Labor Law and Industrial Relations

Placing law and industrial relations side by side differs from other syntheses of “law and——.” Unlike economics, sociology, or psychology, industrial relations as a field has no distinct methodology and presents no unified paradigmatic claim. It is defined by the agents who take part in it (that is, workers, employers, and the state) and by what they do. Pairing industrial relations with legal scholarship is a matter reserved, for the most part, for employment and labor lawyers and regulators of labor markets. To some extent, these matters are also considered in related areas, such as social security, pensions, and corporate governance. Finally, the relationship between the fields of industrial relations and legal scholarship is difficult to describe because industrial relations is a field in constant ...