Back to Basics? Industrial Relations and the Enterprise Culture
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/01425459410073933 |
| Pages | 32-47 |
| Date | 01 December 1994 |
| Published date | 01 December 1994 |
| Author | Peter Ackers |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Employee
Relations
16,8
32
Back to Basics?
Industrial Relations and
the Enterprise Culture
Peter Ackers
Loughborough University Business School, Loughborough, UK
Industrial relations experts…move in such a cloud of mist and mystique that nobody really
knows what they are doing. They rarely commit themselves to paper, tending to keep their
cards as close as possible to their chests. They prefer to develop their own folklore of wheeling
and dealing behind closed doors while fighting cliff-hanging psychological battles in public...And
what does this twilight game produce? Fudge, compromise and a total divorce from the principles
of managing people credibly and successfully[1]
Who Needs Industrial Relations?
Such is the damning verdict of one management guru on the discipline of industrial
relations. Over the last decade, we have witnessed a great influx of popular
management books and videos, prompted by Peters and Waterman’s In Search
of Excellence[2]. These evangelical, quick-fix manuals have edged the more
considered academic studies of business and management off the shelves of even
university bookshops. They are sold and read at airports, and their slogans and
rhetoric seem to have penetrated the minds of many managers and business
school students. The message they receive is saturated with American free market
prejudices against state- and trade union-supported worker rights. Arguably,
such ideas represent a smart, contemporary repackaging of the standard unitarism
[3] long held by “practical conservatives”, who, “with their laissez-faire image of
utopian capitalism, have never really accepted labour unions as a useful feature
of the political economy”[4, p. 109]. For these reasons, it is important to restate
here the crucial contribution of both social scientific understanding and ethical
vision to the progress of industrial relations in the 1990s[5].
In the past this was taken for granted. For the three decades between the end
of the World War II and the election of Mrs Thatcher in 1979, industrial relations
enjoyed a remarkably high profile in British public life. If, in the popular imagination,
“geography is about maps and history is about chaps”, industrial relations used
to be about strikes. And during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s the discipline
benefited from industrial discontent. Conflict at work, and how to manage it,
became central to the national political agenda, which elevated both the discipline’s
academic analysis and the practical skills of industrial relations managers and
trade union leaders. In the shared political spirit of post-war welfarism and social
engineering, these were the new industrial troubleshooters, close cousins to the
expanding social work profession. University industrial relations departments
proliferated, and by 1965 their incumbents dominated the influential Donovan
Royal Commissions on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations. Meanwhile,
Employee Relations, Vol. 16 No. 8,
1994, pp. 32-47. © MCBUniversity
Press, 0142-5455
IR and the
Enterprise
Culture
33
trade union leaders developed a close relationship with government; a trend
which reached its apotheosis with the role of Jack Jones, the Transport and
General Workers Union (TGWU) leader, in the last Labour Goverment’s ill-fated
“social contract”[6]. In business itself, industrial relations became a powerful
specialism within personnel management, and every large workplace had its own
“contracts manager”[7], and his opposite number, the trade union convenor or
senior shop steward.
The election of the 1979 Conservative Government has proved a turning point.
There is no better indicator of this than the trade union membership figures,
which had risen steadily to that year, and have plummetted ever since[8-10] (see
Figure 1).
This was not immediately apparent. In the immediate aftermath of that
election, “Thatcherism” and mass unemployment could appear as a transient
phase, like the Heath industrial relations reforms of a decade before[11,12].
More than a decade later, no such complacency is possible[13]. Academics today
still dispute over how great the changes have been, what the key causes were
– political, legal, economic, etc. – and whether it was “a good thing” for British
industry and society[14,15]. But they cannot truly doubt that the world has
changed. Since 1979, for better or worse, industrial relations as a discipline has
drifted away from the centre of public life. Trade unions have declined greatly
in strength and influence; and even when they have burst into public prominence,
as in the monumental 1984/5 miners’ strike, the Government has eshewed the
industrial relations philosophy of conflict resolution and compromise in favour
of outright victory at all costs. Ironically, industrial relations has been dubbed
a negative discipline, fixated with conflict, and has been increasingly challenged
Figure 1.
Membership of Trade
Unions, 1900-88,
Membership of TUC-
affiliated Trade Unions,
1900-89
14 -
13 -
12 -
11 -
10 -
9 -
8 -
7 -
6 -
5 -
4 -
3 -
2 -
1 -
Total membership
Affiliated to the
Trades Union
Congress
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
Millions
[9, p. 24]
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