Abstract
The arrival of a new version of the essential ‘Warwick book’ on industrial relations (IR) is always an occasion to take stock. Like its predecessors, Industrial Relations not only charts developments in British IR practice over the past decade, but also reflects the state of the academic field. Moreover, this volume edited by Colling and Terry is not just a third edition, but the seventh book in a continuous series that has framed post-war IR research in this country. Elsewhere, the Oxford/Warwick academic IR tradition has been traced through the lens of these influential texts (see Ackers, 2004, 2011). In 1954, Allan Flanders and Hugh Clegg’s edited collection, The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain founded the Oxford school and, arguably, the modern British IR field. Clegg’s single-authored textbook appeared under the same title in 1970, shortly after he had completed work on the 1968 Donovan Commission report and moved up to the new Warwick University to establish it as a major centre for IR. His Changing System (1979) brought to a close this Warwick tenure and the turbulent 1970s. George Bain’s edited Industrial Relations in Britain (1983) steadied the field for the bleak Thatcher years; while Paul Edwards’s two editions of Industrial Relations (1995, 2003) carried it through the more optimistic era of New Labour.
The arrival of a new version of the essential ‘Warwick book’ on industrial relations (IR) is always an occasion to take stock. Like its predecessors, Industrial Relations not only charts developments in British IR practice over the past decade, but also reflects the state of the academic field. Moreover, this volume edited by Colling and Terry is not just a third edition, but the seventh book in a continuous series that has framed post-war IR research in this country. Elsewhere, the Oxford/Warwick academic IR tradition has been traced through the lens of these influential texts (see Ackers, 2004, 2011). In 1954, Allan Flanders and Hugh Clegg’s edited collection, The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain founded the Oxford school and, arguably, the modern British IR field. Clegg’s single-authored textbook appeared under the same title in 1970, shortly after he had completed work on the 1968 Donovan Commission report and moved up to the new Warwick University to establish it as a major centre for IR. His Changing System (1979) brought to a close this Warwick tenure and the turbulent 1970s. George Bain’s edited Industrial Relations in Britain (1983) steadied the field for the bleak Thatcher years; while Paul Edwards’s two editions of Industrial Relations (1995, 2003) carried it through the more optimistic era of New Labour.
Because IR is an applied social science field, chained to public policy and changes in British political, economic and social life, each book is in effect a review of the years that have gone before. Industrial Relations (2010) marks the end of the New Labour era, the onset of economic austerity and a Conservative-led coalition government. Unfortunately, the timing is not perfect, and like Clegg’s (1979) analysis, most chapters in this collection were conceived (if not completed) before a major political turning-point. Thus the preceding economic crisis is widely discussed but the coalition is still a shadowy force. Other events, like the crisis in the euro zone have yet to happen. All this is bad luck, but means that the book appears too early to reach a definitive judgement on New Labour – ‘before the dust settles’ – and yet discusses a public policy world that could quickly disappear. This may partly account for the fatalistic and pessimistic tone of many chapters.
The 18 chapters of this edition are now organized into a synoptic Introduction, which effectively frames the IR approach, and five thematic sections. A comparative Section One replaces the old historical overture with chapters by Colin Crouch and Richard Hyman on the British IR model and the European Union (EU) dimension, which set the tone for much of what is to come. Section Two, ‘Actors’, explores management, the state and capital, and trade unions. Classical 1970s British IR approached a universal model of ‘voluntary’ collective bargaining. Today, it is impossible to talk of one ‘system’ and Section Three, ‘Contexts’, charts the diverse practices found in the public and private sectors, multinationals and small firms. Section Four, ‘Processes’, opens with the continuing decline of collective bargaining and then turns to the growing influence of new non-union forms of employee representation and individual employment law. Section Five, ‘Outcomes’, explores pay and working time, economic performance, skills, and equality and diversity.
Authoritative textbooks, written by leading researchers in the field, are as revealing about long-waves of academic social science as they are about short-term public policy. And this makes Colling and Terry of wider interest to the sociological community represented by Work, Employment and Society. Flanders and Clegg (1954) had little place for sociology or even what we now understand as social science. Instead their text was dominated by institutional description and animated by the academic spirit of politics and history. The subsequent books saw a long march towards ever closer engagement with qualitative workplace sociology, represented by figures in the Oxford-Warwick tradition, such as Alan Fox, Richard Hyman, Eric Batstone and Paul Edwards. This sharply distinguished the British IR field from its US equivalent, rooted in institutional labour economics. There are strong signs here of that tide ebbing.
Three acronyms – VoC, WERS and EU – dominate the new Industrial Relations, and there is a clear trend towards a rather determinist ‘political economy’, the large quantitative data set and a world of reified trans-national institutions. Ironically, this also gives some chapters that heavy, rather indigestible ‘institutional’ feel for which the earlier Clegg texts were once criticized. Hall and Soskice’s (2001) ‘varieties of capitalism’ (VoC) is the big new theoretical idea, finally supplanting older debates between capitalism and socialism. In the original formulation, both liberal-market and co-ordinated varieties have strengths and weaknesses and the binary divide is just a prelude to more detailed historical analysis. Indeed, Paul Marginson and Guglielmo Meardi note the ‘institutional permissiveness’ of our liberal-market framework (p. 208). More commonly, however, VoC and an adversarial reading of the employment relationship are combined to construct a British liberal-market ‘iron cage’ of low-pay, low-commitment, low-trust, low-skill, low-investment employment (see Ackers, 2012). In William Brown’s hands, the Workplace Employment Relations Surveys (WERS) afford a panoramic view of the decline of trade unions and collective bargaining, with the interesting longitudinal insight that employers began to turn away from union recognition on new sites in the 1960s. But, in general, an over-reliance on WERS limits our understanding why such developments took place or what it is like to work in Britain today. Likewise, there is valuable detailed analysis of EU policies and institutions in many chapters; yet ‘Europe’ stands, more generally, for an idealized counterfactual paradigm of co-ordinated capitalism, which, in my view, neither aids our understanding of the real continent, ‘warts and all’, nor helps us to grasp where British employment relations is now, how it got there and where it can realistically go in the future.
Judged overall, as a social science body of work, this collection tends to down-grade three crucial elements of the British IR tradition: qualitative case study research; historical perspective; and public policy relevance.
A lucid restatement of the argument for qualitative case study research and interpretive sociology is found in the two chapters on small firms and economic performance, both involving Paul Edwards. Monder Ram and Edwards take the reader outside the statistical category of ‘the workplace’ into the real ‘lived experience’ (p. 241) of small firms, families and local communities, using qualitative material to explain the intriguing WERS finding that workers in small firms express high job satisfaction. As with Edwards and Sukanya Sengupta (p. 231), a clear methodological case is made for ‘context-sensitive’ research and actors’ social meanings. This is accompanied by a rejection of ‘deterministic’ institutional explanations of company behaviour, leaving space for management choice and, more widely, for social actors to shape their world. As they argue, the same approach has much to commend it for organizations of all sizes. This remains institutional analysis in a broad sociological sense, but takes us beyond those abstract IR institutions discussed in many other chapters, to talk about the places ordinary British people inhabit. And this allows us to grasp the experience of work from the ground upwards rather than through the window of that inter-continental jet called political economy. Even here, I would have liked more ‘thick description’ about, say, specific Indian religious groups, types of family structures and localities like, say, Leicester – research confidentiality permitting. British IR needs to get back to real people in real organizations with names where possible: workers and managers in specific companies, identifiable unions, towns and regions. These two chapters suggest a different starting point and approach.
If ethnographies are one half of the context-sensitive solution, a proper historical perspective is the other. Flanders and Clegg (1954) opened with a fine historical overview by Asa Briggs. Some chapters here do dip into history, but Linda Dickens and Mark Hall, on employment law, are unusual in going back as far as the 1960s. My point is not to excavate the IR past for antiquarian nostalgia; it is to understand why the political rupture of 1979 took place and why it was consolidated, leading Britain from one VoC to another. This is the essential political context to the discussion about trade union and collective bargaining decline that dominates Industrial Relations. And we cannot answer that question by framing the state (or capital or labour) as some disembodied force, as Jason Heyes and Peter Nolan tend to do. Since 1979, British democratic politics – politicians and public opinion – have played a central role in the reshaping of our system. IR struggles to make sense of the present because it fails to grasp the political dynamic whereby ‘the state’ and ‘employers’ turned away from trade unions, collective bargaining and co-ordinated capitalism after 1979. Indeed, the field often talks of liberal-market capitalism and ‘path dependency’ as if no such rupture took place, though the effects of it are everywhere in this book.
After the Second World War, a ‘social democratic settlement’ turned Britain into a co-ordinated capitalist economy (of sorts) and then the 1964 Labour Government began a bold experiment in constructing neo-corporatist IR institutions and relationships, at national and workplace levels, which finally came to grief under Labour’s 1974–9 ‘social contract’. IR pluralists, notably Clegg and Flanders, were central to the Donovan workplace reform programme. The failure of productivity bargaining and incomes policy to reduce strikes and increase efficiency – in contrast to north European ‘productivity coalitions’ - meant that British trade unions lost the argument with public opinion, allowing Thatcher to dismantle pluralist IR institutions. The post-war growth of collective bargaining had been heavily sponsored by a bipartisan state and employers. Once the unions had lost legitimacy with the public, there was no easy going back to ‘business as usual’. By the time Labour returned to power in 1997, a process of political, social and economic change had taken place as profound as that leading to the 1945 social democratic settlement. These, in crude terms, are the main elements of that missing analysis.
So, finally, how far does Industrial Relations contribute to realistic public policy? Colling and Terry restate the goal of earlier editions: ‘comprehensiveness and an authoritative blend of description and an analysis’(p. xv); and this, in turn, should ‘provide a framework both for understanding change and for providing a basis for progressive policy’ (p. xvi). There is no doubt that this book is essential evidential groundwork for any contemporary course on employment relations and will take its rightful place on every IR bookcase. This said, the rather passive concluding section heading, ‘Outcomes’, is not encouraging for public policy impact.
A central paradox is that the one preferred solution to most employment problems offered by virtually all the writers here – strong trade unions and collective bargaining – is by all their accounts in terminal decline. Moreover, a fatalistic institutionalism, discussed above, also means that no over-arching social strategy for renewal is proposed. If my historical reading is accurate, British unions can only revive as ‘public goods’ once they regain normative legitimacy through a constructive national employment profile. For that reason, the brief, rather peripheral discussions of partnership, in the chapters by Michael Terry and by Melanie Simms and Andy Charlwood, are a disappointment. For partnership, in some shape or form, remains the only serious IR strategy to reverse the public, government and employer suspicions inflamed by the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s. In short, if you want co-ordinated capitalism back, at any level, you have to start behaving as if it already exists. True, IR has gained some new policy angles, such as the national minimum wage, European works councils, legal rights or the advance of equal opportunities, but, as numerous chapters insist, few of these work that well without effective union representation. If trade unions are to be active agents in the employment future, description and prescription must come back together.