Voskeritsian, Horen
(2009)
Industrial relations in crisis?: the ‘new industrial relations' theory and the field of industrial relations in Britain.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
A common feeling among the Industrial Relations community is that the field faces a
crisis that challenges both its ability to address the phenomena it studies and its
institutional structures. However, the literature is not clear on the reasons for this
development. Some argue, predominantly in Britain, that the cause of this crisis is the
penetration of Human Resource Management (HRM) or, as this trend is also known,
of the New Industrial Relations (NIR) theory, in the intellectual and institutional edifice
of the field. Others, however, especially from the US, believe that the reason for the
inability of the field to deal with the external environment is its adherence to an oldfashioned
paradigm that does not take into consideration the changing nature of
industrial relations realities. For them, the solution is to incorporate the teachings of
the NIR theory in the intellectual corpus of Industrial Relations. Thus, one is faced
with two contradictory positions that have the same bases, namely that the field is in
a critical condition and that, somehow, a theory is involved (or should be involved) in
the picture. However, the discrepancy between the two theses poses important
conceptual problems for the future of the field for it is not as yet clear who is to blame
(if anyone) for its current situation.
It is, therefore, the aim of this Thesis to clarify the above picture. To achieve this,
both the above theses will be evaluated. To do so, it is imperative to study the
epistemological implications of the NIR theory for the field of Industrial Relations, and
then to examine the place the NIR theory occupies in the intellectual structures of the
field in Britain. Once this is achieved, the issue of crisis will be tackled in more detail
to determine whether British Industrial Relations actually face the crisis that the
various voices in the literature ascribe it with.
In the Introduction the general problem and the Research Questions of the Thesis
will be discussed. Then, the First Chapter will set the theoretical context upon which
the analysis will be based. Chapter Two will present the intellectual and institutional
development of the field of Industrial Relations, while Chapter Three will be devoted
to an analysis of the NIR theory. Chapter Four will examine the epistemic value of the
theory for the field of Industrial Relations and Chapter Five will investigate the
position that the NIR theory occupies in the British Industrial Relations fora of
knowledge development. Chapter Six will complement the above discussion by
examining the evolutionary dynamics of the NIR theory. In Chapter Seven the
intellectual status of Industrial Relations will be examined to see whether the field
faces an intellectual crisis. Then, Chapter Eight will analyse the dynamics of the field
in Britain to evaluate the condition of the field’s institutions. Finally, in Chapter Nine,
the institutional status of the field, together with some ideas about the field’s future
will be further discussed, and some promising avenues for future research will be
presented.
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