GOVERNMENT departments, professional bodies, consultants and others consistently encourage the uptake of modern management practices.

The push is towards both operational practices, such as just-in-time, total quality management, supply-chain partnering and computer-based technology and for people-oriented practices such as teamwork, empowerment and a learning culture.

Part of that drive, however, is fuelled by concern about UK management's ability to take such practices on board, especially the people-oriented ones.

The argument is that Anglo-Saxon financial institutions are geared to short-term profits and consequently managers approach strategy in a short-term, ad hoc

manner. A consequence is that managers, faced with immediate pressures and the need to fire fight, may all too readily gravitate to the latest fashions within management theory or consultancy which seemingly offer ready-made solutions.

And there is a tendency, even in new ventures, to reproduce traditional command-and-control methods.

Call centres are often cited as examples of organisations that are dens of conventional hierarchical methods.

Research at the ESRC's Centre for Organisation and Innovation (at the Institute of Work Psychology) casts doubts on such sceptical scenarios.

A series of surveys has tracked the adoption within British manufacturing of

A recent survey shows that the use of modern management practices is far from ubiquitous. It found over 50 per cent of manufacturing companies are using JIT, TQM, supply-chain partnering, integrated computer-based technology and teamworking extensively.

Moreover, these practices tend to be used together, and such integrated use has increased substantially since the mid-1990s when the centre conducted its first survey.

In addition, managers report greater success in exploiting these practices than they did in the mid-1990s.

This pattern of results is not consistent with the arguments that management adopt management practices in a piecemeal, pick-and-mix manner. Rather they appear to be adopting practices incrementally more in a spirit of experiment than fashion-consciousness.

In manufacturing the more people-oriented practices, such as empowerment and learning culture, are, however, not so extensively used relative to the more operational techniques.

Interestingly, the service sector is more advanced in the use of people-oriented practices.

The relatively low uptake of people-oriented practices in manufacturing is all the more significant given that other research on a carefully selected sample of 80 UK small to medium sized manufacturing companies showed that of all the management practices, empowerment and learning culture have the strongest relationship with productivity and profit.

Our more detailed research, based on extensive studies in organisations, suggests that empowerment improves performance not simply because staff become more motivated levels of motivation are typically high, in any case but because empowerment provides them with more opportunities to learn and do their work in the most effective way.

With empowerment, the knowledge of employees develops more rapidly and to a deeper level and they take a broader and more proactive orientation towards their job and become more willing to suggest new ways of doing things and to engage in meaningful team working.

This research has also revealed the circumstances where empowerment will not have such an impact.

Empowerment is most beneficial when there is more uncertainty in the production system, and employees are required to deal with ambiguity, changing demands and innovation.

At a computer factory, the areas that produced the most variable products saw a large increase in productivity as a result of an empowerment initiative, whereas the performance of operators whose work requirements were systemic and standardised did not improve following the empowerment.

In short, new firms or workplaces are no more or less likely to use modern management methods than older ones.