Introduction

After the uptick in strike activity from the summer of 2022 onwards, it may seem a strange question to ask but, nonetheless: what if there were no strikes in any of the years of the rest of the decade in Britain? What would this mean, and what would its overall significance be? Asking these questions at the very outset helps to get straight to the heart of, arguably, the most salient issue for those studying conflict at work in the present period. This is that the existence of conflict1 within the employment relationship and the expression of that conflict, in whatever form, are not synonymous with each other. They should merely be thought of as overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. Put even more bluntly, the likes of strikes are but the symptoms of conflict and not its causes.2 Therefore, it is possible to have conflict in the employment relationship without any overt expressions of that conflict, mostly obviously, in the form of strikes. Of course, that does mean that it is often harder to then spot the manifestations of conflict without the overt signs of it. Under capitalism, the primary axis of conflict in the employment relationship is between the material interests of capital (employers and management) and those of labour (employees and workers). Alongside these material interests, power and ideology are the other principal and related components in the employment relationship and thus wider economy and society. They form a mutually reinforcing troika within a system based upon the drive to accumulate profits (surplus value) through the exploitation of labour and in competition with other units of capital.

Asking these initial questions about strikes is not an abstract exercise, as will be argued shortly. Asking them helps form the starting point for trying to cast some fresh light on some age-old issues about conflict at work by asking a number of other questions. One of these is: ‘Why do those studying industrial relations still think that spending time looking at the conflict between capital and labour within the employment relationship under capitalism is worthwhile?’ Another is: ‘Why do the most important expressions of conflict predominantly take collective forms?’

Introduction

In the UK, the scholarly disciplines of industrial relations (IR) and labour law have common roots, above all, in the pioneering work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Since the 1980s, the field, or fields, of study have been transformed, in part, by complex and partially intertwined processes of ‘juridification’ and human resource (HR) managerialization. Notwithstanding the shared heritage of labour law and IR, deepening disciplinary silos have meant that these processes have been studied, for the most part, in isolation from one another. Today, the ‘fissuring’ and precarization of work suggests the need for a sociology, or economic sociology, of labour law that would bring together empirical study and normative legal reasoning to identify the kind of law that might help to create more secure and equitable working relations in a wide variety of work settings.

Intertwined roots, forking branches

Sidney and Beatrice Webb are often cited as the founders of the field of IR (Kaufman, 2014). As part of IR's ‘pre-history’ (Voskiterian, 2010: 9), the Webbs provided a detailed account of the emergence and development of trade unionism, in which they identified a very significant role in the struggle for working-class emancipation for the ‘method of legal enactment’ – in combination with the methods of mutual insurance and collective bargaining (Webb and Webb, 1897). They also proposed a sophisticated understanding of collective bargaining as creating a kind of ‘Magna Carta’ for industry, performing an analogous function to political constitutions, namely, limiting the otherwise absolute power of the sovereign, or employer, and establishing democratic decision-making procedures instead. From the Webbs, scholars of IR and labour law alike inherited a shared conception of IR institutions, including law, as ‘context specific’, changing over time and assuming different forms in different locations (Flanders and Clegg, 1954a). Institutions were understood to be shaped, above all, by class conflict and power disparities, and by other features of the wider political economy. The dominant tradition in IR, as represented by the Oxford School, was oriented towards policy making and placed particular emphasis on the discovery of practically useful knowledge through the application of empirical and comparative methods, in preference to abstract, grand theory (Ackers and Wilkinson, 2005).

Introduction

Since it was first introduced by Alan Fox in the 1960s, ‘frames of reference’ has been an enduring concept within the field of industrial relations. It refers to the broad interpretations of the nature of the employment relationship held either by actors in the real world of industrial relations – workers, employers and policy makers – or by academic commentators. In his first use of the term, Fox (1966) drew a distinction between a unitary frame of reference – grounded in the belief that the employment relationship was essentially cooperative and that employers and employees shared common interests whose advance was best secured through the exercise of management prerogative – and a pluralist frame, which recognized that conflict was integral to the employment relationship and that, as a consequence, employees needed independent representation through trade unions and collective bargaining to safeguard their separate interests. In a later formulation, Fox identified a third, radical frame, which emphasized the exploitative nature of employment within capitalist societies and was critical of the pluralist perspective for promoting employee accommodation with this prevailing system (Fox, 1974).

In the period since Fox was writing, researchers have continued to use the frame concept both to analyse the beliefs of industrial relations actors and to identify and reflect upon competing traditions within the academic field (Heery, 2016; Budd et al, 2021; Dobbins et al, 2021; Kaufman et al, 2021). Later writers have often labelled frames differently and have sometimes identified more frames than the three sketched by Fox, but they share his concern to identify broad perspectives on the employment relationship that include both analytical and normative claims grounded in very different assumptions about the relative interests of workers and their employers (Budd and Bhave, 2008; Godard, 2017; Barry and Wilkinson, 2021). In what follows, there is an attempt to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the frame concept and to show how unitary, pluralist and radical/critical perspectives remain identifiable within the academic field of industrial relations.

Frames of reference

Frames of reference are rooted in competing interpretations of the relative interests of employers and workers, and can be placed on a continuum along which the interests of the two sides are fully congruent at one end and absolutely conflicting at the other.

Introduction

This chapter identifies the key changes that have been taking place in the labour market and how these are affecting people's experience of work and employment. Employment relations as a subject takes a different perspective on labour (Rubery, 2005, 2015) than that found in a standard economics text. Instead of focusing on the market and the aggregate demand and supply of different categories of labour, employment relations recognizes that most people are in jobs and not seeking to enter or change employment at any one point in time. Employment relationships thus depend on the characteristics of the organizations that are employing the workforce, the factors that lead to people entering the labour force and seeking employment, and the factors shaping their terms and conditions. Key recent trends on both demand and supply sides have led to significant change in these three dimensions: employing organizations have been transformed by the trends of financialization and fragmentation, seeking financial returns and lower costs and responsibilities through outsourcing; and the labour supply has been transformed by its increasing feminization. The key word to describe changes in the conditions of employment is ‘flexibilization’, reflecting not only changes in employer orientations and practices, as well as changes in the labour supply, but also changing employment regulations, uses of employment contracts and welfare state practices. This analysis of the labour market pre-dates the COVID-19 pandemic in two senses: not only were the trends visible long before COVID-19 but the first draft of the chapter was also completed before COVID-19. The main text is thus complemented by an extended conclusion that both explores the implications of COVID-19 and, indeed, the subsequent cost-of-living crisis for these longer-term trends, and considers the likely direction and force of future trends without a reversal of current policy agendas.

The changing nature of employing organizations

Four key trends have been reshaping the demand side of the labour market: the sectoral shift towards service activities; the increasingly global organization of both manufacturing and service operations (Gereffi, 2012); the fragmentation of employing organizations through the use of outsourcing (Marchington et al, 2005; Weil, 2017); and the financialization of companies, which is reorienting their key objectives and behaviour (Froud et al, 2006; Appelbaum and Batt, 2014).

Work on so-called ‘new actors’ in industrial relations (Heery and Frege, 2006; Cooke and Wood, 2014) has not only added to our knowledge and understanding of industrial relations but also highlighted its distinctiveness and vitality as a field of study, and expanded its boundaries. But what do we mean by an industrial relations ‘actor’? Influenced by Dunlop's (1958) concept of an ‘industrial relations system’, the field was traditionally dominated by a concern with understanding collective relations between workers, represented by trade unions, and employers, often organized in employers’ associations (Heery and Frege, 2006). The label ‘new’ can thus be applied to actors – individuals, organizations, institutions and movements – that either did not used to have much of a role in industrial relations or did have one but were neglected.

Much of the credit for stimulating a greater concern with new actors must go to Bellemare (2000). His study of the Canadian city of Montreal showed the important influence over industrial relations exercised by public transport users. The work of bus drivers, for example, was affected in some important ways by the attitudes and expectations of passengers. Bellemare's (2000) principal theoretical contribution was to conceptualize the nature of an industrial relations actor based on the extent of their involvement at three levels – the workplace, the organization and wider society, respectively – and their impact. Further studies of ‘end users’ in health and social care highlight their importance as actors in industrial relations. For example, the activities of patients’ representatives can influence how individual staff are managed in hospital settings (Bellemare et al, 2018). Moreover, empowering users of care services has important implications for how carers’ work is organized (Kessler and Bach, 2011). However, Bellemare's (2000) approach, with its emphasis on being influential at all three levels and the continuity of such influence, is perhaps too restrictive, potentially excluding actors who play an important part in industrial relations but whose involvement is restricted to a single level or is intermittent (Abbott, 2006; Kessler and Bach, 2011).

In the case of certain actors, it is not that they are necessarily ‘new’ but rather that their role has become more prominent or better understood. Some examples are as follows. John Logan (2006) detailed the important contribution made by anti-union law firms and consultants to corporate efforts to suppress unionization in the US.

Introduction

Reflecting the surge in online delivery under COVID-19, UK government figures show significant growth in logistics, warehouse and transport jobs during the pandemic (ONS, 2021a). Typically non-standard, low paid and closely monitored, the character of jobs in this sector raises questions about flexible labour markets and notions of ‘self-employment’. Terms including ‘precarity’, ‘gig’ and ‘platform’ work now arguably dominate the narrative within the field of work and industrial relations. Yet, the wider academic discourse on ‘flexible’ work has been with us far longer: Pollert (1988) dismantled flexibility, along with the concept of dual labour markets, in 1988. Her analysis revealed the way in which contemporary analysts were prone to conflate under flexibility the distinct processes of job enlargement, effort intensification and cost controls. The same tendency can be seen in recent accounts that invoke flexibility to mask management prerogative, work degradation and job insecurity. This chapter reviews ‘new’ forms of work organization through the lens of parcel delivery. It explores notions of flexibility and work autonomy, and focuses on the contradictory relationship between digital technology and self-employment.

At the end of the supply chain: parcel delivery and flexible labour markets

‘Essential’ parcel-delivery workers in the UK are particularly emblematic of work in the contemporary economy. With the growth of online retailing and business models embracing a myriad of subcontracted supply chains, transformations in parcel delivery have been directed at securing more exacting, demanding and time-critical levels of service delivery at minimum cost. Increasingly complex information technology (IT) systems provide coherence to fragmented employment systems, as well as tracking the movement of parcels under the gaze of the final customer. Amazon and other large retailers entice their customers with ‘free and immediate’ delivery, which relies upon the supply of flexible and closely monitored labour at minimum cost. Overall, the result is an increasingly competitive market for parcel delivery companies, dominated by intense supply chain pressures and fissured workplaces resulting in a degradation of work for parcel-delivery workers (Moore and Newsome, 2018).

For delivery companies, the time incurred by non-delivery represents a crucial cost. The use of so-called ‘self-employed’ delivery workers paid by delivery removes these costs, as labour time incurred in non-delivery is unpaid.

Introduction

The field of industrial relations does not have a unified grand theory, and attempts to build it have never had a lasting success. As a social science field of study, it draws on theoretical paradigms from different disciplines to frame theoretical statements on the meanings, causes and effects of the processes it studies. The frequent statement that it suffers from atheoretical empiricism is unwarranted: theoretical articles and books are among the most cited in industrial relations journals, yet theory in industrial relations often remains implicit.

This reflection takes the form of a journey through the main theoretical contributions that have appeared on the idea of crisis as the focal point of the ‘labour problem’ notion at the centre of the field of industrial relations. The raison d’être of industrial relations comes from the indeterminacy and antagonism inherent to the employment relationship, which make existing disciplines (economics, psychology, law and so on) unable to fully conceptualize it. The ‘labour problem’ has emerged most sharply in the phenomenon of ‘crisis’, not only as a social crisis of order and inequality but also as a political and economic crisis. Not all industrial relations theorizing is directly about crisis, but even that about order exists in the shadow of the possibility or memory of crisis, as in the idea that a functioning industrial relations system should regulate industrial conflict in a well-ordered way. This journey will therefore follow the various crises of capitalism as the milestones of theoretical reflection about work.

Economic crisis and industrial relations theory

The history of capitalism has been a history of crises, even if some extended periods of growth, such as the Fordist/Keynesian postwar decades, had given the impression that the risk of crisis had been forever removed. From the beginning, as can be seen in Marx's works between the 1850s and 1860s, it has been difficult to distinguish between (cyclical) ‘capitalist crises’ and ‘the capitalist crisis’. Following, approximately, the Kondratieff waves, the most remarkable financial crises in the capitalist era have been those of 1847, 1893, 1929, 1973 and 2008 – followed by the ‘exogenous’ crisis of 2020. All of these moments have marked social thought about work, at the same time as they led to deep political change.

We are very pleased to introduce the next volume in this book series, Understanding Work and Employment Relations. The Value of Industrial Relations: Contemporary Work and Employment in Britain, a multi-authored edited collection edited by series editors Andy Hodder and Stephen Mustchin, is the fourth text to be published in the series.

This series has been designed as a space for both monographs and edited volumes to highlight the latest research and commentary in the academic field of employment relations. The series is associated with the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA), which marked 70 years of existence in 2020. The series seeks to draw on the expertise of the membership of BUIRA and contributions to its annual conference, as well as employment relations academics from around the world. Employment relations is a mature field of study and continues to be of relevance to academic and practitioner audiences alike. BUIRA recognizes the broad nature of the field of employment relations, and acknowledges that the field of study is constantly developing and evolving. BUIRA regards employment relations to be the study of the relation, control and governance of work and the employment relationship. It is the study of rules (both formal and informal) regarding job regulation and the ‘reward-effort bargain’. These issues remain relevant today, in an era where the standard employment relationship has become increasingly fragmented due to employers’ pursuit of labour flexibility, and we see the continued expansion of the gig or platform economy. Employment relations (and adjacent research areas including human resource management and the sociology of work) is taught widely in universities around the world, most commonly in business and management schools and departments. The field of study is multidisciplinary, encompassing law, politics, history, geography, sociology and economics. HRM has a tendency to focus uncritically on management objectives, without exploring issues of work and employment in their wider socio-economic context, and has its disciplinary roots in psychology, whereas employment relations retains a strong critical social science tradition. As scholars in this area, we feel that there is a need for regular, up-to-date, research-focused books that reflect current work in the field and go further than standard introductory texts.

Introduction

The role of the state in the UK has been the subject of extensive discussion within the industrial relations literature. All states, to some extent, have their idiosyncrasies; however, the historical fault lines and the progressive fragmentation of the state in the UK are curious characteristics, the consequences of which have become clearer in a context of increasing neoliberalism and labour market fragmentation. Yet, what is noticeable are the fundamental contradictions and tensions in the economic and social remits of the state – something that industrial relations scholars have studied and highlighted across a range of issues. As discussed later, much of the debate that engages with the changing nature of the state does not explicitly frame itself in terms of ‘the state’; however, it does form an interesting set of insights about the contradictory and ongoing interventionist nature of the state in the UK. The chapter will show how the debate on the state has been key to industrial relations in various ways, though not always in an explicit manner. Furthermore, different periods of debate within industrial relations have captured the changing character of the state, as explored later. More recently, there has been increasing attention paid to the way in which the state has remained a significant factor in the context of a greater emphasis on marketization and what is often labelled ‘neoliberalism’, albeit in a decentred and increasingly contradictory fashion. The contribution of industrial relations academics to the debate on the state is therefore more engaging than first meets the eye, partly because the discipline has always been concerned with addressing some of the more informal and discreet features of regulation.

The problem of the UK state: trust and industrial relations autonomy

Keeping the state out of the direct regulation of worker representation and collective action has been a mainstream characteristic of UK industrial relations – supported by organized labour and capital – since the early 20th century. Recent work by Dorey (2019) on the then Labour government's attempts to reform industrial conflict and worker representation in the 1960s shows us how strong the defence of an autonomous sphere of worker representation was in shaping the debate on the state's reach, even as intervention was increasing elsewhere in terms of welfare and health services.

Introduction

Human resource management (HRM), as a field of study, has evolved since its entry onto a 1980s’ ‘enterprise culture’ that prized ideological individualism and hard business performance (Guest, 1990). In this chapter, we argue that HRM can have three uses: ‘as a field of study’, addressing factors influencing how people are managed; as a specific model delivering firmlevel ‘competitive advantage’, for example, high-commitment management (HCM) or high-performance work systems (HPWS); or as a ‘normative perspective’, for example, searching for best practice or best-fit human resource (HR) arrangements. We suggest that approaching HRM ‘as a field of study’ reflects a more eclectic and pluralist approach concerned with external contextual forces, as well as internal social relationship dynamics (see Boxall and Purcell, 2016; Dundon et al, 2022).

Within the realm of work and employment, ‘human resource management’ threatened to supplant the nomenclature of ‘industrial relations’ (IR), which has rather different epistemological and ontological underpinnings (Ackers and Wilkinson, 2003). With the decline of institutional IR (Purcell, 1993), contemporary HRM was seen by some to fill gaps in the coverage of modern working life shaped by the emergent ‘enterprise culture’ of the 1980s. While there were some battles in the 1980s and into the early 1990s around the distinctions between personnel management (PM) and HRM (Guest, 1987), or whether HRM and IR had arrived at an accommodation of some common ground related to issues of work and employment, by the new millennium, there was an altogether different threat to both IR and HRM in terms of the intellectual space from a growing psychologization of the subject area (Godard, 2014; Kaufman, 2020; Barry and Wilkinson, 2021).

While being seen as part of a US neoliberal and hyper-individualistic agenda, HRM has evolved, at least in the UK, to reflect a variety of approaches, with each of which seeking to understand the tensions and issues affecting people in work and employment. We acknowledge that this HRM mix can be seen much more in the likes of the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand than in North America, where HRM has been seen more as applied psychology and IR is often seen as a branch of labour economics (Kaufman, 2014).

Introduction

The celebration of 70 years of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA) is an apt time to consider contemporary challenges and discussions within industrial relations (IR), and this chapter is a contribution to those discussions. More specifically, it examines the relationship between intersectionality and IR, which continues to be ambiguous, undefined and full of tensions. At the same time, it is full of conceptual, theoretical, methodological and empirical possibilities. In 2006 and 2015, Holgate et al (2006) and McBride et al (2015), respectively, challenged us to pay more attention to gender, difference and intersectionality in the field of work and employment relations. More recently, Heery (2016: 171, 197) has noted that engagement with the gendered nature of the employment relationship is one of the most ‘noticeable changes in writing about work and employment in recent times’, with intersectionality ‘currently the hottest concept within critical writing on equality and diversity’. This chapter is an attempt to more critically examine the use of the concept of intersectionality within IR and engage with the recent call by Lee and Tapia (2021: 1) for the ‘incorporation of critical race and intersectional theory into IR to address the erasure of vital counter-narratives and to expand our empirical cases for labor and employment research’.

Within the confines of this short chapter, and inspired by Edward Said's (1983) idea of a travelling theory and Salem's (2018) application of it in relation to intersectionality, we explore how intersectionality, as grounded in discussions within feminist critical race theory, has been treated in IR scholarship. We develop our arguments from the reading of approximately 30 articles published in IR and IR-associated journals using the terms ‘intersectional’ and ‘intersectionality’. While this continues to be ‘work in progress’, we identify three trends from this initial scoping of such texts and a spectrum of usage. This ranges from the symbolic – where the term ‘intersectionality’ justifies the study of a more representative sample of workers, with no reference to its origins in critical race theory – through to those articles that actively engage with the concept as a means of using critical race theory to raise challenging questions for IR scholarship. We recognize the discussion of labour issues in other journals and return to a consideration of these work-related studies appearing outside of IR.