Labor Law and Industrial Relations

The Field of Industrial Relations

Although John Dunlop's 1958 model was not the first exploration of the field of industrial relations systems, it is still, despite constant critique, considered the starting point for theoretical inquiries into the distinct nature of industrial relations. In Dunlop's model, industrial relations is defined by the study of interactions between workers, employers, their associations, and the state. Interactions take place against the background of several variables: technology, the design of work and markets, and power relations within society. The system stays intact by a shared ideology, and its product is the norms that govern the employment relationship and the labor market. One can depict an industrial relations system not only at the national level; it is a flexible term that can also be applied at the enterprise, domestic, occupational, sectoral, and international levels. Dunlop viewed the industrial relations system as a distinct subset of the economic system and separate from the political system.

Criticism leveled at Dunlop's systems model focused on aspects that it considered to have been lost. For example, the assumption of a shared ideology driving the system, rather than power and conflict, was seen as excessive, and the separation of the industrial relations system from other systems, namely, the political system, was seen as problematic. For the present portrayal of the field, however, it is important to identify the changes that have taken place in its focus. Scholars began to write about industrial relations to study collective bargaining (which is distinct from the two alternative measures for labor market governance, markets and public regulation). This fact allows scholars to trace the origins of the field back to the bedrock [Page 906]of modern-day unionism, be it Marxist theory or the Fabian socialism of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and to later academic movements, most notably the Wisconsin school of industrial relations.

With the gradual decline of collective bargaining from the 1970s onward, particularly in the United States, there were growing doubts as to whether the field of industrial relations had anything to contribute to the understanding of changes in the labor market. Even in nations where the decline was not as damaging to trade unions as it was in the United States (for example, in various European countries), decentralization, on one hand, and globalization, on the other, have caused some scholars to question the continued emphasis on collective bargaining and “national models” of industrial relations.

...