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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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Employee Voice

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The topic of employee voice comprises three distinct but related concepts: employee involvement, employee participation and industrial democracy. The difference between these constructs is best understood in terms of variations in employee power and influence. Broadly speaking, there is a continuum ranging from narrow task-based employee input (employee involvement) through to elements of co-determination or joint decisionmaking (participation), extending to full-blown employee ownership (industrial democracy).
The topic of voice has a long history. Interestingly, while employee involvement is nowadays ascendant, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the past, the field has been dominated by the themes of participation and industrial democracy. The current hegemony of employee involvement can be tracked to the 1980s and the emergence of neo-liberalism and various influential HRM models. While employee involvement is currently ascendant, developments at EU level have served to bolster the flagging fortunes of employee participation. The European Works Council and Information and Consultation Directives provide employees with statutory rights to consultation hitherto denied to British workers. Academic commentators, however, have expressed reservations as to whether the legislation has the potential to seriously challenge managerial prerogative.
Empirical research thus indicates a trend towards employee involvement and a decline in representative participation. An outcome of this trend is that large swathes of the British workforce are not covered by trade union representation. There is concern that a ‘representation gap’ has opened up and that such workers lack ‘voice’ and the ability to influence workplace decisions.
There has been some experimentation with non-union forms of collective voice (NERs). Evidence suggests that such structures are managerial creations that lack power and autonomy. One corollary is that pluralist commentators argue these are a wholly ineffective substitute for independent trade union voice. Such structures may, however, be compatible with HRM given its unitary underpinnings.

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