The network firm – implications for the labour market

Jill Rubery

This paper draws upon new research into the relationship between changing organisational forms and the reshaping of work to consider the changing nature of the employment relationship. The development of more complex organisational forms involving cross organisation networking, partnerships, alliances, use of external agencies for core as well as peripheral activities, the growth of multi-employer sites and the blurring of the public/private sector divide have implications for both the legal and the socially constituted nature of the employment relationship. The notion of a clearly defined employer-employee relationship becomes difficult to uphold under conditions where the employee is working in project teams or on site beside employees from other organisations, where responsibilities for performance and for health and safety are not clearly defined, or involve organisations other than the employer. This blurring of the relationship affects not only legal responsibilities, grievance and disciplinary issues and the extent of transparency and equity in employment conditions, but also the definition, constitution and implementation of the employment contract defined in psychological and social terms. Does the employee perceive his/her responsibilities at work to lie with the direct employer or with the wider enterprise or network organisation? And do these perceptions affect, for example, how work is managed and carried out and how far learning and incremental knowledge at work is integrated in the development of the production or service process? So far the investigation of both conflicts and complementarities in the workplace have focused primarily on the dynamic interactions between the single employer and that organisation's employees. The development of simultaneously more fragmented and more networked organisational forms raises new issues of how to understand potential conflicts and contradictions around the `employer' dimension to the employment relationship in addition to more widely recognised conflicts located on the employer-employee axis.