperBusiness.
Streeck, W. (1992). Social Institutions and Economic Performance: Studies of Industrial
Relations in Advanced Capitalist Economies. London: Sage Publications.
Womack, J. P., Jones, D. T. and Roos, D. (1991). The Machine That Changed the World:
How Japan’s Secret Weapon in the Global Auto Wars Will Revolutionize Western
Industry. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

Surviving Job Loss: Papermakers in Maine and Minnesota, by Kenneth A. Root and
Rosemarie J. Park. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazo, MI,
2016, 251 pp., ISBN: 9780880995085, $19.99, paperback.

In Surviving Job Loss: Papermakers in Maine and Minnesota, Kenneth Root and
Rosemarie Park present an in-depth comparative analysis of dislocated workers in
down-sized paper mills owned by the Verso Corporation in Sartell, Minnesota, and
Bucksport, Maine, USA. The downsizings took place in 2011 and the negative impact
of these layoffs (which saw 169 workers let go from the Sartell mill and 151 workers
from the Bucksport mill) was amplified by a fatal explosion and fire at Sartell soon
after. The accident led to Verso permanently closing the facility and 280 subject to
redundancy. This is the context in which Root and Park begin their analysis, focusing
on how the job loss affected the dislocated paper mill workers in terms of their family
and social life, mental and physical health and financial status.
Root and Park gathered the bulk of the primary data for their analysis from 10-page
questionnaires that were distributed to displaced workers from Sartell and Bucksport.


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