Abstract
The title of this book precisely captures its purpose: to review, and where necessary update, the three frames of reference famously developed by Alan Fox; and to show how these perspectives help us to understand important contemporary issues. These issues are: participation, the customer, equality, and the global financial crisis. The second of these may require a little elaboration. The point is to show how each frame ‘has responded to the emergence of the customer as a central category in social analysis and to examine their distinctive understandings’ of the trilateral relationship between employers, workers, and customers (p. 138). The book judiciously and thoroughly (witness the 40-page bibliography) synthesises and discusses each perspective. It deploys a four-fold structure to assess each frame: its conception of worker interests and hence the research agenda that is central to it; its mode of explanation and view of who the key agents of change are; its standards of evaluation; and the ways in which it addresses and represents the subjective states of social actors. One of its particular strengths is to show the extent to which the frames have constructively engaged with each other, as against some tendencies to treat them as incommensurable. It also adduces important intra-frame debate. Thus its main development of Fox is to identify two strands within each of the second and third frames: hard and soft unitarists, stressing respectively contracts and incentives from an economics basis and high performance work systems analysed through a psychological lens; and critical labour studies and management studies scholars, the former being familiar as industrial relations radicals and the latter embracing a more diffuse group of ‘labour process theorists, critical realists, and post-structuralists’ (p. 72). The distinct lines of analysis within each sub-category are carefully explained.
Heery’s stated main purpose is exposition. But he does allow his own voice to enter from time to time. His feet are, albeit ‘probably’, ‘planted in the muddy ground between pluralist and radical perspectives’ (p. 11). In that I would place myself in the same tradition and in that I also share Heery’s admiration for Fox (as well as having commented on parts of the book in draft), I may not be the best person to review the book. I was reminded of John Goldthorpe’s review of Fox’s Beyond Contract, in which Fox set out his radical view, which essentially said: welcome to the party. In this case it is: thanks for contributing so much to the party over a period of time, but you might also be aware of other parties elsewhere. Heery’s party is clearly that of anglophone scholars who have indeed made extensive use of Fox’s frames. The concrete examples that he discusses are also mainly from the Anglo-Saxon world. Other scholars enter here and there, for example Wolfgang Streeck among the pluralists. But Heery does not directly discuss how far the frames have resonated outside anglophone debates or their applicability concretely in different national contexts. I have no expertise in judging the former but in relation to the latter I would argue, and would expect Heery to do likewise, that they do indeed apply, for they endeavour to grasp the essential features of the employment relationship anywhere, or at least under capitalism. Some commentary on this point would have rounded out the book.
So, a very brief introduction if the frames are not familiar to you. Fox identified unitary and pluralist perspectives 50 years ago. His purpose was not necessarily to offer a deep scholarly analysis, for the idea emerged in a research paper for a government commission on industrial relations and its specific aim was to persuade British employers to abandon unitarism. The fact that it has lasted so well is a testament to Fox’s scholarship. Unitarism says that the interests of workers and employers are essentially shared, it thus has no real place for trade unions or other regulatory institutions, and the employer is the main actor. Pluralism says that interests may clash but that appropriate institutions, of collective bargaining, the state or both, can manage this conflict. As Heery stresses, unitarism used to be presented as out-dated, but with the rise of human resource management in general and such particular things as high performance work systems and ‘employee engagement’, together with the decline of pluralist institutions, it has now taken centre stage. Radical, or critical, writers see the interests of workers and employers as ‘fundamentally opposed’, thus interpreting specific features of the employment relationship in an ‘overwhelmingly negative’ way, and focusing on critique rather than interventions in practice (p. 71).
In terms of specific processes, Heery first takes the issue of employee participation, looking at partnership (in the anglophone sense of labour-management cooperation, rather than social partnership) and employee engagement. Unitarists are not, of course, much concerned with the former but have developed substantial work on the latter, arguing that employers who promote it will meet workers’ psychological needs and hence better performance. Pluralists criticise how far any of this is embedded in practice and whether it undermines employees’ independent voice, while radicals pursue these arguments further in particular in relation to the ability of managers to live up to their own rhetoric. As for participation, Heery sets out with great clarity pluralist, broadly favourable, and radical views of it. His characterisation of the two positions serves as a great resource, including for the teaching of the topic. He also identifies some resolution, as scholars have moved beyond stark oppositions to identify different kinds of partnership with different effects. As a future exam question will no doubt say: ‘partnership varies “in its form and consequences, depending on context” (Heery, 2016: 123); discuss’. Just a little more on how the context indeed shapes the result would round this all out; but this is not a book on partnership specifically and perhaps that is to ask too much.
The other chapters take a similar approach. A key overall point is that the field has responded constructively to new issues such as equality and the role of the customer albeit, as Heery remarks, more slowly than other parts of social science. This, together with the realignment between frames, leads Heery to an optimistic overall assessment. Within his own preferred position, there is, he says, a constructive engagement between the institutional reform of pluralists, in particular the growing interest in hybrid regulation as in reflexive law, and the interest in social movements from radical scholars.
The book does what it sets out to do although, as noted above, it has some clear boundaries to its ambitions. It is a thorough, scholarly and convincing analysis which should promote further development of the field. My own view of that development is that the pluralist-radical interface is less muddy in theoretical terms than Heery thinks that it is. First, on the interests of parties to the employment relationship, Heery carefully adduces the interests that the frames ascribe to the parties. But radical scholars have also struggled with the deeper questions of where these interests derive from and how we can know what they are. At the same time that Fox was developing his radical view, a few hundred metres away Steven Lukes was producing his radical view of power, with its famous account of real interests. This was importantly elaborated and qualified in 2005. Andrew Sayer has discussed cognate questions. Heery does not discuss this theme. Secondly, while radicals would agree that interests are ‘fundamentally’ opposed they would also stress common interests and the extent to which they can be secured, as in the work of Erik Olin Wright including his debates with Streeck. It would be good to see scholars of Heery’s ability subjecting such arguments to the rigorous scrutiny that this book exemplifies.
And finally…I could spot only one error of fact. It is a small but in the context an unfortunate slip. Hint: it is really a double error.