future of industrial relations

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148,USA.

Industrial Relations Journal

36:4, 264–282ISSN 0019-8692

Blackwell Science, LtdOxford, UKIRJIndustrial Relations Journal0019-8692Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005 2005364264282Original Article The challenging but promising future of IRPaul Edwards

❒

Paul Edwards is Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Warwick. Correspondence should beaddressed to Paul Edwards, Industrial Relations Research Unit, Warwick Business School, University ofWarwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK; email: [email protected] is an extensively revised version of a plenary article given to the British Universities IndustrialRelations Association Annual Conference, Leeds, July 2003.

The challenging but promising future of industrial relations: developing theory and method in context-sensitive research

Paul Edwards

ABSTRACT

Industrial relations (IR) in the UK are often seen as being in a state of some disarray.Yet analytical advances can also be detected. This article takes one part of IR, context-sensitive research, to suggest ways of building on such advances. Its focus is theintellectual core of the subject, and not its institutional position. The particular routeidentified is to link IR to the programme of critical realism and thereby to makemethodological progress and strengthen links with social science. Policy relevance mayalso be enhanced. Whether IR’s possibilities are realised remains uncertain, andwhether an intellectual programme leads to institutional advance is even harder to

predict.

INTRODUCTION

Assessments of the state of industrial relations (IR) research in the UK over a periodof 30 years have pointed to an emphasis on institutional description at the expense oftheory (Bain and Clegg, 1974; Berridge and Goodman, 1988; Kelly, 1998; Towers,2003; Winchester, 1983). In the words of Ackers (2002: 2), IR ‘has proved generallyincapable of restating or revising its core paradigms, as they were established in the1970s’. Ackers and Wilkinson (2003a: 2) identify ‘a strong sense of intellectual mar-ginalisation’ of IR. IR research received no serious mention in the report of theCommission on the Social Sciences (2003). Kaufman (2004a) finds six factors account-ing for the decline of IR in America, and argues that these apply, albeit with less force,in the UK. He concludes his assessment of the subject at a global level by identifying‘reasons for both optimism and pessimism’, though ‘probably the scales tilt in thedirection of the latter’ (p. 621). The present concern is not to review this powerful andlargely convincing argument. It is to pursue one aspect of an optimistic view.

The article builds on the conclusions of Whitfield and Strauss (1998: 294) who arguethat the ‘tide engulfing industrial relations is strong’ but that a distinctive position can

The challenging but promising future of IR 265

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005.

be sustained and indeed developed through stronger research design ‘allied to changesin conceptual tools, a broadening of scope, and possibly a modification of the field’stitle’. The article does not directly address the ‘tide’. As a referee of an earlier draftnotes, the tide’s components include the possibly greater apparent relevance of humanresource management or organisational behaviour to business schools, a relevanceheightened by the ability of scholars in such fields to target leading journals that counthighly in the Research Assessment Exercise. Symptoms include the renaming of degreeprogrammes. Some remarks on the

institutional

position of British IR have beenoffered elsewhere (Edwards, 2005). They suggest some positive elements, though cer-tainly do not constitute a rebuttal of the more downbeat view; one further commentis made below. The present concern is largely the

intellectual

position of IR, which, itis argued, is more robust than might appear. The focus is thus IR analysis in general,and not specifically the state of research in the UK, though many of the examplesgiven are British-based.

This task will be pursued by focusing on one strand of research based on context-sensitive explanatory approach. This label signifies two things. First, IR institutionsand processes are grasped in context so that, to take a familiar example, the meaningof ‘trade union democracy’ is different in different countries and indeed within coun-tries. Second, there is a concern to offer systematic explanation of, and sometimesgeneralisation from, the cases chosen for study. Examples are given below, but thelabel is intended as no more than a reflection of much that is taken for granted in IR.The classic study of the car industry by Turner

et al.

(1967), for example, addressedthis particular context and showed that key IR characteristics, notably strike levels,varied within the industry and between the UK industry and those of other countries;explanations thus turned on embedded features of particular IR arrangements ratherthan generic features of the industry. ‘Cases’ can plainly be workplaces, industries orcountries. Locke and Thelen (1995) use the term ‘contextualised comparison’, a termborrowed here, to capture this approach.

There are several reasons for this delimitation. First, the aim is not to review thewhole field of IR research. Nothing is said about, for example, historical methods,large-scale survey research or interpretivist or social constructivist approaches. Someresearch within such traditions is consistent with the analysis developed below, butthis point is not argued out. The purpose is simply to address one style of researchthat captures important elements of the core of IR as traditionally practised. Second,such issues as the definition of the field and what might constitute ‘IR theory’ areaddressed only very briefly. Third, the relationship with approaches such as that ofhuman resource management is not considered. The Ackers and Wilkinson (2003b)volume addresses these last two points. Finally, nothing is said about the teaching ofthe subject.

The central reason for the focus is to concentrate on one issue: the development ofresearch that offers genuinely explanatory accounts derived from context-sensitiveanalysis. Such research has an ontological and epistemological base in the programmeof critical realism (CR), and there are some specific methodological tools on which itcan draw. It offers a way forward in relation to: new challenges within the field of IR,such as how to incorporate gender relations; and the making of connections betweenIR and wider social science disciplines.

In international comparative context, UK IR is in a potentially strong position.According to Kaufman (2003a; 2004a), IR in the USA developed earlier than was thecase in the UK, and a clear focus was identified, but an ironic result was that IR cut


266 Paul Edwards

itself off from wider developments in social science and management studies and thusfound itself in a narrow conceptualisation from which it could not escape. In continentalEurope, by contrast, ‘industrial relations has not become an independent academicdiscipline’ (Frege, 2003: 242). The UK tradition is somewhere between these extremes,though arguably it needs to link its own insights into the employment relationshipwith the wider ‘socio-political’ (Frege, 2003: 256) emphasis of other countries.

The article proceeds in three main stages. First, developing conceptual, epistemo-logical and empirical themes are reviewed. Second, challenges within IR and in mak-ing links with social science are discussed. Third, methodological prospects areindicated. IR has always been a practical subject, however, and the implications of thesuggested approach for policy relevance are also briefly sketched.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

Analytical development is addressed in three steps. First, IR has a conceptualisationof its core focus, albeit one that may need some relabelling. Second, an IR approachconstructively illustrates some leading approaches to social science, though this hasrarely been recognised. Third, conceptualisation and epistemology can be illustratedby developing empirical research.

Conceptualisation of the employment relationship

There seems to be widespread acceptance, as illustrated by the texts cited above andseveral others (Blyton and Turnbull, 2004; Edwards, 2003a; Kaufman, 2004b), thatIR studies employment relations or the employment relationship. Conceptualisationof this subject has proceeded under two heads (Ackers and Wilkinson, 2003a: 20;Kochan, 1998).

•

The employment relationship as a contested terrain, embracing conflict and con-sent. From an employer point of view, there is an inherent management of uncer-tainty. For employees, concerns include dignity and justice as well as economicinterests; and employees tend to develop moral economies rather than operatingas purely individually rational actors.

•

At a more concrete level, the web of formal and informal rules and expectationsgoverning the conduct of work and the negotiation of order. This provides apowerfully political understanding of how order is negotiated and uncertain.

The standard definition of IR was the ‘study of the rules governing employment’(Clegg, 1979: 1). This remains a remarkably robust statement, if ‘rules’ are understoodto embrace a complex and shifting set of expectations and norms involving the use ofpower and if influences from outside the employment relationship that shape the rule-making process are taken into account. A ‘modification’ (Whitfield and Strauss, 1998:297) of title might now use the popular term ‘governance’ to signal at least two things:the relations of power, politics and contest that are central to the regulation ofemployment; and the fact that regulation occurs at many levels including supra-national and national regimes as well as what goes on directly in the employmentrelationship itself. The ‘governance of employment relations’ could thus be one label.This label embraces the proper concerns of writers such as Kelly (1998), that issues



such as injustice and exploitation be kept central, for the employment relationship isseen as an inherently contested one.

The uncertainties of the contested terrain have been underlined by Nolan (2003;also Nolan and Wood, 2003) in his analysis of the work of the ESRC Future of WorkProgramme. Drawing on a long tradition of scholarship (e.g. Hyman, 1987), Nolanargues that unidirectional and mono-causal accounts of the evolution of the employ-ment relationship are inaccurate and that there are inherently contradictory tendenciesat work. There are contradictions within any approach to the employment relationshipand between the specifics of employee management and the wider context of firms incapitalist markets. In relation to the former, the concept of contradictions has alsobeen applied explicitly by Korczynski (2002: 58) to the analysis of service work, whichis a particularly important case given that IR is sometimes equated with the ‘old’ worldof manufacturing. Korczynski identifies a series of tensions, some of which are argu-ably generic to any kind of employment (e.g. between quality and quantity), and someof which, notably the pressures around the customer, are distinctive to service work.The wider context has been powerfully highlighted by Thompson (2003: 371), whopoints to ‘the interrelated impacts of globalisation, the shift to shareholder value incapital markets and systemic rationalisation across the whole value chain of firms’ asreasons why firms find it hard to keep their promises in terms of high commitmentsystems. In short, a perspective informed by the politics of the employment relation-ship can be applied to developing issues such as the nature of service work andunderstanding the effects of globalisation.

Theory and ontology

The strength and weakness of IR is its lack of a closed paradigm. This gives it anopenness to a range of intellectual approaches and sensitivity to day-to-day realities.But by the same token IR has lacked attention to ‘fundamental issues concerning thenature and purpose of social science theory and research, as raised in the philosophyand sociology of science literature’ (Godard, 1993: 284). Anyone searching for the-ory in IR would have to be aware of the tacit nature of theoretical statements.Becker’s (1998: 3) fond account of the work of Everett Hughes has strong echoes.Hughes

always threatened to write a ‘little theory book’, containing the essence of his theoretical position. [Hisstudents knew] that we were learning a theory, though we couldn’t say what it was. [Hughes never wrotethe book] because he didn’t have a systematic theory in the style of Talcott Parsons. He had, rather, atheoretically informed way of working.

Theory can nonetheless be found. For example, reviewing IR theory in general Dab-scheck (1989) found five established ‘theoretical approaches’ plus a developing onewhile Adams (1988) identified nine. Giles (1989: 130), addressing theories of the stateand IR, saw four theories ‘lurking beneath the weight of descriptive writing’. A secondconsideration is that IR is a relatively specialised field drawing on several disciplines,so that its theoretical developments should not be compared to those of a wholediscipline such as economics or sociology.

If we look at Godard’s ‘philosophy and sociology of science’ one approach seemspertinent to IR. This is CR. It is laid out clearly by Sayer (1992; 2000), while Godard(1993) and Fleetwood (1999) are among the few IR scholars to consider it.

1

This is

1

Critical realism (CR) is also known simply as realism; the label of CR has become the preferred term,following its introduction by Roy Bhaskar (Sayer, 2000: 7).


268 Paul Edwards

an approach to the philosophy of science that demonstrates that the contrast betweenscientism and naturalism is false. One can be scientific without aping the naturalsciences (or to be more exact, a stereotypical view of what the natural sciences aresupposed to be like). CR takes a stance against both positivism and relativistapproaches such as constructivism and most variants of postmodernism. Positivismis faulted for addressing only empirical regularities rather than the underlying mech-anisms producing these regularities; its basis in deductive-nomological approachesprevents it from asking why things occur as they do. Relativism treats the social worldas wholly socially constructed and neglects the causal influences of structures that lieoutside processes of social construction.

Critical realism argues that there are real, if unobservable, forces with ‘causalpowers’ and that it is the task of science to understand the relevant mechanisms. Thesocial world is seen as being different from the natural because it requires humanintervention, but it does not follow that society is wholly the product of human designor discourse: rules, norms and institutions develop with logics independent of thechoices of individual actors. CR stresses that causal powers are not necessarily acti-vated and is thus very sensitive to the importance of institutional context. It aims tomove beyond the discovery of empirical regularities to understand the mechanismsthat not only produce these regularities but also determine when they will occur andwhen they do not.

Critical realism has been advocated in relation to management studies in general(Ackroyd and Fleetwood, 2000)

2

and as an ‘underpinning philosophy’ for the area ofoperational research (Mingers, 2000). The latter example is pertinent, for that field is,like IR, often seen as simply one driven by practical problems, and yet a deeper socialscience base can be discerned. Sayer (2000) gives examples of realist research inpractice. One with resonances with IR debates is drawn from Morgan and Sayer(1988).

Conventional, ‘taxonomic’, approaches use large data sets to seek invariate relationships betweenindependent factors and performance. But such relationships rarely exist because of the ‘openness ofsystems’. Morgan and Sayer switched to an intensive methodology, treating firms in causal rather thantaxonomic categories. [E]xplanations as to why firms behaved as they did were in fact easier to comeby than would have been possible through seeking determinate statistical relationships [Sayer, 2000:24].

A further IR example would be the link between unemployment and union member-ship. Much UK and US research finds an inverse link, but studies in other countriesfound no such link or even a positive one, for reasons to do with their systems ofunemployment insurance; an alternative approach to the links between unions andthe development of capitalist economies then addresses sets of institutional conditionsincluding the unemployment insurance system (Western, 1997).

The explicit use of CR is, however, rare. Whitfield and Strauss (2000) studied themethods deployed in articles in leading IR journals between 1952 and 1997. Theyidentified a shift towards deductive approaches, which would generally but not neces-sarily be associated with positivism rather than CR. Larouche and Audet (1993)identified 158 ‘theoretical contributions’ published between 1897 and 1988 that

2

This book contains six chapters offering illustrations of CR in practice. It admits that three of them,including the two closest to IR, do not use the language of CR explicitly. The two are an extract from thework of Peck (1996) on the structuring of labour markets and an article by Rubery (1994) on the Britishproduction model as a distinct societal system.



addressed what ‘IR is’, and mapped them onto the well-known typology of philosoph-ical approaches laid out by Burrell and Morgan (1979). The great bulk (139) fall intothe ‘functionalist group’. This group would be largely positivist in orientation, thoughsome might be consistent with CR.

We may also assess the extent of CR in recent publications, by looking at three IRjournals over a five-year period (1997–2001). Of the 353 articles reviewed, none usedthe term CR but 27 might be seen as clearly consistent with the approach on thecriterion that they are interested in causal mechanisms and underlying causal factors.In similar vein, Fleetwood (1999: 474), in providing a CR-based critique of economicmodels of trade union behaviour, says that ‘something akin to’ his preferred approachcan be identified in a small number of extant studies. Four illustrations may be given,chosen simply on the criteria that they appeared in this

Journal

, that they exemplifydifferent concrete methods, and that they illustrate context sensitivity.

•

Ortiz (1998) used case study methods to examine teamwork in General Motorsin Spain. He framed the analysis in terms of largely critical views of teams froma union and worker viewpoint in the USA and UK and more favourable responsesin Germany and Sweden. He showed that Spain fell between these two extremes,which he explained in terms of the way in which the IR system allowed negativefeatures to be contained and positive features to be developed. In CR terms,teamwork has causal powers of positive and negative kinds, and how they areactualised depends on specific conditions. Note also that a single case can offergeneral lessons because it is placed in the context of other cases so that the waysin which causal influences operate in different contexts may be analysed.

•

Grimshaw

et al.

(2001) compared the gender pay gap in the UK and Australia,using statistical and institutional evidence on two occupations. They showed thatthere was a complex interaction between the national pay-setting regime andoccupation-specific forces. An average pay gap in a country reflects the interactionof different forces.

•

Traxler (2003) analysed the nature of national systems of coordinated collectivebargaining. Arguing that many quantitative studies ‘neglect the manifold quali-tative differences’ (p. 196) of coordination, he offered detailed comparison of fourcountries that were selected systematically to illustrate different patterns.

•

Edwards (1987) studied strikes and payment by results (PBR) systems usingsurvey data. Theory often asserts that PBR tends to promote strikes but in somecircumstances the expected association is absent. The survey identified sets ofconditions such as the size of workplaces and their industrial sector that affectedthe operation of the ‘causal powers’ of PBR systems, and case study research wasused to explain how these powers may or may not be actualised.

Note that a ‘CR’ approach is wholly consistent with quantitative methods; it is notstatistical modelling to which CR objects but the weak model of causality that issometimes displayed in this area (Godard, 1993: 292; Mingers, 2000: 1266). TheTraxler study is notable in this regard, for it builds on a previous meticulous large-scale quantitative analysis (Traxler

et al.

, 2001).I am not arguing that all IR researchers are critical realists without knowing it, still

less that research articles should rehearse their ontological assumptions. It is reason-able to claim, however, that context-sensitive institutional research does fit a broadCR programme. CR is useful at minimum in giving a grounding to the instincts of


270 Paul Edwards

many IR researchers who shy away from positivism and interpretivism. More con-structively, it encourages researchers to think about different levels of causal powersand about the kinds of arguments that they wish to address. For example, whendifferent outcomes are identified under different institutional conditions, what reasonsare adduced?

Empirical progress

A previous review identified illustrations of research reflecting empirical advance inareas including managerial strategy and IR in small firms (Edwards, 1995; 2003b).Further development can be detected in both areas, for example, in the analysis of thecomplex ways in which strategies are devised and implemented and in the study ofnew organisational forms (e.g. Beynon

et al.

, 2002) and the improved understandingof employment relations in small firms (Ram and Edwards, 2003). The followingillustrations also highlight a context-sensitive ‘theoretically informed way of working’.

In the area of total-quality management and teamwork much research has tended,to use the terms of Wilkinson

et al.

(1997), to offer bouquets (extravagant praise) orbrickbats (extreme condemnation). IR research has, first, contributed to improvedconceptualisation of these practices by studying them as interventions in the contra-dictions of the employment relationship. They may be understood as ways of managingthe inherent tensions between control and consent, and hence, as strategic interven-tions that, as Ortiz (1998) implied, have their effects in the context of a wider set ofrelationships (Geary, 2003). Empirical studies have also located teams in a theoreticalview of the workplace—seeing them, in the words of Geary and Dobbins (2001), asnew elements of the contested terrain and, hence, as neither wholly new nor simplypart of an unchanging struggle for control. Second, therefore, it has been possible toshow that teamwork has a number of forms. Several dimensions have been proposedincluding contrasts between lean production and socio-technical work designs(Fröhlich and Pekruhl, 1996). The ‘teamwork dimensions model’ identifies threedimensions, the technical, governance and normative, through which to understanddifferent types of team and their linkage to wider aspects of IR (Findlay

et al.

, 2000;Thompson and Wallace, 1996). Finally, research has identified sets of conditions thatare likely to shape the results of teamwork experiments (e.g. Marchington

et al.

, 1994).The outcome is that it is possible to grasp two key and apparently puzzling results.

Overall, the use of teams seems to have no observable effect on employee commitmentor autonomy (Harley, 2001) while under certain conditions it can bring specific, iflimited, benefits to workers (Geary, 2003). The explanation is that, overall, the lan-guage of teams covers many things, with rhetoric often being stronger than substance,but that under given conditions there may be negative (work intensification) or posi-tive (autonomy and job interest) results for workers (Edwards

et al.

, 2002). It can ofcourse be debated how far such insights depend on or are peculiar to an IR approach.But it can reasonably be claimed that the perspective that it brings to bear, stressingthe uncertainties of managerial strategies and the importance of context, has helpedto develop an explanation of teams that would otherwise have been the weaker.

Looking upwards to cross-national issues, development is also clear. Early researchon corporatism devoted a huge amount of effort to the measurement of the degree ofcentralisation of IR systems, and was never able to deal with the anomalies that thisapproach produced (e.g. Calmfors and Driffill, 1988). An alternative approach focused



on coordination rather than centralisation and indicated the causal powers of systemsof coordination in countries such as Germany (Soskice, 1990). The work of Traxler

et al.

(2001) developed this idea through rigorous theoretical analysis and detailedquantitative testing. As noted above, this research has subsequently been deployed toaddress the embedded nature of bargaining coordination.

It is also now clear that certain initial expectations, for example, that global forceswill erode national distinctiveness, have been rejected. Research has pointed to themutual shaping of global and national forces and to the significant extent of sectoraland local variation. To take two examples, comparative research on the car industryhas shown how production systems vary between countries and indeed companies andplants (Kochan

et al.

, 1997). Studies of multinational companies (MNCs) have shownthat they are not the bearers of fixed home country characteristics but instead interactactively with their home and host country environments:

the globalisation dynamic is

intrinsically

played out through the medium of interacting, internallyheterogeneous, nationally rooted MNCs, seeking to draw their international competitive advantagefrom the distinctive and variegated institutional configurations, including systems of employmentrelations, in which they are embedded [Ferner and Quintanilla, 2002: 249, emphasis original].

Particularly notable here is the work of Locke and Thelen (1995), who lay out themethod of ‘contextualised comparisons’ in explicit contrast to that of ‘matched com-parisons’. The latter typically compares an issue such as industrial restructuring intwo or more countries. But it tends to assume that external forces are of similar importin different economies. Yet countries differ in their position in the internationaldivision of labour, so that such shocks will be experienced differently. (One might addthat subsequent contrasts between coordinated and liberal market economies havebeen overly impressed with some structural similarities within each group, to theneglect of different ways in which such liberal economies as the UK, the USA andCanada are inserted into the global economic system.) Moreover, the ‘same’ issue hasdifferent meanings depending on context. Comparisons of industrial restructuringmay conclude that the issue is central in one case and not another, and conclude thatthe latter reflects successful institutional responses to global challenges. But suchchallenges may arise in other domains. On the basis of analysis of four such domainsacross four economies, the authors demonstrate that ‘seemingly different, nationallyspecific conflicts are in fact analytically analogous’ (p. 359).

This article does not, however, explicitly ground itself in a CR perspective. Itsapproach also works well when we are comparing distinct national systems withreasonably known characteristics. How far it could be sustained when the unit ofanalysis is the company or workplace, and when issues might not fall into neat sets,is less clear. The approach is none the less a powerful illustration of explanatorypossibilities.

Moving up to another level, we have the question of supra-national systems ofregulation. What in particular does European integration mean for IR? There seemsto be a reasonably distinctive ‘IR’ contribution in this area, an emphasis on ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down’ issues. Political science tends to offer the latter, addressing,for example, state decision making. IR complements this by considering what happenson the ground: not only the extent to which top-level initiatives are frustrated by issuesof implementation but also the active importance of ‘bottom-level’ processes in cre-ating new sets of demands and in contributing to the processes of ‘multilevel gover-nance’ (Sisson

et al.

, 2003). In this context, an IR perspective has a particular strength,because it is sensitive to the politics and uncertainty of negotiation.


272 Paul Edwards

ANALYTICAL CHALLENGES

Challenges within the field of IR

A CR-informed perspective can help us grapple with the issue of broadening the scopeof IR, as underlined by Whitfield and Strauss (1998) and Ackers (2002). One keyexample is the field’s responsiveness to the study of gender relations, for gender isevidently central to understanding employment relations and yet its neglect has beenamply demonstrated (Greene, 2003; Wajcman, 2000).

Wajcman points to the development of theoretical perspectives in other fields ofstudy. This is true, but it is also true of other areas relevant to IR such as theories ofpower or the nature of the capitalist state. We should not set the impossible taskof generating wholly new social theories of work. What it is reasonable to expect isthat IR analysis should throw light on the distinctive ways in which gender workswithin IR institutions such as trade unions. It should thus be able to inform anddevelop core theories of gender relations rather than merely apply them (just as ananalysis of workplace power relations should inform theories of power).

If IR is opened to gender perspectives, is there an answer as to what other influencessuch as ethnicity and family origins need to be addressed? One possible answer is thatIR is concerned with the politics of the employment relationship and not social identitymore generally. In pursuing this concern, it should be attentive to the resources thatare brought into the process, recognising that in the past it tended to neglect some ofthe most important of these. In the language of CR, it neglected their causal powers.Perhaps the clearest argument remains that of Emmett and Morgan (1982) in discuss-ing the Manchester ethnographies. They showed that in some workplaces, for example,engineering workshops, religious identity had little salience, whereas in the clothingsector such identity played a significant role in the construction of workplace solidar-ities. They argued that the walls of the workplace are a ‘semi-permeable membrane’filtering out some external influences and allowing others through.

A more exact statement would be in terms of mediation or interaction, for it is nota case of external influences simply entering the workplace unchanged, but of theirbeing constituted through workplace processes, which in turn reflect back on ‘external’relations. For example, Westwood (1993) demonstrates the gender solidarity and spacethat women factory workers are able to generate, while Glucksmann (1990) shows howwomen semi-skilled workers were constituted in social class terms through the inter-action of workplace and other processes. It then becomes part of the task to considerin particular cases how the politics of the employment relationship are shaped byinfluences such as gender and ethnicity.

How, then, might one develop a research programme informed by gender? A CR-informed approach stresses the need to ask what aspects of gender relations interactwith IR processes, and under what conditions. IR is, for example, centrally concernedwith worker mobilisation and the extent to which, and conditions under which,solidarity emerges. We might thus begin with this level of analysis and ask when genderand ethnic resources generated in the wider society contribute to the process. Forexample, the gender resources of workers may tend to provide a basis of socialcohesion; such gendered cohesion has been noted in studies of female workers, as inthe studies just mentioned, and also male workers (Collinson, 1992). Yet the causalpower of these resources is not fixed by the mere fact of gender characteristics; workerswho have developed certain identities through schooling may operationalise the



resource in different ways from those with different educational experiences. More-over, the use of the resource will be shaped by the workplace context, so that gendersolidarity may mean one thing in a manufacturing context and quite another in amanagerial environment, and the nature of the solidarity may be variable (e.g. whenworkers identify around ethnic divisions, and thus define solidarity through the exclu-sion of others).

We might then ask to what extent workers in modern employment conditions definethemselves in gender terms and why might some workers do so more than others. Wemight then proceed to ask about the consequences, for example, for the kinds of issuesthat reach the surface as specific bargaining issues. Appropriate contextualised com-parison could address such questions.

Industrial relations and social science

Turning to IR’s links with social science, the need for interdisciplinary analysis iswidely noted (e.g. Grimshaw and Rubery, 2003). IR research has profound messagesfor ‘mainstream’ disciplines. These have been spelt out several times. They include:the substantial amount of IR research on pay structures, that reveals processes thatare captured at best very imperfectly in labour economics (see Rubery, 1997); researchon the psychological contract and the employment relationship (Guest, 2003); andstudies of workplace relations that address sociological theories of power, the labourprocess and patriarchy (Armstrong

et al.

, 1981; Pollert, 1996). But the impact has notbeen impressive. For example, a special issue of an economics journal on the effectsof the national minimum wage (NMW) contained no reference to institutional IRresearch (

Oxford Bulletin

, 2002). Yet, as a key article remarked, ‘the low wage labourmarket is more complex than the straightforward text book model would have usbelieve’ (Metcalf, 2002: 580). And there is now institutional research both in general(as reviewed by Rubery, 1997) and in relation to the NMW (Gilman

et al.

, 2002) thatsuggests how the labour market can be understood.

Yet there is also evidence of some openness to institutional research. In the USA,the National Bureau of Economic Research developed its ‘pin factory’ initiative (seehttp://www.nber.org/programs/pr). The objective was to persuade economists toengage in field research, drawing on Adam Smith’s archetypical pin factory, in orderthat they can understand the dynamics and complexity of concrete cases. Discussingthe benefits, Helper (2000: 228) remarks that ‘understanding the setting can helpexplain differences in findings between cases, by making clear the mechanism by whichvariables are linked’, thus touching on a theme widely rehearsed by IR researchersand also unconsciously expressing a core tenet of CR.

As to how to improve impact, some modest suggestions may be made. First, wemight keep spelling out the distinct contribution, for example, in showing how theNMW has variable effects within firms. Second, IR researchers may be able to helpthemselves by sharing experience as to attempts to make connections that seem towork and any noticeable impact. Third, the pin factory example points to scholars inrelated areas who may be open to institutionally informed IR analysis. It may, forexample, be possible to use journal special issues or edited volumes rather than ‘cold’submissions to journals to promote an IR view. Perhaps particularly constructive,though also difficult, would be an attempt to move beyond general perspectives toempirical projects that address puzzles faced by cognate fields that might be resolved

http://www.nber.org/programs/pr


274 Paul Edwards

with an IR view. Crucially, we would be seeking analyses that count as explanations,rather than as simply interesting empirical facts. IR may thus not advance any free-standing ‘theory’ but can contribute to theoretically informed inquiry by showing howits approaches help to address theoretical gaps left by core disciplines.

MAKING IT WORK: METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES

A key methodological challenge is, in line with CR, that of developing plausible causalaccounts and then developing a research programme of cumulative analysis. Considerthe debate on trade unions and productivity: once it was recognised that the linkagebetween the two depends on context (Freeman and Medoff, 1984: 179), it was hardto proceed much further with conventional techniques. CR would argue that thesolution lies, not in more and more refinements to surveys or individual case studies,but in identifying relevant causal mechanisms and then using an appropriate mix ofmethods to elucidate their operation. In certain areas such as the analysis of teamworkan implicit cumulative programme has emerged, but there is now a need to be moresystematic.

The method of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) as laid out by Ragin (1987)and also Becker (1998: 182–194) has some potential here. QCA is a complex methodinvolving the use of Boolean algebra but in essence it is quite simple, as Ragin’s ownexample (which as it happens is an IR one) shows. Suppose that an analyst wants toknow whether strikes are successful or not. Three possible conditions are identified:a booming product market, labelled A; the threat of sympathy strikes, B; and a largestrike fund, C. The various combinations of A, B and C are related to strike outcomes,and it can be shown whether, for example, success depends on both A and B beingpresent but not C, or whether C alone is sufficient. The value of this way of thinkingis that it encourages the analyst to identify logical possibilities and then go throughthe evidence systematically to see what combination of factors is necessary and suffi-cient for a given outcome. It also invites development of new research. In this case, itmay be that information is not available on all the logical possibilities of the combi-nation of A, B and C, so that research should then seek out missing cases.

The qualitative comparative analysis has generally been applied to macro questionssuch as differences between nation states. In this context, Goldthorpe (2000: 51)identifies three problems. First, the approach is highly deterministic, with prior con-ditions always being required to produce one outcome or another. Second, it reducescomplex characteristics to simple binary yes/no attributes. Third, analysis is highlydependent on the correct coding of a country, with a single change of classificationhaving potentially major effects.

These are key points, and QCA is not a magic solution. But it has the merit ofhelping thinking about a given case in the light of others. Suppose that a researcherconducts a study of teamwork and concludes that it has ‘failed’. The first need is tohave clear criteria of failure rather than the rather vague accounts that can be foundin the literature. Second, what factor or combination of factors seems to account forthe failure? Is there a systematic causal account of the case itself ? Third, how doesthis account marry with others in the literature? For example, if ‘middle managementresistance’ is identified, where is the evidence of this phenomenon in the case, does itappear in other cases, and does it seem to be important in itself or only when otherconditions exist? Finally, further case study research can then be armed with clear



expectations, for example, that middle management resistance seems to have beenimportant where teamwork had one form rather than another, so that new researchwould seek cases where the relevant phenomena varied in key ways and where newexplanations might thus be developed. The recent article by Roscigno and Hodson(2004) is instructive here. This takes Hodson’s database created by developing quan-titative indicators from a set of workplace ethnographies and deploys QCA along withmore conventional methods. It relates patterns of conflict to characteristics of work-place regimes and then identifies three distinct types of regime.

A key issue in relation to individual cases is to try to select them with a clear viewin mind, ahead of time, as to what lessons can be drawn. What is the answer to thequestion, ‘what is this a case of, that is, from what class of things is this case drawn,and hence what does it tell us about processes in this class of things?’ If we look, forexample, at the mass of recent work on call centres, we need to move beyond thestarting point of holding up reality against some model such as the electronic sweat-shop to ask whether particular results are, say, specific to non-union call centres inScotland, or likely to hold in all non-union cases, or relevant to non-union cases wherethe work has a quasi-Taylorist form but not where a more ‘high skills’ vision ispursued. If this is done with precision, then a single new case can have importantwider lessons.

A second aspect of methodology relates to different levels of analysis. A well-established point about much IR case research is that the focus has been on concreteevents at micro level rather than the wider structural conditions that shape behaviour(Purcell, 1983). Thompson (2003) underlines the point in identifying a small numberof case studies that examine the different levels at which employment restructuringoccurs. Linking workplace experience to other levels of change is a key route forward.

Turning to issues of research technique, it may be an appropriate time to look atthe tried and trusted method of interview-based case studies. They have limitations interms of process and outcomes. In relation to process, they rely on reports rather thandirect observation of behaviour and they tend to depend on retrospective accountsthat may be coloured by events. O’Mahoney (2000) conducted by contrast a longitu-dinal study in which he reports that respondents claimed, after a new system of workorganisation was in operation, that they had always been in favour of it, whereasinterviewed earlier they had been highly sceptical. Bonazzi’s (1998) observationalstudy of supervisors is also instructive, for it asks about the impact of changes on theirwork not by asking for their accounts but by observing what they did and thusshowing how their tasks had changed. In relation to outcomes, reports have obviouslimitations. Some studies carefully collect outcomes data, but more can be done toidentify the outcomes of interest and ways of measuring them. Considered attentionto the design of ethnographic studies will also contribute to the integration of genderperspectives, for, as Greene (2003: 313) notes, the relevant processes in organisationsare ‘hidden’ and thus require ‘in-depth qualitative research’.

In relation to international comparisons, we know in broad terms that global forcesare shaped in numerous ways. We now need to show more exactly how and why onesector differs from another, and thus develop causal explanations of the ways in whichsuch shaping takes place and the conditions leading to one form rather than another.The issues of research design here are very large, for they embrace differences betweencountries, sectors and companies, and interactions between all three. Yet, as arguedabove, research has progressed considerably, and there is no reason why furtherdevelopment cannot be made.


276 Paul Edwards

THE CHALLENGE OF RELEVANCE

The above reflections have a strong practical relevance. From 1979 until the mid-1990s,the relevance of IR research may have seemed small. Managements confidently pur-suing what Kessler and Purcell (2003) characterise as the dominant cost-minimisationstrategy would have had little time for employee relations. The government agendawas also largely deregulatory. Yet we now see two lines of development.

First, cost minimisation may have reached its limits. Evidence points to a wide-spread sense of insecurity (Heery and Salmon, 2000) and to growing employee aware-ness of extensive and increasing use of monitoring and performance targets (Felstead

et al.

, 2002; Green, 2001). One recent study finds that pressures to attain targets aresubstantial even for managers (Ogbonna and Wilkinson, 2003). As Green (2003: 145)concludes, ‘intensification of effort is hardly viable as a long-term strategy for sustain-able growth’.

Second, consideration of alternative views is illustrated by the TUC and CBIagreeing that a ‘climate of mutual trust’ between managers and employees is essentialto organisational success (CBI-TUC, 2001) and by growing interest in ‘partnership’.We might also place IR in the context of major debates about corporate governanceand corporate social responsibility. As a recent symposium (

BJIR

, 2003) on the formershows, these bring to the centre of attention such questions as the rights of ‘stake-holders’ (including employees), the ethical responsibilities of firms, and the degree oftransparency of decision making and systems of auditing. Such debates are evidentlyones in which IR concerns with employee voice could play a part. Adding to thecompany perspective are the external context and the position of employees. The mostobvious of the former are new information and consultation requirements. But thereare also wider arguments about competing models of capitalism and the benefits ofcoordinated market economies. Governance is indeed multilevel, and there is a grow-ing need for clear analysis of the linkages between levels.

There is thus a context in which critical analysis, that is one that is aware ofcontradictory pressures rather than proffering immediate solutions, has a role to play.Consider, for example, the following aphorisms (Becker

et al.

, 2001: 32, 39): ‘HRperformance drivers’ are ‘unique to each firm’; and strategy ‘

implementation

, ratherthan strategy

content,

differentiates successful from unsuccessful firms’. IR academicsare particularly well-placed to elucidate the important truths in these remarks. Thewealth of research on why performance-related pay or total-quality management oftendo not work in practice speaks volumes about the importance of implementation,consistent messages, trust and, above all, understanding change programmes in thecontext of past history and the socially structured expectations that shape responsesto new initiatives. An understanding of the contradictions of the employment rela-tionship may be of particular value to practitioners struggling to make sense of acomplex world and doing so moreover when their own employment situations areincreasingly affected by pressures of rationalisation and restructuring.

CONCLUSIONS

Industrial relations’ traditional inductive and problem-oriented approach has been itsstrength and its weakness: a strength in addressing concrete questions without beingconfined to a particular discipline, but a weakness in lacking explicit theory and in atbest responding to rather than driving forward new intellectual agendas. This article



has focused on the context-sensitive aspects of IR to argue that there have beenanalytical advances, and hence, that the weaknesses are not as disabling as is some-times claimed; offer some lines of future development around philosophical bases andmethodological approaches; and suggest that such development has an affinity withIR’s practical focus, which focus may also be of growing salience. It would be fancifulto suppose that there is an agreed research paradigm or that practical relevance willbe readily demonstrated. Yet it is also true that there is more potential than issometimes realised.

Within IR itself, the integration of a gendered perspective remains an issue, and oneway forward in this area is comparative analysis, for example, of different conditionspromoting or retarding gender-based solidarity. IR research has developed a researchprogramme in such areas as the nature of teamwork, but it has not been a plannedone. For the future, a more careful selection of comparative cases, together withattention to the kinds of data collected and the research techniques used to generatethem, is a key issue. Such points also pertain to the issue of international research.Here, advances have been made in showing how new forms of work organisation varyon national, sectoral and individual company lines. Yet the next challenge is substan-tial: to move beyond showing that there are such variations towards a stronger expla-nation of just how and why they exist.

As for demonstrating the potential of IR traditions, two complementary routessuggest themselves. One is to work with scholars from related areas in business studies.Some researchers on call centres, for example, argue that if we are to place labourrelations issues in their context we may need to work with people from operationsmanagement, the better to understand the technical division of labour and, hence, itslinks with the social. The second is to work with researchers in ‘mainstream’ socialscience disciplines to tease out the theoretical contribution of IR. This is not just aquestion of using IR to ‘solve’ puzzles for the disciplines, for such intellectual arro-gance may seem presumptuous. It is a matter of contributing to debates while alsotaking from the disciplines new themes from which IR can learn.

Industrial relations research can look back with a degree of satisfaction, in par-ticular, in the light of the obvious and varied challenges that it has faced. We donot need a major rethinking of our fundamental views of the subject, and indeedsome of the core themes of Commons and the Webbs seem as relevant as they everwere. As noted at the start of the article, Kaufman identifies several intellectual andinstitutional challenges to IR. Yet, in his assessment of the Wisconsin School, heidentifies in that school a broad and inclusive stance that was committed not to anyparticular concrete model of IR but to general principles of efficiency, equity andhuman well-being; he argues that such an approach can continue to inform thecurrent agenda (Kaufman, 2003b). It is more a matter of reinvigorating the field bydeveloping methods and theories so that we can explain the ever-changing world ofwork in a way that is intellectually convincing and also (indeed, hence) of relevanceto policy.

The challenge of showing research relevance in business schools was mentionedearlier. Yet one interesting indicator emerges from a study of journal publications inthe 2001 UK Research Assessment Exercise (Geary

et al.

, 2004: 101). This identifiedthe 20 most frequently cited journals in Business and Management. Nine of thesecover the field of work and employment; they accounted for 613 of the 1,551 publi-cations in this group (40 per cent). They are listed below, together with the total numberof citations, the mean RAE rating for the business school returning publications in


278 Paul Edwards

the journal

3

, and the number of times cited in submissions from schools with the ‘top’5 and 5* ratings. They include, in order of number of total submissions:

Returned by 5 andJournal Total Mean 5* departments

British Journal of Industrial Relations

84 5.3 40

Human Relations

78 5.2 35

International Journal of HRM

76 4.9 32

Organization Studies

75 5.3 37

Work, Employment and Society

64 4.9 24

Human Resource Management Journal

64 4.6 16


60 4.7 13

Personnel Review

57 4.2 9

Organization

55 5.4 26

In addition,

Employee Relations

is just outside the top 20 journals by submission (48,4.5, 9), with 19 submissions from

New Technology

,

Work and Employment

, 14 fromthe

European Journal of Industrial Relations

and 11 from

Historical Studies in Indus-

trial Relations.

Students of the


, in particular, can concludethat it came fourth among the targeted IR/HR journals. There are three other con-clusions: there was no dominance of journals focusing on either IR or HRM; IR/HRjournals feature prominently in ‘top’ submissions; and a wide range of such journals,rather than a clear elite, was represented among such submissions.

The challenges of linking theory and empirical research, in particular, in interna-tional comparison, face social science as a whole. To expect IR in and of itself toresolve the relevant issues would be unrealistic. It is none the less well-placed to playits part. It is very hard, however, to say whether such an intellectual programme isitself sufficient, in a context of intense academic politics and, more importantly,changing definitions of employment relations.

Acknowledgements

I am particularly grateful to Keith Sisson and Paul Marginson for their advice. Thanksalso to two anonymous referees, Peter Ackers, Ardha Danieli, Steve Fleetwood, JohnGodard, Anne-Marie Greene, Bruce Kaufman, Mari Sako and Mike Terry. The articlereflects work as a senior fellow in the Advanced Institute of Management Research,funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

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=

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