iMost existing theoretical approaches to industrial relations and human resources management (IR/HRM) build their analyses and policy prescriptions on one of two foundational assumptions. They assume ...either that conflict between workers and employers is the natural and inevitable state of affairs; or that under normal circumstances, cooperation is what employers can and should expect from workers. By contrast, A New Theory of Industrial Relations: People, Markets and Organizations after Neoliberalism proposes a theoretical framework for IR/HRM that treats the existence of conflict or cooperation at work as an outcome that needs to be explained rather than an initial presupposition. By identifying the social and organizational roots of reasoned, positively chosen cooperation at work, this framework shows what is needed to construct a genuinely consensual form of capitalism.
In broader terms, the book offers a critical theory of the governance of work under capitalism. ‘The governance of work’ refers to the structures of incentives and sanctions, authority, accountability and direct and representative participation within and beyond the workplace by which decisions about the content, conditions and remuneration of work are made, applied, challenged and revised. The most basic proposition made in the book is that work will be consensual—and, hence, that employees will actively and willingly cooperate with the implementation of organizational plans and strategies—when the governance of work is substantively legitimate. Although stable configurations of economic and organizational structures are possible in the context of a bare procedural legitimacy, it is only where work relationships are recognized as right and just that positive forms of cooperation will occur.
The analytic purpose of the theory is to specify the conditions under which substantive legitimacy will arise. Drawing in particular on the work of Alan Fox, Robert Cox and Jürgen Habermas, the book argues that whether workers fight against, tolerate or willingly accept the web of relationships that constitutes the organization depends on the interplay between three empirically variable factors: the objective day-to-day experience of incentives, constraints and obligations at work; the subjective understanding of work as a social relationship; and the formal institutional structure of policies, rules and practices by which relationships at work are governed.
This paper asks whether collective industrial relations can be promoted by means other than seeking change in public policy. Recent research points to the increasing significance of transnational ...private regulation (TPR) in developing economies. There is an emerging consensus that market incentives to improve wages and conditions of work can have a modest positive effect on measurable outcomes like hours of work, and health and safety. However, it appears that TPR has little impact on the capacity of workers to pursue such improvements for themselves via collective action. The paper takes a closer look at the potential of TPR to enhance worker voice and participation. It argues that this potential cannot be properly evaluated without understanding how local actors mobilise the social and political resources that TPR provides. The case studies presented show how different TPR schemes have been used by unions in Africa as a means to pursue the interests of members. The authors found that the scale of the impact of TPR in all of the contexts studied depended almost entirely on the existing capacities and resources of the unions involved. TPR led to the creation of collective industrial relations processes, or helped unions to ensure that certain enterprises participated in existing industrial relations processes, but did virtually nothing to enhance the political and organisational capacity of the unions to influence the outcomes of those processes in terms of wages and conditions of employment. The paper concludes that the potential of TPR to promote the emergence of collective industrial relations systems is very low.
This article reports on some new survey and case study research that shows what can be achieved when existing workers' organizations have the capacity to take advantage of the opportunities offered ...by private compliance initiatives. However, the same research also illustrates the limits of private regulation. While it adds to the existing evidence that market incentives can encourage employers to modestly improve certain measurable outcomes like hours of work and health and safety standards, it also shows that such incentives have little discernible impact on the capacity of workers to pursue improvements in wages and conditions of work for themselves via collective action.
Marxists and industrial relations pluralists distrust cooperative work-place relationships, seeking ways to explain them away as illusory or the result of strictly temporary configurations of ...economic forces. Industrial relations is potentially much more significant a discipline than its rather marginal academic status might suggest. Across the developed world, social market politics is under attack from economic nationalists who argue that global capitalism has nothing to offer ordinary people. The theory of industrial relations proposed is aligned with the larger project of critical theory which, in J. Bohman’s words, aims to “transform contemporary capitalism into a consensual form of social life”. Rather more importantly, putting authority relations at the centre of Industrial relations has very significant consequences for theory development. Industrial relations theory should help us to understand how to organise production so that work and the normative framework within which it takes place are freely chosen by all involved.
In this chapter, the author discusses the implications of his argument for industrial relations research and industrial relations policy—although the two are very closely linked. New theory of ...industrial relations (NTIR) recognises that any of the ‘non-organization-negative’ frames of reference could in principle form the basis of a stable industrial relations (IR) system. The different dimensions of the IR context would lend themselves well to use as a framework for comparative analysis of national and sectoral IR systems, for example if used to structure a qualitative comparative analysis. NTIR allows us to make a series of predictions not just about the nature of industrial relations IR contexts under the different frames of reference, but about the effect of ideological and institutional coherence, opposition and transformation. Jurgen Habermas argues that while communicative action can and does occur within formal organizations, its validity basis is undermined.
This chapter offers the development of industrial relations theory and its preoccupations at any particular moment as reflecting a position in relation to national and international policy debates ...that roughly mirrors that of neoclassical economics. The industrial relations system receives inputs from its environment in the shape of requirements arising from the technological characteristics of industry, product, labour and capital markets, and the ‘locus and distribution of power’. Institutionalism’s competitors in the argument were the policy manifestations of the cooperation assumption. The main theoretical argument in Industrial Democracy is focused on the external dispute with economics. Anti-system conflict is a clash of ideologies rather than an institutionalised resolution of differences that remain within certain agreed boundaries. The balance between capital and labour having normative substance in itself as the outcome of compromises consciously made by ‘reasonable men’, the web of rules is a technical artefact; an outcome of processes operating largely beyond the intentions of those involved.
The new theory of industrial relations is a critical theory of the governance of work under capitalism. The economic system is made up of product, labour and financial markets and is external to the ...organization. Since the economic and organizational systems are nothing more than complexes of action, worker action in response to system requirements is part of the process that ultimately gives rise to system requirements. Significant change in frames of reference will also lead to change in the functional characteristics of the economic and organizational systems. The objective and subjective aspects of the industrial relations system are in a dynamic relationship of mutual influence, while the institutional structures of industrial relations attempt to stabilise that relationship from the perspective of a particular frame of reference. Democratic unitarism is the frame of reference that arises when both the market and organizational systems are given a positive normative evaluation.
Frames of Reference Cradden, Conor
A New Theory of Industrial Relations,
2018, 2017
Book Chapter
Frames of reference provide a structure for analysing the balance between structural requirements and substantive normative choice as the antecedents of action at work. To grasp a system as ...meaningless means that resisting system requirements is as inappropriate a response as positive and active cooperation. From the perspective of the objective effectiveness of coordinated action, a negative evaluation means that although the values the system is intended to pursue may be recognised as legitimate, the structural means of pursuing those values is technically questionable. Where an economic system is evaluated negatively, actors will recognise that the organization cannot have a single overarching goal or set of goals arising solely from the market. A positive evaluation of an economic or organizational system implies that, conformity with the role behaviour required by the system is a valid end in itself rather than simply a means to avoid sanctions or seek rewards.
Bureaucratic contexts have frequently been treated from a systems perspective. Although the behaviour characteristic of economic and political systems is grounded in the lifeworld via the generalised ...values that Talcott Parsons identified, the spheres have become ‘uncoupled’, with the systemic spheres breaking away and congealing into ‘blocks of norm-free sociality’. Parsons’s strategy is to introduce the idea of ‘generalized values’, which are values that can be presumed to motivate or bind all actors in the same way at all times and places. Formal rules are formulae that pre-establish the outcome of an interaction between particular types of actors in a given set of circumstances. The legitimacy of law in the areas has a direct connection to a communicatively structured consensus, which makes the idea that formal rules could link up to create autonomous social systems that are beyond human control look very implausible.
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