Abstract

  Today there is good reason to be anxious about the future of industrial relations (IR) as an academic enterprise. With that in mind, a session at the 2007 Labor and Employment Relations Association's annual meeting was organized to reexamine the purpose and content of IR as a field of study. Panelists were united in the belief that IR should not abandon research on topics that long represented the core of the field, especially unions and collective bargaining, but they also shared a vision of an expanded area of study—encompassing all aspects of work and the employment relationship. Presenters included Michael J. Piore, Bruce E. Kaufman, John W. Budd, David Marsden, John Godard, and Daphne Taras, and this essay summarizes their remarks and offers a brief discussion of how IR might be revitalized.

     A frightening trend emerges when one reviews assessments of the interdisciplinary field of industrial relations (IR) during the past two decades. First, there was talk of decline. Then the word crisis crept into the discussion. Most recently, there have been expressions of concern about extinction, a possibility that many have been forced to take seriously in the wake of the shutdown of the University of Wisconsin's IR graduate program and research institute (Taylor 2005). At the same time, a persistent decline in Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) membership has added to anxiety over the future of IR as an academic enterprise.

     This January 2007 session was organized to reexamine the purpose and content of IR as a field of study. Panelists were united in the belief that IR should not abandon research on topics that long represented the core of the field, especially unions and collective bargaining, but they also shared a vision of an expanded area of study—encompassing all aspects of work and the employment relationship. Presenters included Michael J. Piore, Bruce E. Kaufman, John W. Budd, David Marsden, John Godard, and Daphne Taras.

Piore, Kaufman, and Budd

     Michael Piore kicked off the session with a look at IR in the field's Golden Age (1935Ð1975) and a discussion of what is required to recapture some of its past vitality. In that earlier period, IR arose in response to three concerns: labor unrest (the "practical" concern), a desire for an alternative to Marxism and free market liberalism (the "intellectual" concern), and a need to recognize the social nature of humans without losing an appreciation of individualism (the "moral" concern). Although the unrest of the past does not now exist, at least in most industrial democracies, Piore argues that the need for IR—as a realm involving both science building and problem solving—remains at least as compelling as in that earlier period.

     Piore recommends expanding the scope of IR from a field preoccupied with collective bargaining to one interested in all aspects of work and employment. He also stresses that work-related social relations should not be studied in isolation from other social movements and institutions. In the Golden Age researching unions may have seemed a sufficient way to study the interaction of the economy (especially corporations) and the rest of society (especially the family), but IR today must recognize a more complex and dynamic reality that involves multiple connections between families, schools, jobs, and related social networks such as retirement (and migrant laborer) communities.

     Bruce Kaufman followed Piore by outlining two ways to revitalize IR. One requires rebuilding the labor movement, which—regardless of its desirability—Kaufman does not consider likely in the near term. The other involves restoring the broad scope that IR had in its earliest days. Kaufman draws his inspiration from that earlier period and argues that John R. Commons and other early IR scholars offer insights that point toward a revitalized field.

     Kaufman's main point about IR is that "while union-management relations is not generic, the employment relationship is generic, and it is the latter that should define our field of study." This becomes clear when one examines the history of IR as a field: it emerged out of the study of labor problems in the early decades of the previous century. In IR's early days, the union movement was part of the terrain to be studied, but so too was personnel management and welfare capitalism. Moreover, early IR scholars recognized that neoclassical economics is an inadequate guide to the study of the employment relationship—a point they passed down to their students who eventually founded the Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA).

     While John Budd agrees with Piore and Kaufman that revitalizing IR requires broadening its scope, he devoted his attention to the question of whether the field needs a unique theory and/or common set of research methods. His answer: no, it does not. Instead, Budd calls for a metaparadigm—an "axis of cohesion" capable of opening the field to an array of conceptual frameworks and methods. The foundation of Budd's metaparadigm is a set of objectives, any one or more of which may be relevant to an employment relationship: efficiency, equity, and voice (the list is not intended to be comprehensive). To revitalize IR Budd advocates a broader and more "explicit" IR—a field in which theoretical assumptions are clearly stated and employment objectives become the starting point for investigations and analyses.

Marsden, Godard, and Taras

     David Marsden described one sort of conceptual apparatus that becomes useful once IR is expanded to include the study of all types of employment relationships. In particular, he outlined a "theory of employment systems," which emphasizes the need to understand employment as a contractual form—of formal and informal rules—chosen by an employer and employee. This approach stresses an examination of the protections that a given employment relationship provides workers and managers—and the need to ask why the observed contractual form was chosen above all others. Drawing on seminal work by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Marsden noted that although collective bargaining can establish "working rules" governing employment, such rules emerged prior to and reach far beyond the realm of union-management negotiations. The employment-systems theory, he added, can be fruitfully employed to examine any number of contemporary employment arrangements, including those designed to promote workplace flexibility and others that bring worker skills and enterprise needs into alignment.

     John Godard later stressed the value of an "institutional environments" approach to IR, an approach that nicely complements Marsden's emphasis on the working rules that define employment relationships. Workplace rules do not emerge or exist in a vacuum, Godard explained. Rather, rules are embedded in social, political, and economic institutions, which comprise distinctive institutional environments. Therefore, it is the institutional environment that shapes the identities, goals, and arrangements established by labor and management.

     Godard's approach draws special attention to the state (government), a nation's "founding conditions," and history. The state, he explained, plays a dominant role in shaping and sustaining institutional environments. Each nation, meanwhile, has been organized around certain core conditions, and disputes over their interpretation and applicability to the present are central to national politics. Moreover, since history is set in motion from a given set of conditions, nations tend to follow path trajectories that limit their prospects for viable change.

     While Godard provided examples to show how the "institutional environments" approach applies to a variety of questions involving comparative, historical, and policy-oriented research, his remarks ended with a brief discussion of how IR itself can be understood from this vantage point. Special attention was given to the field's failure to achieve its multidisciplinary mandate and its isolation within the present-day academy. As one institutional possibility, Godard mentioned the option of IR scholars becoming more closely aligned with members of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.

     Picking up where Godard left off, Daphne Taras closed the presentations with a focus on IR's need to provide interested scholars with a "home," food," and "loving parents." While there has been plenty of prior attention to ideological and conceptual reasons for the field's decline, institutional features are also at work. We are losing our institutes; we have lost our fundraising dynamic; and our scholars are not recruited or rewarded by business schools because their work does not contribute to business school benchmarking (no IR journals are included, for example, in the Financial Times list of top forty management journals). Thus, Taras argues that IR needs a wholesale effort to revitalize the academic and scholarly institutions of the field—through creation of professorships, student awards, and permanent funding for infrastructure, and by drawing greater attention to the difference IR scholars make in the world they study.

Additional Comments

     This session's panelists sought to initiate a dialogue on the future of IR, not rally LERA members in favor of a predetermined path.¹ In light of that, it was heartening to observe that a number of attendees offered insightful comments from the floor during the discussion period. For example, Robert Bruno noted that there is considerable academic interest in unions, organizing, and collective bargaining today but that much of this is happening within departments of (and among professional communities centered on) sociology, history, and labor studies. The challenge, therefore, is for IR scholars and associations such as LERA to better connect with those scholars and units.

     My own contribution to this dialogue would be to stress the need for IR to give attention to nationwide insecurity over employment, health care, and retirement. Commons and other IR founders thought such concerns—and related matters such as business cycles and structural economic change—were among the most pressing of all labor problems, but the macroeconomic side of IR has been allowed to atrophy for decades. As those who established IRRA (LERA) clearly recognized, conventional economists cannot be relied upon to effectively address these issues. An early step in the revitalization of IR must include renewed attention to economy-wide problems within the field's centers of teaching, research, and professional discourse.

Note

1. Given their goal of fostering further dialogue about IR, the panelists and session chair are collaborating with other IR scholars on a volume (to be edited by this author) entitled New Directions in the Study of Work and Employment: Revitalizing Industrial Relations as an Academic Enterprise (Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming).

Reference

Taylor, Robert. 2005. "The End of Industrial Relations." Perspectives on Work, Vol. 9, no. 1 (Summer), pp. 44Ð46.