| Abstract: | This paper reports findings from a third consecutive study to re‐visit a steelworks that provided a classic elaboration of the industrial enterprise as a social system. The social system of the works in the 1950s (Scott et al., 1956) was used to explain the positive orientation of steelworkers to change. A later study of the plant in 1991 uncovered a remarkably similar positive orientation to change in the plant indicating a number of continuities (Blyton et al., 1996). Despite massive changes affecting the plant between the 1950s and the early 1990s, the social system of the works‐occupational structures and identities and management‐union relations‐were seen as having a continuing bearing on steelworkers’ attitudes to work in general, and their positive orientation to work change in particular. A third study of employee attitudes in the same plant in 1999 revealed important changes had occurred during the 1990s. |
