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s high control over the manufacturing and distribution process. However, for S & S employees the lack of a union means that M & S is able to dictate cost reduction by altering the manufacturing product-life cycle from intelligent, hand crafted work to piece-meal style of manufacturing process, where the employee who can assemble the most product from strict and non-innovative instructions gains the largest reward. Thus, employees of S & S are not participants in their financial participation schemas, but are victims of it. They suffer lower wages and lack of union involvement at the manufacturing level, while M & S employees gain individualism.

Within the UK, a characterisation of unionisation (and, lack thereof) is that employee involvement is voluntary, where organisations and employees are compelled to establish arrangements based on the collectivism needs of both parties (Hollishead, Nicholls and Tailby 2003). Within typical non-union organisations, paternalism is the most common in production markets, where the employees and floor-level managers are restrained by employer choices, and formal discipline and recruitment strategies focus on following the expectations of labour legislation and manufacturing production, rather than the needs of the employees (Head and Lucas 2004). Within the paternalistic employee relationship strategy of non-union organisations, a common cost reduction strategy is to prevent unionisation through workforce restructuring, where the result is that a greater scope of managerial control allows for more numerical flexibility (Head and Lucas 2004). M & S is a typical non-union organisation in this area as it functions within the patterns of paternalism, where employee relationships are established based on the needs of management and recruitment strategies focus on initiating policies that focus on the individualism needs of employees. However, M & S’s paternalistic cost-cutting strategies as they involve S & S manufacturing are also typical of non-union organisations in that the patterns of workforce restructuring, in particular the movement of skilled labourers to non-skilled piece-assembly work with lower pay is a common manufacturing strategy of organisations that lack unionisation and employee voice.

In a quantitative review of several hundred non-union and union organisations, researchers Dundon and Rollinson (2005) found disadvantages and advantages for non-union membership. An imperative concept when discussing the structure of a typical non-union organisation is that employees are individualised, thus in non-union firms employees and managers feel that managerial freedom is the strongest advantage of non-union organisations (Dundon and Rollinson 2005). Thus managerial strategies may prefer non-unionisation in that it allows for stronger amounts of workforce structuring freedom. This is true at M & S where the human resource strategy is based on the ability of managers and employees to communicate and create solutions to problems through high amounts of managerial freedom. Similarily, disadvantages exist, where communication in non-union organisations is easier due to direct contact, it also requires 'that effective communications along individualistic lines requires a degree of time, effort, and money' (Dundon and Rollinson 2005:66). Non-union status also allows management to have the ability to pay lower wages, where wage negotiations are