Claims that the understanding of employer‐employee relations in the small enterprise is essential in Ireland where firms employing less than 100 people account for 92 per cent of all manufacturing units. Reports on research into continuity and change in Irish industrial relations, examining both the external and internal dimensions of the small firm. Identifies and discusses the external and internal variables influencing employee relations in small firms.

This paper explores how sensemaking theory offers a new perspective on HR's role during strategic change. As change in organisations today is less of a programme and more of a continuous cycle of business transformation, there has been a shift in focus to its underpinning, cognitive process of sensemaking. However, HR's role in developing sensemaking praxis in organisations is not widely researched to date. This paper addresses that gap. We draw on Eisenhardt and Sull's ‘simple rules’ whereby complex strategy praxis is reduced to a highly translatable, small number of key rules (2001). Through a diary study of middle managers engaging in strategic change, we investigate their real-time, lived sensemaking praxis. We conclude that HR have a significant contribution to play in developing an organisation's sensemaking praxis through four Simple Rules of Sensemaking: (1) plan creative discourse opportunities, (2) ensure leader-middle manager parity, (3) mutually direct sensemaking through ongoing re-planning and re-prioritisation, and (4) ensure leadership effort continues beyond the initiation of strategic change.

This article investigates why workers submit to managerial bullying and, in doing so, we extend the growing research on managerial control and workplace bullying. We employ a labour process lens to explore the rationality of management both engaging in and perpetuating bullying. Labour process theory posits that employee submission to workplace bullying can be a valuable method of managerial control and this article examines this assertion. Based on the qualitative feedback in a large-scale survey of nurses in Ireland, we find that management reframed bullying complaints as deficiencies in the competency and citizenship of employees. Such reframing took place at various critical junctures such as when employees resisted extremely pressurized environments and when they resisted bullying behaviours. We find that such reframing succeeds in suppressing resistance and elicits compliance in achieving organisational objectives. We demonstrate how a pervasive bullying culture oriented towards expanding management control weakens an ethical climate conducive to collegiality and the exercise of voice, and strengthens a more instrumental climate. Whilst such a climate can have negative outcomes for individuals, it may achieve desired organisational outcomes for management.

The concept of employee resilience continues to receive burgeoning academic attention within the fields of organisational psychology and human resource management, while practitioner interest has intensified since the pandemic. So far, however, resilience remains underexamined from a labour process perspective. Taking a labour process theory lens, this article explores the potential silencing effect of resilience in the workplace. We argue that the universalist narrative of resilience, one which embodies neoliberalism and individualism, has implications for how work is governed and for worker resistance. We conclude with a discussion of the need to counter such forms of hegemonic control arising from the contemporary rhetoric of resilience.