Labor Relations

Conceptual Overview

Originally, the core subject matter of LR was the study of work and conditions of work, both in connection with a project to democratize working life. This also was the idea behind studying collective bargaining, that is, the processes by which workers and their organizations (mainly trade unions) negotiate with employers, either at the workplace level (singleemployer bargaining) or with employers' associations (multiemployer bargaining). These processes have many facets, including centralized formalized negotiations at the industry or national level versus local and informal bargaining at the workplace, and they include mediation and arbitration and the prevalence of industrial conflict (strikes and lockouts).

LR cannot be considered an academic discipline on a par with economics or law with its own set of theories. It is rather a well-established field of study, in which social scientists apply theories from their respective backgrounds, including sociology, economics, history, political science, organization studies, psychology, and law. In the Anglo-Saxon world, however, LR has become more of a distinct discipline, embedded in academic departments and with established academic journals. In continental Europe, LR has developed into a subdiscipline of the various more general academic disciplines, as in industrial sociology, industrial psychology, labor history, labor economics, and so forth.

Subject matter in LR research also includes wage formation and pay, equal pay and gender issues, industrial conflict, the role of shop stewards in the workplace, working time, skills and training, involvement and participation of employees at work, work-place democracy, and so forth. In most cases, the emphasis has been to explore how collective actors and rules for negotiation and mediation may influence and improve the conditions of employees or the productivity of companies or avoid industrial conflict. Authors have, however, given different priorities to these varying goals. In fact, the theoretical purposes of LR studies have been both varying and at variance, and the area is, perhaps especially it was, characterized by a significant degree of controversy, possibly reflecting the varying interests of the two opposing parties in LR, employers and employees. In a classic heuristic, it became usual to distinguish between three theoretical perspectives.

• The unitary perspective, which sees the purpose of LR studies and research as the avoidance of unnecessary conflict and the enhancement of superior collective communication toward the common goal. In this perspective, arbitration, mediation, the clear communication of management goals to employees, and the avoidance of all conflict are the main issues. Originally, this perspective was closely tied to Dunlop and to the functionalist perspective in sociology (especially Parsons) and to the human relations school (see the pioneering Hawthorne studies). Today, this same approach may be found in the theories of human resource management (HRM, see below).
• The pluralist perspective, which sees the LR arena as consisting several actors each pursuing their own goals and agendas, and where bargaining and mediation bring about constantly renegotiable compromises. Here, the processes of negotiation, of bargaining, of inclusion and involvement of employees, the generation of rules for arbitration, and the mutual understanding by the actors of the other parties' legitimate goals are the main focus.
• The radical (Marxist) perspective, which views and depicts LR as endemically conflict-ridden due to the inherently antagonistic interests of the respective collective actors. Here, the main points of interest are industrial conflict more than conflict resolution, exploitation of workers more than fair pay in wage bargaining, and issues of labor deskilling.

In unitary LR (or systems theory), it was usual to distinguish between (1) collective actors, (2) processes, and (3) outcomes, as originally in Dunlop. Collective actors are, first, employers and their associations; second, trade unions and their members; and, third, the relevant institutions of the state. Actors operate in economic and national contexts; they are under the influence of a consensual ideology tying the parties together, despite their differences. The parties enter into various types of processes, which may be viewed as (a) bilateral negotiations or bargaining, (b) mediation or arbitration, often with the assistance of outside parties, for example, agencies of the state, and (c) participation or involvement of employees at the work-place level, directly or via various forms of cooperative committees. The outcome of this may be either substantive or procedural, substantive when it concerns rights or rates, such as rates of pay and working hours, and procedural when it concerns rules for mediating and conflict resolution. Outcomes in the form of rates or rules feed back into the economic and social system and thus back to the collective actors as input.

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