The Journal of Industrial Relations : 60 years on

Abstract

Introduction

This special issue of the Journal of Industrial Relations (JIR) celebrates 60 years of continuous publication in Australia. It is an opportunity to reflect on the history of the publication and the contributions of the practitioner and academic communities which gave life to the journal and which continue to foster the journal. The JIR is now recognised as one the world’s leading journals in the field of industrial relations, providing disciplinary leadership in research, academic analysis and policy commentary.

The first issue of the JIR was published in April 1959. The articles in this first issue were very much of their time in terms of topics and approach, being largely descriptive overviews. There were two papers on the Australian ‘industrial relations scene’ (Ian Sharp; D. C. Thomson), two industry studies (Frank de Vyver on building and Robin Gollan on coal-mining) and two on conflict (Kenneth Walker; N. R. Conn), along with one paper each on long service leave, a particularly Australian phenomenon (Thomson), wages policy (Joe Isaac) and American trends in industrial relations research (Walker). The range of authors reveals much about the characteristics of the emerging discipline too: Joe Isaac was a leading labour economist, and was later appointed to the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission; Robin Gollan was a particularly eminent labour historian, whose contribution speaks of the multi disciplinary nature of the field; Walker, in turn, produced scholarly industry studies inspired by the pluralism of John Dunlop in the USA. Notably, all the contributors were men, reflecting the gendered nature of the field. This would be slower to change, it must be said, than in most areas of the humanities and social sciences, despite the looming changes in the nature of work and labour markets.

In this introduction, we draw on interviews with previous editors to enliven aspects of the journal’s past and briefly assess the changing scope of the field. We then reflect on the contributions made by practitioners and the nature of the books reviewed in the JIR. We conclude by introducing the articles in this commemorative issue.

The editors and the scope of the field

In its 60 years, the journal has had three sole editors – Kingsley Laffer (1959–1974), John Niland (1974–1991) and Braham Dabscheck (1991–1999) – and three editorial teams – Ron Callus and Russell Lansbury (1999–2005), Russell Lansbury and Bradon Ellem (2005–2009) and Marian Baird and Bradon Ellem (since 2009), the last of whom were joined in 2015 by three associate editors, Stephen Clibborn, Rae Cooper and Chris F Wright, and in 2018 by Alex Veen as book review editor. The first book review editor was Di Yerbury in 1981; since then, Braham Dabscheck, Bradon Ellem, Grant Michelson, Rae Cooper, Johanna Macneil and Sarah Kaine have served in that role.

The founding editor, Laffer, at that time a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, wrote in the first issue that:

This venture, The Journal of Industrial Relations, is intended to help meet the needs both of scholars and practitioners. It will provide information and analysis concerning many aspects of the Australian industrial relations scene where these have been lacking and should both stimulate research and provide a forum for discussion and results. It will also provide a channel for informed comment on contemporary events that should prove useful to all who are practising, in whatever capacity, in the field of industrial relations. (Vol. 1(1), April 1959: 62)

Laffer led a wider project of establishing an academic community in industrial relations, of which the new journal was part. Moving from Western Australia to the University of Sydney, he set up the first industrial relations subjects in this university, in 1953. He was instrumental in the formation of the Industrial Relations Society of New South Wales 5 years later, which was the JIR’s first publisher. His approach to industrial relations was shaped by the ‘systems theory’ of Dunlop, focusing on three actors: unions, employers and governments. Laffer was also focused on understanding bargaining, both between employees and employers and between employers and unions. Establishing a society to exchange views fitted the logic of his frame of reference.

Laffer’s successor was John Niland, Professor at the University of New South Wales and from 1989 to 1992 President of the International Industrial Relations Association (now the International Labour and Employment Relations Association). He was influenced by thinking in the USA, having worked as a mediator at Cornell University. His own influence in the field was immense: not only as the longest-serving JIR editor, but as one of the chief architects of one of the major shifts in industrial relations policies in Australia. Favouring enterprise bargaining over centralised arbitration, his report to the New South Wales government in 1989–1990 heralded change in and eventually beyond that jurisdiction to other states and the Commonwealth.

In reviewing his time as an editor, Niland noted that the 1970s were ‘a golden age for the development of the discipline’. And rightly so: context has always been recognised as important in industrial relations studies and, in Australia and globally, that decade was a volatile one in terms of industrial disputes and union activity. They were also exciting years to study industrial relations in Australia: the topic was rarely off the front pages of the print media; there were vigorous policy debates; student enrolments in industrial relations subjects increased; and practitioner interest was at its peak. The JIR played an important role in this period:

Industrial relations was an increasingly lively area for public debate and the JIR provided a scholarly framework for a deeper analysis of issues in contention. Particularly popular topics embraced bargaining versus arbitration, policy transformation, unions and strikes, industrial democracy and industrial relations strategy. But there was much more too. (Niland, personal correspondence, 6 July 2018)

The editorship of the journal remained at the University of New South Wales under Niland’s successor, Associate Professor Braham Dabscheck. The two men had cooperated as authors on one of the foundational textbooks in Australian industrial relations, first published in 1981. Like most textbooks, it was shaped by a pluralist framework centred on the competing institutions making the rules which governed the employment relationship. Dabscheck was one of the few Australian scholars to develop an alternative general theory of industrial relations, which he first published in 1980. This modification of systems theory attempted to grasp the growing empirical complexities of industrial relations by proposing that there is a multitude of interactors (not three actors) in orbits of interaction (not a stable system). His much-cited account of change in the 1990s drew on this framework.

In the late 1990s under the guidance of the editors Professor Russell Lansbury and Associate Professor Ron Callus, both at the University of Sydney, the JIR ‘sought to expand the range of issues and to “internationalise” the journal, while still maintaining strong Australian content’. This approach arguably shifted the JIR from one where the ‘focus of papers … was predominantly on Australian institutions, parties and processes (i.e. a fairly traditional approach to domestic industrial relations issues) which was appropriate for this period’ (Lansbury, personal correspondence, 28 May 2018).

This period was a high point of institutional industrial relations, crystallised in Australia in a corporatist ‘Accord’ between a Labor Party government and the union movement, before decentralisation and decollectivisation. The Accord generated an immense amount of research and writing. The government itself directly funded research, with two nationwide workplace surveys (sadly not repeated) and the establishment of ‘key centres’. One of these was the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training at the University of Sydney, of which Callus was a long-time director. In these years and later, Lansbury’s long interest in international and comparative industrial relations reshaped the journal’s aspirations just as it had teaching and research in universities where Lansbury and his colleagues were influential.

The ‘much more’ of interest, alluded to by Niland earlier, continued to grow in the 1990s and the editors responded accordingly. Declining union membership, the waning strength of the male breadwinner and unionist, and the rise of more precarious employment became major fields of interests. As Callus observed:

It was a period that was dominated by legislative and institutional changes in Australian industrial relations and the emergence of profound changes to the labour market and the growth of casual and contract labour. Hence research on these issues was becoming widespread. (Callus, personal correspondence, 21 June 2018)

Attention to comparative studies, globalisation and geography of work marked the editorship of Russell Lansbury and Bradon Ellem, Professor of Employment Relations at Sydney University. Perhaps the major change in this period lay with the production of the journal itself. Like many academic journals, the JIR had been published by its proprietor, but this became problematical as it grew and as demands on academic and administrative staff increased. There were two editions annually in the journal’s first five years; by the 1970s, there were four; from 2006, five. At the same time, commercial publishers saw immense opportunities in academic journals. Online publication allowed market expansion, much beyond the membership of the sponsor-bodies, to international libraries and to students anywhere. Largely unrelated to this commercial trend, journals (and with them their contributing authors) have become assessed by metrics delivering journal ranking systems by which journals can live or die. Commercial and competitive imperatives shaped journals worldwide at the same time as those journals sought to retain traditional academic rigour.

From 2009 Ellem was joined as Editor-in-Chief by Professor Marian Baird, whose own research on gender relations, work and care was influential in broadening the scope of the JIR. In 2017 the editorial team expanded, partly to manage a much-increased volume of submissions but also to pass on the traditions to a new generation of scholars. Dr Stephen Clibborn, Professor Rae Cooper and Dr Chris F Wright became Associate Editors. The interests of the five editors reflected the scope of the journal’s publications: institutional industrial relations, unionism, government policy, gender relations, flexibility at work, work regulation and law, and comparative studies.

Any consideration of the nature of an academic field and of the scope of a journal invites consideration of what has been missing. We have referred already to the slow uptake of work inspired by feminist scholarship, a problem reflecting the nature of the discipline. The same might be said, with some notable exceptions, of the inattention to changes in ethnicity in workplaces with the waves of immigration which reshaped Australian society from the late 1940s. With still greater international labour flows and rising racial tensions around the world, this has now become a major source of scholarship, as a forthcoming special issue of the JIR will show.

One of the defining features of Australian industrial relations for almost all the 20th century was a state-sanctioned system of compulsory conciliation and arbitration, which in effect set conditions for almost all employees and provided de facto union recognition. Arguably, the importance of this system and the institutions associated with it meant that research into other aspects of industrial relations was under-done. This focus reinforced the systems approach; consequently, there was less about class relations than in other countries and fewer studies of the labour process and workplace organisation.

A tradition of practitioner-focused scholarship

The JIR has a long tradition of engagement with practitioners as well as undertaking its primary role as an outlet for rigorous academic research. A dialogue with practitioners has been beneficial for industrial relations scholarship, given its focus on the management and regulation of the employment relationship. Since the journal was founded in 1959, dozens of articles authored by employer association and trade union officials, human resource managers, government ministers, public servants, labour lawyers and members of industrial courts and tribunals have been published in its pages.

Even a cursory browse through the back issues reveals how many luminaries have written for the JIR. An article in 1995 by Australia’s first female Justice of the High Court and equal pay pioneer Justice Mary Gaudron analysed the significance and impact of the Boilermakers’ Case. In 2009, Julia Gillard, then the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and later the first female Prime Minister of Australia, reflected on the transition to a new system of workplace laws. In the Annual Reviews from 1975 to 1980, the articles on trade union matters were contributed by Bob Carr, who was then a union official and would become the Premier of New South Wales and Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Gillard and Rudd governments. The JIR has also featured articles by prominent union leaders such as John Ducker and John Halfpenny, leading employer association officials including Bob Herbert, Colin Polites and Reg Hamilton, and many government ministers, tribunal members and notable public servants.

In more recent years, there have been several articles by accomplished practitioners on matters of contemporary and historical significance. These include current and former Presidents of the Fair Work Commission, including Justice Geoffrey Giudice on the prospects of industrial relations reform and Justice Iain Ross on how the Commission has sought to change its operation in response to wider changes to the nature of work and in the labour market. Articles by Qantas’s then industrial relations manager Sue Bussell with John Farrow and by Australian Council of Trade Unions Assistant Secretary Tim Lyons provided contrasting perspectives on the Fair Work Act. Heather Ridout, formerly Chief Executive of the Australian Industry Group and Reserve Bank of Australia board member, examined the issue of fairness in industrial relations policy. The JIR has also featured articles by prominent figures based on their addresses for the University of Sydney’s Kingsley Laffer Memorial Lecture. These include a 2002 article by then High Court Justice Michael Kirby – who has been a frequent contributor to the JIR on a diverse range of matters – examining the relationship between human rights and industrial relations. In 1993, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke authored a prescient assessment of the turbulent history and uncertain future of Australian industrial relations.

Books and book reviews

Book reviews have been an integral part of the JIR since its inception. Over 1300 books have been reviewed, covering a wide range of topic areas. The reviews were written by well over 600 individuals. While the empirical articles in the journal initially had a strong Australian focus, the book review section from its outset had an international orientation, reviewing books that detailed the industrial relations systems of different countries, developments in union movements or wage-determining practices from around the globe.

In most recent years, reviewers have commonly been reviewing one publication at a time. However, until the early 2000s it was common practice for multiple works to be evaluated in one review – allowing the reviewer to contrast and illuminate the differences and merits of similar works, detailing for which purposes they added most value, or for which uses they were most suitable. While the number of books reviewed increased until the mid-1990s, a steady decrease in the number of reviews per issue can be found thereafter, following the increasing academic emphasis, at least in business schools, on peer-reviewed publications. Nonetheless, the JIR’s book review section continues to provide critiques of relevant books published in the employment relations and related areas, such as human resource management, labour economics, labour history, labour law, management, political economy, organisational psychology and sociology.

In the early days of the journal, there was a strong interest in the nature and configuration of industrial relations systems, personnel management and the design of work ‘at the coal face’. By the 1970s, there was an increasing emphasis on enterprise bargaining and the ways in which political economy and labour markets affected workplaces, wage-setting and productivity. The 1980s were marked by critical examinations of unions, strikes, technological disruption and automation. An emphasis on industrial democracy continued well into the 1990s. In that decade, there also was an increasing emphasis on the role of the welfare state, deregulation, social movements and the rise of the human resource management practice. As in the journal itself, gender, migration, workplace health and safety, union renewal and regulatory reform became central topics.

The 60th anniversary issue

In this issue, we have selected articles that we think speak to emerging issues or cast fresh light on familiar ones. We open with Leon Gooberman, Marco Hauptmeier and Edmund Heery’s study of one of the key collective institutions in industrial relations, employers’ associations, charting their decline in the UK over the last 40 years. In examining one of the most discussed of American unions, the Service Employees International Union, Kyoung-Hee Yu breaks new ground by inquiring into how unions such as this seek to retain ‘idealism’ within their own ranks. The next three articles are innovative approaches to pressing contemporary issues. Frances Flanagan brings a deeply textured historical analysis to her theorisation of the ‘gig economy’. In examining climate change and industrial relations, Raymond Markey and Joseph McIvor move beyond the merely empirical to push towards a more ambitious rethinking of this critical issue. In ‘The Wrong Sex’, Megan Moskos and Linda Isherwood examine men working in jobs commonly held by women, in this case in the aged care sector. Finally, in the ‘controversy’ article – a style we encourage to address pressing policy matters – Shae McCrystal asks why it is ‘so hard to take lawful strike action in Australia’.

Conclusion

The ‘aims and scope’ of the JIR have broadened in the recent past to reflect the changing context for, and shape of, work and employment. These changes also reflect the increasingly internationalised author base and readership of the JIR. Journals such as ours are important because they are a record of change in a discipline’s academic boundaries and content, while also documenting shifts in practice in industrial relations processes and policy.

Having reflected on the past 60 years of the JIR’s scope, we conclude by observing that the journal’s historical content cannot necessarily be taken as indicative of the breadth of our aspirations for the future since the editorial team can only select and publish from the work submitted to us. Looking ahead, we invite more work that reconceptualises the field itself; we would welcome more comparative work; and we are keen to see research that brings together changes in workplaces with wider structural transformations.

As editors, we are honoured to have built on the editorial work of some of Australia's best known and globally recognised scholars and on the research and writing of Australian and international colleagues. We also add an acknowledgement of our past and present editorial board and scores of referees, whose work is invaluable to the journal. Given the quality of global scholarship in our discipline, we are excited about what the JIR will contribute to the field in the years ahead.