Reframing: a feminist reflection on Alan Fox
| Date | 18 July 2024 |
| Pages | 1346-1361 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-01-2024-0033 |
| Published date | 18 July 2024 |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
| Author | Anne-marie Greene,Heather Connolly,Deborah Dean |
Reframing: a feminist reflection
on Alan Fox
Anne-marie Greene
School for Business and Society, University of York, York, UK
Heather Connolly
Department of People, Organization and Society, Grenoble Ecole de Management,
Grenoble, France, and
Deborah Dean
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Abstract
Purpose –This paper contributes to the broad aim of this special issue, reflecting on the relevance of the
writing of Alan Fox to the contemporary industrial relations field. It offers an original reflection from a feminist
perspective on Fox’s classic insights around frames of reference.
Design/methodology/approach –We concentrate on Beyond Contract, Work, Power and Trust Relations
(1974a) and Man Mismanagement (1974b, 1985) as the texts setting out Fox’s influential frames of reference
theory, before moving on to subsequent literature in the field making use of Fox’s frames. In undertaking this
review from a feminist perspective, we specifically look at the extent to which work considers standpoint,
gender relations and political engagement. We draw further on wider feminist scholarship within industrial
relations, critical race theory and intersectionality perspectives.
Findings –Despite the concept of inequality forming the core of Fox’s analyses, there is a lack of attention to
gender or to other diversity strands in his work and, notwithstanding the weight of feminist scholarship within
the industrial relations field since, this neglect has been carried forward into subsequent use of Fox’s work. We
argue there is space for the frames to be interpreted and used in ways that leave space for attention to feminist
concerns and call on academics to approach their use of Fox from a more critically-informed perspective.
Research limitations/implications –The paper’s argument has implications for the field of industrial
relations in terms of conceptual understandingand methodological approaches. With space, it would have been
useful to apply our revised understanding of Fox’s key concepts to empirical cases.
Practical implications –Greater clarity in what constitutes “unitary”and “pluralist”perspectives and
categories will help employment relations actors.
Originality/value –We present a novel feminist re-framing of Fox’s work, providing new understandings of
the strengths, weaknesses and applicability of the frames of reference withincontemporary industrial relations
research and practice. We advocate for methodological and scholarly approaches which advance theoretical
and empirical justice in the field, moving beyond gender to draw on critical race theory and intersectionality
frameworks.
Keywords Frames of reference, Feminist, Critical race theory, Intersectionality, Alan Fox
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The aim of this article is to subject some of the work of Alan Fox, and those who have written
about his work since, to a necessary feminist analysis. Fox’s (1974a,band 1985) classic
insights are undoubtedly some of the most important theoretical developments in the
industrial relations (IR) field. However, the underpinning premises of these studies have not
been analysed from a feminist perspective, which we argue is crucial to achieve three
contributions to the contemporary IR field: (1) to identify and critique the “gender-blind”
premises and assumptions underpinning taken-for-granted concepts; (2) to move towards
greater theoretical and empirical justice; (3) to acknowledge that a feminist analysis can be
extended to highlight the need to include other diversity “strands”including race, ethnicity,
disability and age.
ER
46,6
1346
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0142-5455.htm
Received 15 January 2024
Revised 10 June 2024
13 June 2024
14 June 2024
Accepted 14 June 2024
Employee Relations: The
International Journal
Vol. 46 No. 6, 2024
pp. 1346-1361
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-01-2024-0033
“Gender blindness”is perhaps to be expected from a classic IR theorist writing some fifty
years ago and, as we will go on to argue, Fox’s canon is certainly characterised by many of the
features underlying feminist critiques of the field (e.g. Forrest, 1993a,b;Dickens, 1997;
Greene, 2003,2019;Wajcman, 2000;Healy et al., 2006;Danieli, 2006;Holgate et al., 2006;
McBride et al., 2015,Baird, 2003). These have been summarised as the “what”, the “who”and
the “how”of IR (Greene, 2003): what are the common forms, issues and purposes; who are the
usual research subjects; and how are phenomena explained within IR analysis? The
mainstream field of IR, and in this case, Fox’s analysis, has ignored feminist-informed
explanations of IR phenomena and the specificities of women’s and men’s experiences as
workers, with consequent significance for the relevance and applicability of concepts and
models.
What is more striking is the lack of substantive gender analysis or critique of Fox’s work
in subsequent analyses using Fox. This is an extant field which, according to Kaufman et al.
(2021), comprises at least 700 peer-reviewed articles dealing with Fox’s frames of reference
alone. Such lack of attention is particularly surprising, as arguably at the core of Fox’s
analyses is the concept of inequality within the employment relationship, its effects and policy
implications (Gold, 2017). However, as will be argued in more detail later, inequality here
refers only to power in relation to socio-economic considerations, rather than in relation to the
diversity strands above and in particular to the deep partitions of gender and race/ethnicity.
These strands are tied to what Kaufman (2008, p. 334), tracing the history of the field of IR,
identifies as its “core principles”, including the necessity to recognise that “labour is
embodied in (real) human beings”.Dean and Liff’s (2010, p. 423) discussion of the field argues
that “exploration of equality issues also highlights the human dimension of capital”in, for
example, the fake CV studies demonstrating “pervasive unfair discrimination”by employers
on the basis only of group membership such as gender and ethnicity. However, most of the
body of literature analysing and reframing Fox has not followed through on the analytical
implications of IR’s“core principles”; and non-socio-economic diversity issues appear not to
be deemed relevant for many authors.
In this article, we consider Beyond Contract, Work, Power and Trust Relations (1974a) (BC)
and Man Mismanagement (1974b,1985) (MM), using a framework of the three pillars of a
feminist approach to IR research (Greene, 2019): “Standpoint”,“Gender relations”and
“Political engagement”. Our process included an extensive and detailed review of MM (both
editions) and BC, plus other texts by Fox which had some discussion of the frames of
reference [1]. We then undertook a broad review of publications in the IR field which utilise
Fox’s frames of reference, working within Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005, p. 21) understanding
of scoping studies of existing literature which aim to identify research gaps and draw
conclusions as to “the overall state of research activity”. This included a Google Scholar
search for “Fox”and/or “frames of reference”and then within those sources, searches for
“gender”and/or other diversity strands (ethnicity, race, disability, age, sexual orientation,
gender identity etc.).
We argue first, that feminist critique of Fox’s work is important in clarifying the
assumptions and premises from which concepts have been developed and the uncritical
ways, through a gender lens, in which they have been applied since within the field. Second,
that having established the continuing contemporary relevance of Fox’s concepts within a
more critically-informed perspective, we are able to move towards approaches to IR research
and analysis better-fitted to contemporary work. A fem inist analysis allows us to
“understand the experience of women and men and brings a more rounded understanding
of the reality of workers”lived experiences’(Holgate et al., 2006, p. 311), emphasising the
interconnections between the material and the cultural, the family and the workplace and
breaking down conventional binary conceptualizations separating such factors (Holgate
et al., 2006, p. 321). This, we argue, is necessary to better understand the nature of the
Employee
Relations: The
International
Journal
1347
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