Root Metaphor in Industrial Relations: A Reply to Tom Keenoy

Where Keenoy takes liberties, I try to correct him. I did not say that the 'old' industrial relations has been superceded by the 'new'. Nor did I suggest a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Nor did my argument hinge upon these things happening. Quite the opposite, in fact. The root metaphors are a problem precisely because little is scientifically decided between 'old' and 'new'. Once such wrinkles have been ironed out, Keenoy and I seem to agree on a great deal. His conclusion, however, is more comforting than mine.     

Paradigms in Industrial Relations: Original,Modern and Versions In‐between

This article argues that the industrial relations (IR) field has had two distinct paradigms — an original paradigm centred on the employment relationship, and a modern paradigm centred on unions and labour–management relations. In practice, IR scholars in the decades after the Second World War frequently adopted the former as a broad principle but followed the latter in research and teaching. The narrower labour–management paradigm has created a significant survival challenge for the IR field, given the marked long‐term decline in union density in most countries. I join with others in arguing that to survive and prosper in the years ahead, the field needs to return to an updated version of the original ‘employment relationship’ paradigm. To promote this end, I describe the major features of the original paradigm, including its core positive and normative principle. I also outline how this core principle provides the foundation for an integrative IR theory of the employment relationship, which the field greatly needs to move ahead.     

Why a New Journal?

Speaking both personally and officially, I am delighted to salute the appearance of this first issue of Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society. Since my service as the first Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at Berkeley, I have retained a close personal attachment to the Institute and a sense of pride in its growing record of accomplishment. And because I am a student in the industrial relations field, I can speak with some personal conviction of the great need for this type of publication. As President of the University of California, I am pleased to see this new venture undertaken by the Institute of Industrial Relations, one of the University’s many important research and service organizations. The publication of new knowledge, insight, and scholarly speculation is an essential part of the advancement of learning. The free marketplace of ideas cannot operate effectively without the avenues of communication provided by the scholarly journals which serve every field of research. I am sure that Industrial Relations will prove a stimulating vehicle for the exchange and development of ideas about a highly significant segment of modern industrial society.     

The Reconstruction of Industrial Relations in the Privatized Water Industry

Abstract : The article examines changes in industrial relations in the recently privatized water authorities, and argues that the development of new industrial relations procedures and practices has involved a substantial reconstruction of the old public-sector industrial relations framework. However, change has by no means been uniform throughout the ten new water plcs, and comparisons are made to highlight the diversity of management response to the new environment created by privatization. In explaining the scope and pace of change, the paper argues that the early move to single-employer bargaining and the opportunities for comparisons of performance within the new regulatory framework are important explanatory factors.     

From Donovan to … Wherever

The Donovan Report is twenty-five years old. Since publication it has been at the centre of debate about industrial relations in the UK. Though much criticized, it laid down the pattern of decentralized collective bargaining which is prevalent today in the unionized private sector. Re-reading the Report, three things stand out: its defence of abstentionist law, its failure to explain how voluntary reform would work, and its fixed ideas about the shape such reform should take. These are discussed. The focus is particularly on management, especially whether the reforms acted as a drag on management's ability to change in the 1980s This is the fifth Royal Commission, we are reminded in the opening paragraph, to have been appointed during the last hundred years to enquire into industrial relations. One of the few predictions which can be made with any confidence, after reading the thousand or more paragraphs which follow, is that it will not be the last. For the Commission has failed ….     

New technology and industrial relations

This article reviews recent studies of new technology and industrial relations and indicates four main areas for future research. The author concludes that more attention should be devoted to the technology itself, and that industrial relations research could usefully incorporate many recent insights and developments in industrial sociology .     

The Role of Workplace Chaplains in Industrial Relations: Evidence from Australia

This paper examines a neglected and largely invisible actor within the field of industrial relations. Taking the case of industrial chaplains in Australian workplaces, it demonstrates that not only do chaplains play an important and independent role in their own right, but that their ostensible neutrality is also used to help achieve the interests of both management and trade unions. The location of chaplains in industrial relations and their need to develop workplace legitimacy accounts for this finding. This suggests that future studies that seek to explore the purpose and activities of new and non‐traditional groups in industrial relations will need to place their analyses within the context of more established actors.     

Addressing the Legitimacy Gap in the Israeli Corporatist Revival

Since the mid-1980s, Israel's labour law and industrial relations have transitioned from a Continental corporatist system to an Anglo-American pluralist system. The process has been characterized by greater fragmentation of the labour market and the system of interests' representation. However, in recent years, there have been several episodes of nationwide collective agreements and social pacts. These agreements resonate with a second generation of social corporatist bargaining that has been identified in some European countries. In this article, I question the legitimacy of the new agreements. The legitimacy gap evolves from the use of corporatist instruments against the backdrop of a pluralist system. I discuss the attempts to increase the legitimacy of the corporatist instruments, pointing to their limited success. Future attempts must consider solutions that track the hybrid nature of the industrial relations system and devise institutions that bring together the traditional corporatist social partners and the new pluralist agents. Of particular importance is the need to consider the role of the new associations in civil society that voice the interests of the growing segment of disadvantaged workers in the secondary labour market.     

Marriage and Family Therapy in NPD Teams: Effects of We‐ness on Knowledge Sharing and Product Performance

Drawing on marriage and family therapy (MFT), this paper introduces the concept of we‐ness to new product development (NPD). We‐ness is the shared sense of togetherness family members feel toward each other. We apply we‐ness to NPD as the construct through which people share knowledge at the team, between‐team, and between‐organization levels. The results support the hypotheses that we‐ness increases knowledge sharing and that knowledge sharing increases product performance. In this study, we used regressions to analyze the hypotheses. We found that the greater in‐team we‐ness (H1, t = 3.786, p = .000), between‐team we‐ness (H2, t = 5.411, p = .000), and between‐organization we‐ness (H3, t = 2.940, p = .004) activities there were, the more knowledge sharing in NPD. Results also indicate that knowledge sharing is related to better NPD performance. This paper contrasts team and family as the foundation metaphor to organize people engaged in product development. We argue the team metaphor can be counterproductive in settings where difficult decisions must be made. Teams can lead to individual members suppressing their opinions to “help” the team achieve its goal. Members are expected to sacrifice for the good of the team. That can be adaptive when the task is straightforward. The family metaphor suggests that the group sacrifices for the individual. In a family environment, members protect minority opinions, and in cases where complex, ambiguous decisions must be made individual expertise and insight may come from one person. High‐trust family‐like settings can facilitate sharing sensitive information and norms that can be challenged. The family metaphor suggests a more flexible and tolerant approach to new ideas. At the same time, it is recognized that families can have dysfunctions that can detract from performance. Therefore, managers must carefully apply the use of family‐like settings. The importance for family‐like approaches across organizations seems to be more important as technology complexity increases. Between‐team we‐ness was revealed significantly higher in goods manufacturers than service firms in this study. Small companies need to make extra effort to increase between‐team we‐ness. The idea of approaching product development from a family relations perspective opens up new alternatives for managing people in teams, between teams, and even between organizations. MFT tools to address behaviors and individual performance issues increase the number and nature of managerial tools to increase product performance.     

Unitarism, Pluralism, Interests and Values

The paper notes that in both management theory and pluralist political theory there has recently been increased emphasis on culture and values. The implication is that the ideas of unitarism and pluralism in industrial relations need to be reconsidered. Traditionally, they have been expounded in terms of interests, and values are significantly different from interests. An emphasis on values rather than interests raises some new problems both for unitarists and pluralists. For unitarists, 'managing values' can involve paradox and contradiction. For pluralists, emphasis on values requires a new conception of the process by which differences are reconciled, and may require changes to union structures.     

The Individualization of Irish Industrial Relations?

Research claims that industrial relations in greenfield sites in Ireland are commonly individualized. Data from a representative sample of workplaces in Ireland show that no trend towards more pronounced individualization is apparent in the use of HRM practices in new as compared with established workplaces. The state of collective industrial relations in workplaces in general is also shown to be independent of the extent to which individually focused HRM practices have been adopted. The Irish findings, and recent international research, question the idea of individualization as a useful way of understanding the character and dynamics of employment relations in advanced economies.     

利益相关者视角下旧工业建筑的可持续评价

在对旧工业建筑的利益相关者分析的基础上,构建可持续发展评价体系,通过层次分析法与模糊综合评分法进行经济、环境、社会文化与功能四个系统层的可持续发展评价,并对南昌699文化创意产业园进行了实践,提出了旧工业建筑再利用项目的可持续发展路径。研究表明,把利益相关者作为可持续发展评价主体,能有效解决当前可持续发展评价中将利益主体视为无差异群体的问题,为促进旧工业建筑的可持续发展提供了思路和方法。     

A ‘Copernican Revolution’ in French Industrial Relations: Are the Times a’ Changing?

In 1998 and 1999 France passed the sixth and seventh laws in seventeen years affecting working time. They offered financial incentives to firms signing collective agreements that created or protected jobs and cut the legal working week from 39 to 35 hours from 1 January 2000. Early evidence suggests that while their direct job creation effect is limited they are moderating wage settlements and leading to more flexible working patterns. In this paper I situate the new hour laws within the long historical tradition of state political intervention over working time and argue that this remains a key element in reforming French industrial relations.     

End Users: Actors in the Industrial Relations System?

The paradigm elaborated by John T. Dunlop in his landmark 1958 volume, Industrial Relations Systems , described this system as consisting of three actors: unions, employers and the State. Over the past few years, the call to expand upon the notion of actors in the industrial relations environment has become more and more widespread, but no one has yet suggested how this integration might be implemented. The main objective of this paper is to propose an analytical model of the actor and to explore how the latter could be applied in the case of public urban transit users.     

The Future Role of Government in Industrial Relations

The future role of government in industrial relations depends on the choices made by employers, workers, and especially governments. Technological change and internationalization have reduced the viability of both Keynesian economics and the mass production system, once integrally related to the industrial relations systems of industrialized democracies after the 1930s. Economic success will require new policies and high-performance systems more appropriate for a global, knowledge-intensive economic environment     

Beyond high tech: early adopters of open innovation in other industries

Companies have historically invested in large research and development departments to drive innovation and provide sustainable growth. This model, however, is eroding due to a number of factors. What is emerging is a more open model, where companies recognize that not all good ideas will come from inside the organization and not all good ideas created within the organization can be successfully marketed internally. To date, Open Innovation concepts have been regarded as relevant primarily to 'high-technology' industries, with examples that include Lucent, 3Com, IBM, Intel and Millenium Pharmaceuticals. In this article, we identify organizations in industries outside 'high technology' that are early adopters of the concept. Our findings demonstrate that many Open Innovation concepts are already in use in a wide range of industries. We document practices that appear to assist organizations adopting these concepts, and discover that Open Innovation is not ipso facto a recipe for outsourcing R&D. We conclude that Open Innovation has utility as a paradigm for industrial innovation beyond high tech to more traditional and mature industries.     

The Role of Ideas in Understanding Industrial Relations Policy Change in Liberal Market Economies

This paper analyzes the uneven processes underpinning industrial relations policy liberalization in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Ireland. Drawing upon 140 elite interviews and building upon ideational comparative political theories, the paper highlights the role of ideas in the policy change process. It identifies how particular ideas can be used to construct policy problems, how these ideas can gain legitimacy through battles with competing ideas, and how policy legacies can influence whether ideas take root. The findings from the comparative case analysis expose a critical difference between “positive legacies” and “negative legacies” to account for different liberalization trajectories.     

The Hegemonic Behaviorist Cycle

Values relating to technology and technology education, I will argue, can either be co-constructed or imposed. A teacher employing behaviourist methodologies in the classroom, for example, will inculcate within students, a prescribed set of values relating to technology. They can do this in many ways. In an industrial arts model of technology education, teachers will lead students towards an understanding of technology as a process of fabricating prescribed artifacts with a view to increasing their industry standard psychomotor skills. This, they will argue, will help students gain useful employment in that field of industry. At the other end of the continuum, but still set within the behaviourist paradigm, the teacher might insist that the genetic modification of food is necessary in order to create more efficient production systems in agriculture, or that the only truly sustainable way of maintaining an electricity supply to meet current demands is by nuclear power. In these models, the teacher as expert provides the correct solutions to the prescribed questions. I will argue that this model forms the basis of what I will call a “hegemonic behaviourist cycle”. By this I mean that inculcation into a behaviourist system will serve to shape the learners’ actions when setting into practice what has been learned. I will begin by considering the way values can be formed in a behaviourist setting. I will then explore how technology education set within a behaviouristic system serves to produce unthinking students. I will then go on to explore a learning paradigm in which the formation of values relating to technology is seen as a social process. I will present an argument, in line with current educational thought, that a need now exists to abandon current behaviourist pedagogies and move towards a more broad based learning environment. This, I will argue, is necessary for the development of more informed attitudes about the impact that new and emerging technologies can have on individuals, societies and the world. Values relating to technology will be seen, in this model, to be co-constructed rather than imposed.     

基于演化范式的技术创新动力机制研究

演化范式的兴起和发展为重新审视技术创新动力机制问题提供了有益视角,应用其倡导的生物学隐喻研究方法,技术可以被理解为以技术知识作为基因型的表型。技术创新的动力一方面来源于技术知识的变化即新技术知识的生产。另一方面来自环境的激活作用,以此为主线可以构建一种有效的技术创新演化动力机制理论。     

产业网络成长范式研究：基于创新与互补性资产视角

施氏“产业微笑曲线”认为在成熟的产业经济中，能给产业带来高附加值的关键环节是研发设计和销售品牌环节。然而，随着产业价值链的分解，各个环节形成了大量相对独立厂商，那么原来仅仅依靠技术创新的成长范式已经远远不能够适应产业经济形势的发展，所产生的附加值也没有原来那么高。那么，产业经济需要新的成长发展范式，即企业之间根据不确定性组建产业网络，依靠互补性资产和持续创新实现产业经济的永续发展。