Securing commitment in an insecure world: Workers in multinational high-tech subsidiaries

The article explores the relationship between high-tech work reorganization and worker commitment using case studies of three multinational electronics firms in the Philippines. The author analyzes firms' work organization strategies and traces three work systems; the panoptic, the peripheral human resource and the collectively negotiated work systems, and the corresponding types of commitment they generate; coerced, purchased and bargained, respectively. The results show that high performance and worker commitment is not incompatible with more traditional managerial hierarchies and workplace control, and that the continuum of commitment types leads to varying worker ability to leverage their commitment into real gains in compensation, autonomy and participation.