Contestation, continuity, and change: The political economy of organizational and institutional change in the skilled trades

This thesis argues that the process of institutional change at the micro level, while loosely constrained by the larger organizational and institutional fields in which it is embedded, contains a significant political and contingent component. While an analysis of the interests and relative power of significant actors in a change process may appear to explain particular outcomes, the contestation that occurs in the midst of institutional change actually transforms the interests of actors as it both opens new institutional opportunities and closes others.; This research works across new institutional theory on isomorphism and path dependency, work in political economy on institutional embeddedness and advanced capitalism, and the new work systems literature in industrial relations. It employs the case study method to examine the politics of institutional change from Taylorist modes of work and labor relations to team-based modes of work and more cooperative labor-management relations. The data for the thesis are largely qualitative and are the product of two years of fieldwork and action research on work reorganization toward a team-based work system within the skilled trades at a pharmaceutical plant.