Many managers are frustrated by a bewildering array of advice about what works in the workplace. In 1995 the National Center for the Workplace and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation sponsored a conference on the links between workplace practices and organizational performance. This volume presents revised versions of five papers from that conference, coupled with two invited chapters, an introductory chapter, and a concluding one that outlines obstacles to diffusion and draws out lessons for public policy.

The introductory chapter (by the editors and Thomas A. Kochan) reviews the problems researchers face in identifying the effects of workplace practices. With these cautions in mind, it then summarizes the literature on such practices. Results show that systems of innovative human resource management can have large effects on business performance. Success comes not from any single innovation, but from a coherent system encompassing pay, training, and employee involvement. Finally, although a majority of contemporary U.S. businesses have adopted some innovative work practices, only a small percentage have adopted a coherent new system.

This volume contributes to a growing consensus about effective workplace practices. It combines detailed studies of single industries (automobile assembly, apparel, and machine tools) with cross-industry studies of financial performance. The chapters are among the very best on the adoption and effects of innovative workplace practices. The research described here has better measures of both workplace practices and organizational performance than does most past research. In addition, most of the chapters analyze data spanning many years.

The past two decades have witnessed considerable experimentation and research on new work practices and human resource policies. Why have businesses adopted them? What has been their effect on performance?

This study has two primary goals. The first is to review features of the research methods employed in studies on workplace innovations. This review of methodological issues serves as a framework for evaluating existing studies and to encourage new research on workplace innovations to incorporate the most persuasive research designs possible. The second goal is to review the findings from a broad set of studies that employ different research designs. Because different research designs have their own particular strengths and limitations, we highlight those results that emerge consistently from different studies. Much more than a typical volume introduction, this chapter presents a critical review of the strengths, weaknesses, and results of research on what works at work.

The Nature of Workplace Innovations

The term “innovative work practices” has no settled meaning. For many scholars and practitioners it refers to employee involvement efforts such as work teams (e.g., Katz, Kochan, and Gobeille, 1983). For others, it means employee participation in the financial well-being of a company such as profit-sharing, employee stock ownership, or pay-forperformance. Still others have in mind flexible and broadly defined job assignments, employment security policies, or improved communication and dispute resolution mechanisms. Often, managers and workers refer to a special workplace “culture” that is not easily captured by the measurement of a single work practice.

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

In reviewing the public life of Jesus, we may separate from the events those discourses which were not merely incidental, but which stand independent and entire. This distinction, however, is not precise, for many discourses, owing to the occurrences that suggested them, may be classed as events; and many events, from the explanations annexed to them, seem to range themselves with the discourses. The discourses of Jesus given in the synoptical gospels, and those attributed to him in the fourth, differ widely both in form and matter, having only a few isolated sentences in common: they must, therefore, be subjected to a separate examination. Again, there is a dissimilitude between the three first evangelists: Matthew affects long discourses, and collects into one mass a number of sayings, which in Luke are distributed among various places and occasions; each of these two evangelists has also some discourses peculiar to himself. In Mark, the element of discourses exists in a very small proportion. Our purpose will, therefore, be best answered, if we make Matthew's comprehensive discourses our starting point; ascertain all the corresponding ones in the other gospels; inquire which amongst them has the best arrangement and representation of these discourses; and, finally, endeavour to form a judgment as to how far they really proceeded from the lips of Jesus.

GENERAL COMPARISON OF THE MANNER OF NARRATION THAT DISTINGUISHES THE SEVERAL EVANGELISTS.

If, before proceeding to the consideration of details, we compare the general character and tone of the historical narration in the various gospels, we find differences, first, between Matthew and the two other synoptists; secondly, between the three first evangelists collectively and the fourth.

Among the reproaches which modern criticism has heaped on the gospel of Matthew, a prominent place has been given to its want of individualized and dramatic life; a want which is thought to prove that the author was not an eye-witness, since an eye-witness is ordinarily distinguished by the precision and minuteness of his narration. Certainly, when we read the indefinite designation of times, places and persons, the perpetually recurring τότε, then, παϱάγων ἐϰεĩϑεν, departing from thence, ἂνϑϱωπις, a man, which characterize this gospel; when we recollect its wholesale statements, such as that Jesus went through all the cities and villages (ix. 35; xi. 1; comp. iv. 23); that they brought to him all sick people, and that he healed them all (iv. 24 f.; xiv. 35 f.; comp. xv. 29 ff.); and finally, the bareness and brevity of many isolated narratives : we cannot disapprove the decision of this criticism, that Matthew's whole narrative resembles a record of events which, before they were committed to writing, had been long current in oral tradition, and had thus lost the impress of particularity and minuteness.

AGONY OF JESUS IN THE GARDEN.

According to the synoptical narratives, Jesus, immediately after the conclusion of the meal and the singing of the Hallel, it being his habit during this feast time to spend the night out of Jerusalem (Matth. xxi. 17; Luke xxii. 39), went to the Mount of Olives, into a garden χωϱίον (in John, ϰῆπος) called Gethsemane (Matth. xxvi. 30, 36, parall.). John, who gives the additional particular that the garden lay over the brook Kedron, does not represent him as departing thither until after a long series of valedictory discourses (xiv.–xvii.), of which we shall hereafter have to speak again. While John makes the arrest of Jesus follow immediately on the arrival of Jesus in the garden, the synoptists insert between the two that scene which is usually designated the agony of Jesus.

Their accounts of this scene are not in unison. According to Matthew and Mark, Jesus takes with him his three most confidential disciples, Peter and the sons of Zebedee, leaving the rest behind, is seized with fearfulness and trembling, tells the three disciples that he is sorrowful even unto death, and admonishing them to remain wakeful in the mean time, removes to a distance from them also, that he may offer a prayer for himself, in which, with his face bent to the earth, he entreats that the cup of suffering may pass from him, but still resigns all to the will of his Father.