Waving not Drowning: British Industrial Relations in the Twenty‐First Century
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12256 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12256
55:3 September 2017 0007–1080 pp. 672–675
BOOK REVIEWS
Waving not Drowning:British Industrial Relations in the Twenty-First Century
Framing Work:Unitary, Pluralist, and Critical Perspectivesin the Twenty-first Century
by Edmund Heery. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016
Employment with a human face: Balancing Eciency, Equity and Voice by
John W. Budd. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2004
Forty years ago, I made my first contact with the academic IR field as an Oxford PPE
student of RodMartin — a second-generation member of Clegg and Flanders’ ‘Oxford
School’. All around me practical IR waserupting, as we entered the 1978–1979 ‘Winter
of Discontent’. When I joined the WarwickMA in 1980, trade unions represented well
over half the workforce and three-quarters of employees were covered by collective
bargaining — as I have told undergraduates ever since. The main academic argument
back then was still between pluralist advocates of moderate collective-bargaining and
voluntary incomes policy, such as Hugh Clegg — whohad just retired — and radical
champions of industrial militancy, led byRichard Hyman.
In 2017, when collective bargaining is rare outside the public sector and chapters
on strikes have long disappeared from employment relations textbooks, what is truly
remarkable is that academic IR still survives as a vibrant and argumentative field, as
Ed Heery’s excellent new survey testifies. Even more surprising, perhaps, Alan Fox’s
threefold model of unitary, pluralist and radical (restyled here as ‘critical’) ‘frames of
reference’ still generates heat and light, 50 years after its original twofold Donovan
formulation. Our social science and public policy field has survived and transcended
its original, rather narrow institutional focus. We are still here, carrying the torch for
better employment relations,when maybe we should not be.For back in 1979, Sir Keith
Joseph probably hoped and expected that academic IR would wither away once the
trade union roots of the field were cut. So why has academic IR survived?
One obvious explanation is academic inertia: social science fields and disciplines
become institutionalized and develop a life of their own, independent of the real
world. But IR is a public policy field too, now largely located in the tough academic
environment of Business Schools,and would not still be here if we had continued just
talking about male manual, manufacturingworkers, unions, collective bargainingand
strikes. Instead, British IR has adapted to the new management language — HRM,
employment relations, employee involvement and so on — to continue sounding
relevant; while expanding its explanatory range to new topics thrown up by a largely
non-union, post-industrial labour market, characterized by great gender and ethnic
diversity. IR has moved with the times, but as Heery demonstrates, is still drawing-on
‘time-honoured’ (p. vii) social science principles.
C
2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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