Societal Institutions and Contradictions in the Workplace: A comparative analysis of lean management systems in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom
结合组织制度主义和比较雇佣关系理论，通过德国、意大利和英国金属企业的案例，分析社会制度如何通过赋予劳动者权力资源，影响精益管理体系中赋能、降成本与泰勒主义逻辑矛盾的解决方式。
This article combines insights from the organizational institutionalist (OI) literature on the complexity of transnational institutional streams and the power-based approach of the comparative employment relations (CER) literature to better explain diversity in human resource (HR) practices across organizations embedded in different societal contexts. Building on the insights from both literature strands, the article argues that societal institutions, by providing power resources to labour vis-a-vis management, influence the settlement of contradictions in HR practices in the workplace, with implications for the internal consistency of HR systems. The findings are based on the comparative case study of three metal companies in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom that implemented lean management systems. They suggest that labour-supporting institutions at the sectoral and organizational levels in the German metal company contribute to a more ‘balanced’ settlement of the tensions between the (ideo)logics of empowerment, cost-cutting and Taylorism, which characterize lean management systems, compared to the Italian and British companies. The article contributes to cross-fertilization between the OI and CER literature because it demonstrates the value of integrating the power resource perspective in (comparative) OI studies, and of taking into greater consideration the role of transnational (ideo)logics in CER research.