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While the "world of work" has been one of the most popular topics of discussion in recent years, the field of industrial relations has frequently been dismissed as being of declining interest and relevance. This has been partly a result of falling trade union membership in a number of countries and the diminishing importance of labour market institutions which have previously regulated work and employment. Enrolments in industrial relations courses at many universities, particularly in the English-speaking world, have declined and there has been growing concern that the subject may disappear from the curricula in Faculties of Social Sciences (where it began) and Business Schools (to which it migrated). The British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA) issued a statement in May 2008 entitled "What is the point of industrial relations?" in order to refute the argument that the subject is outmoded and claimed that "the future of industrial relations remains challenging bur promising" (BUIRA, 2008; also Edwards, 2005).
In the past, the most common themes discussed in the fiEld of industrial relations included collective bargaining, trade unions and strikes. Some of these topics appear to have declined in importante in recent decades, but issues of how work is regulated, pay is determined, the views of employees are represented and how conflict at work is resolved, continue to be of significant concern to people at work, organizations, employers and governments. As the BUIRA statement points out: "the environment of employment has become more complex than in the past, with an increasingly diverse workforce, radical changes in technology and organization of work, the shift towards a 'service economy', new contractual arrangements and patterns of working and the pressures of a global economy" (BUIRA, 2008: 1).
Challenges to Industrial Relations
While challenges to the "stable state" of work and industrial relations have varied between countries, there are some trends that are similar in a number of countries, particularly in developed market economies. These have disturbed the "stable state" which characterized the field of industrial relations for many years. They include the deregulation of labour markets, the shift from centralized to decentralized systems of industrial relations, the growth of "non standard" contracts of employment (including fixed-term, part-time, on-call, freelance contracts and hiring through temporary employment agencies) which now cover around 40 per cent of workers in the European Union, the replacement of collective forms of bargaining with more individualized arrangements and a diminishing role for the traditional social partners in industrial relations as labour market coverage by unions and employer associations has declined.
As noted previously, the definition of industrial relations as a field of knowledge as well as a practice has also been subject to change. The term industrial relations is commonly traced back to the end of the nineteenth century and the publication of classic studies by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in Britain (Webb, 1894, 1897). However it did not become established as an academic subject taught in universities in the UK, US, Canada and Australia until around the 1930s (Kaufman, 2004) and did not gain widespread acceptance until the 1950s, when scholarly associations were founded in these countries. As Morris (1987, 1993) has observed, the field of industrial relations was gradually formed over a number of decades "as part of a perpetual but largely ad hoc restructuring of social science concepts." It also appears to have enjoyed its greatest vogue during periods of labour "crises" when strikes were frequent and disruptive to the economy and society.
The principal concerns of industrial relations have altered over time as issues of concern have changed. In the US, during the immediate post-war period, according to Strauss (1987), "mainstream IR positioned itself rather narrowly, focusing primarily on the union-management relationship and its impacts. Only secondary attention was given to individual workers, individual relationships between workers and managers, and relationships between groups, except as occurred through collective bargaining." With the decline of strikes and union coverage, "the field's reason for existence became less clear" (Strauss and Feuille, 1978). By the 1990s, according to Cappelli, "having narrowed its focus over the years to union-management relations, and having excluded consideration of other models, industrial relations researchers suddenly had very little to say that other constituent groups cared to hear" (Cappelli, 1991: 6).
There has been considerable debate about whether the field of industrial relations is either too theoretical and removed from the concerns of everyday life in the workplace to be relevant to practitioners and policy makers or, conversely, whether it has been too partisan in its relationship with unions or employers and has served the needs of one party or the other. This is not a new issue. At the first annual meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association in the US in 1948, the sociologist C. Wright Mills warned of pitfalls if industrial relations became captive to the "sophisticated conservatism" of American managers and their enthusiasm for "human relations", which was enjoying popularity at the time. Mills also raised concerns about narrow "molecular" social science, which focused excessively on "small scale problems and statistical models of verification." Instead, Mills advocated the adoption of a more "macroscopic" approach which emphasized the importance of social structures and the role of institutional forces in economic and political life (Mills, 1948, 1953). This is remarkably similar to current concerns that human resource management is displacing industrial relations in many business school curricula because it "tends to accept management's objectives uncritically (and) concentrates on activities at the company level without exploring the social environment" (BUIRA, 2008).
In some other countries, with different traditions of industrial relations compared with the United States, the field has been more broadly defined. According to BUIRA (2008), "the focus of (contemporary) industrial relations is on the regulation, control and governance of work and the employment relationship. It is a multidisciplinary field of study ... (and) provides a multi-level understanding of relationships at work." It should be noted that industrial relations is also a policy-oriented field of study which has multiple and competing goals. Hence, while some industrial researchers regard industrial relations as essentially concerned with balancing equity, efficiency and voice (see Budd, 2004), others regard productivity and workplace justice as the key concerns of the field (see Edwards, 2007). However, in most non-English speaking European countries, industrial relations is not regarded as a separate social science discipline and the focus of research tends to reflect the discipline from which the researcher is drawn.
Is Industrial Relations Still Relevant?
Various arguments have been advanced to justify the continuing relevance of industrial relations as a field of study as well as a practice. Keith Sisson (2008) argues that industrial relations is not only a vibrant field of intellectual inquiry but that it "delivers" something of practical value: "the subject is able to impart ideas and provide insights that inform policy and practice, present evidence that tests their explanatory power and maps developments in the field that add richness to the discourse of the employment relationship as a multi-faceted phenomenon" (BUIRA, 2008). As a subject that is now taught predominantly in Faculties of Business and Schools of Management, industrial relations provides one of the few opportunities for students in these fields to examine the issue of conflict in both organizations and in the wider society. Unlike some other subjects, such as Human Resource Management, which tend to accept a unitary view of employment relationships and do not explore the wider societal environment in which organizations operate, the pluralist approach of industrial relations regards conflict and its resolution as a natural consequence of an environment in which there are multiple stakeholders.
A number of commentators have also highlighted that employment relationships cannot be understood in isolation from wider social, economic and political developments. This provides the grounds on which it can be argued that industrial relations is not only relevant to the effective operation of organizations and the economy, but also is strongly connected to democratic citizenship (see Hearn and Lansbury, 2006). The principles developed by T. H. Marshall in his seminal work Citizenship and Social Class (1950) remain an influential benchmark for determining "the relative success of each western society in empowering its citizens in an equal and inclusive way throughout their lives" (Hudson and Kane, 2000: 137). McCallum (2006) has drawn on Marshall's ideas to develop a concept of "industrial citizenship" that would establish minimum wages and conditions of employment, and protect both employees and employers from "arbitrary, capridous and discriminatory conduct" (McCallum, 2006: 6).
Industrial relations is relevant to the current concerns expressed in some countries about the decline in democratic cultures and the political engagement of citizens, which is often linked to changes in the world of work. Sennett (1998) has argued that the decline in employment security in many countries has led to a decline in social participation and active citizenship, and ultimately undermines the quality of democratic life. Uncertainty in the labour market and the intensification of work are linked by a number of studies to the decline of membership in political parties, trade unions and other community organizations which provide the basis for active citizenship (see White, 2004).
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