This book examines the development of employers' human resource management and industrial relations policies in Britain. It adopts a broad historical perspective, beginning with the inheritance from the nineteenth century and coming up to date with modern human resource management policies. It focuses on how managers organise the employment relationship, how they control work relations, and how they deal with trade unions and industrial relations. The author examines these in the context of the market within which the firm operates, and the strategy, structure, and hierarchy of the modern industrial enterprise, developing a theoretical approach which emphasises the effect of these factors on management choices. The book shows that historically British employers tended to adopt market based strategies rather than internal ones. Despite a post-war trend towards 'internalisation', comparison with the US, Germany and Japan reveals that this has come about only slowly and unevenly, and has not been able to reverse the relative decline in economic performance and national competitiveness.