Book Reviews
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1966.tb00931.x |
| Date | 01 March 1966 |
| Published date | 01 March 1966 |
BOOK REVIEWS
Industrial Relatiom: What
is
Wrong with the System?
by Allan Flanders
Faber and Faber,
1965, 12s. 6d.
Institute of Personnel Management
(paper edition),
8s.
6d.
IN
his book,
The Fawlty Productivity Agreements,
Mr Flanders gave us a
detailed study of plant bargaining which is certain to become a classic
of
industrial relations literature. His new book,
Industrial Relations
:
What
is
Wrong with the System?,
is completely different, but equally important read-
ing for both the industrial relations student and the practitioner.
Fawley will live when Linwood and Coryton are forgotten, not because
it was the first or the most successful of plant productivity bargains, but
because it is completely recorded for us in Mr Flanders’s book
-
warts and
all. The strength of the Fawley study lay in its penetrating and detailed
treatment
-
over
500
pages on the origins, development and consequences
of a single series of plant bargains. The new book, in contrast, covers the
whole field of industrial relations in
64
pages. It is, indeed, two books in
one
-
an outline of
a
theory of industrial relations and an assessment of
the British industrial relations system. It is an assessment, moreover, which
goes on to indicate what needs to be done.
Industrial relations, Mr Flanders suggests, needs its own framework of
theoretical analysis apart from those of the disciplines which contribute
to it: history, economics, government, sociology and law. Such
a
theory
must begin with a recognition that
a
system of industrial relations is
a
system of rules; it deals with regulated or institutionalized relationships
in industry concerned with employment.
The rules in question are of two kinds: procedural and substantive.
Procedural rules govern collective relations
;
substantive rules govern
market relations, managerial relations and human relations. The rules
may also profitably be analysed according to whether they provide for
internal or external job regulation. Shop stewards usually straddle the two
systems. ‘As spokesmen of works groups in the enterprise, they may partici-
pate in the making of internal rules either separately or jointly with
management. As representatives of their union, they have a responsibility
for enforcing its rules or the agreements that it has entered into with
employers.’
The British system is characterized by three leading principles
:
it gives
priority to collective bargaining over other methods of external job
regulation
;
it gives priority to voluntary over compulsory procedural rules
for collective bargaining
;
and the parties
to
the collective bargaining have
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