Research Paper on:
UK Working Culture and Conditions

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
internal culture or by looking at the actual working conditions and how they are controlled by legislation and/or granted by employers. This paper will look at the UK using both  of these approaches. Individual v. Collective Orientation, in the UK there was, until the mid 1980s a collective bargaining scenario. However the  unions over stretched their power and alienated the general public in the 1970s, and 1979 saw union membership peak and since that time it has been in decline. Unions and  collective organisations have served multifaceted purposes in the workplace in the past, they have given power to the employees and acted as a social coherent (Kessler-Harris, 1987). Collective solutions used  to be sought with agreement from unions, and collectivism can be seen as having positive influences in many instances, for example; better working conditions at the beginning of the twentieth  century as well as many of the social reforms of the century before (Kessler-Harris, 1987). However, there is a shift ion the way collectivism manifests in the UK. During the  1990s there was a shift towards individualism. The ability for each individual to be paid what they are worth, and rewarded for additional effort and the increased flexibility in the  employment contract was popular. This model may be seen as prominent today, and the predominant characteristic of this move towards individualism is not the way in which the individual is  rewarded, it is the shift in power, away from the employee and towards the employer. Despite this, there are also new models emerging, especially with Japanese companies that have invested  in the UK, where there is a form of consensual collectivism, contrasting with the former conflicting model. Power distance is a reflection of the authority perceptions in the employee