Beyond Contract: Work, Power and Trust Relations

Beyond Contract: Work, Power and Trust Relations

This book is addressed to several audiences. It offers those interested in in the sociology of work, industry, of industrial relations, of exchange theory, and of organization generally an analysis of how industrialization, division of labour , and contract have created many “low- trust” work roles in what can be characterized as a low-trust society. The analysis related this “institutionalized trust” in work situations to rewards; and shows how it interacts with power, legitimation, and the principle of reciprocity to generate dynamics of change which not only affects roles and authority relations within work organizations but also reach out to the wider society beyond. The Notion of trust dynamics is then used to explore certain aspects of industrial relations, incomes policy and inflation, and the general texture of social relations now and in the future. Here becomes evident the relevance of the book for that wider audience concerned with the debate about the quality of life; a debate which grows as industrial societies pursue their preoccupation with economic values.

Alan Fox

Faber and Faber Limited

1974

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English

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