employee performance can be closely monitored or appraised. This dominant
HR strategy is more prevalent in firms with a highly routinized transformation
process, low-cost priority and stable competitive environment. Under such
conditions, managers use technology to control the uncertainty inherent in the
labour process and insist only that workers enact the specified core standards
of behaviour required to facilitate undisrupted production. Managerial
behaviour in such organizations can be summed up by the managerial edict
'You are here to work, not to think!' Implied by this approach is a focus on
process-based control in which 'close monitoring by supervisors and efficiency
wages ensure adequate work effort' (MacDuffie, 1995, quoted by Bamberger
& Meshoulam, 2002, p. 60). The use of the word 'traditional' to classify this HR
strategy and the use of a technological 'fix' to control workers should not be
viewed as a strategy only of 'industrial' worksites. Case study research on call
centres, workplaces that some organizational theorists label 'post-industrial',
reveal systems of technical and bureaucratic control that closely monitor and
evaluate their operators (Sewell, 1998; Thompson & McHugh, 2002).
The other dominant HR strategy, the commitment HR strategy (top left
quantrant), is most likely to be found in workplaces in which management
lacks a full knowledge of all aspects of the labour process and/or the ability to
monitor closely or evaluate the efficacy of the worker behaviours required for
executing the work (for example single batch, high quality production,
research and development, and health care professionals). This typically
refers to 'knowledge work'. In such workplaces, managers must rely on
employees to cope with the uncertainties inherent in the labour process and
can thus only monitor and evaluate the outcomes of work. This HR strategy is
associated with a set of HR practices that aim to develop highly committed
and flexible people, internal markets that reward commitment with promotion
and a degree of job security, and a 'participative' leadership style that forges a
commonality of interest and mobilizes consent to the organization's goals
(Hutchinson et al. 2000). In addition, as others have noted, workers under
such conditions do not always need to be overtly controlled because they may
effectively 'control themselves' (Thompson, 1989; Thompson &: McHugh,
2002). To develop cooperation and common interests an effort-reward