Joint Consultation and the Disclosure of Information: an Historical Perspective

Abstract

Disclosure of accounting information to employees, as has been argued before (Ogden and Bougen, 1985), is most appropriately viewed as a managerial strategy designed to contribute to the managerial task of exercising control over labour. The need to exercise control over labour stems from the fact that contrary to consensual interpretations of the labour-capital relationship, industrial relations is characterised by fundamental and irreconcilable conflicts of interest. This is most visible in the buying and selling of labour power but also continues into the labour process itself. Although in the labour market the wage may be and usually is defined specifically, the amount and quality of work rarely is. Rather than agreeing to expend a given amount of effort, employees ‘surrender’ their capacity to work, their labour power, and it is the function of management to transform this capacity into actual productivity in the labour process. However, while employers usually want to be able to use their labour forces in as flexible a way as possible and as a resource to be manipulated, employees want to exert some control over the way they are used to prevent or minimise their insecurity and exploitation. Consequently, one of management’s major tasks is concerned with attempting to ensure that labour as a factor of production can be rendered as susceptible to control as other factors of production.