Table Of Content

FRONTMAT.qxd 8/25/2004 11:56 AM Page i INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS RESEARCH ASSOCIATION SERIES Theoretical Perspectives on Work and the Employment Relationship EDITED BY Bruce E. Kaufman FRONTMAT.qxd 8/25/2004 11:56 AM Page ii THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON WORK AND THE EMPLOYMENT RELA- TIONSHIP. Copyright © 2004 by Industrial Relations Research Association. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of the book may be used without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. First Edition ISBN 0-913447-88-9 Price: $29.95 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS RESEARCH ASSOCIATION SERIES: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting Annual Research Volume IRRA 2002 Membership Directory (published every four years) IRRA Newsletter (published quarterly) Perspectives on Work(published biannually) Inquiries and other communications regarding membership, meetings, publications, and general affairs of the association, as well as notice of address changes, should be addressed to the IRRA office. INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS RESEARCH ASSOCIATION University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 121 Labor and Industrial Relations Building 504 East Armory Avenue Champaign, IL 61820 Telephone: 217/333-0072 • Fax: 217/265-5130 Internet: www.irra.uiuc.edu (cid:127) E-mail: [email protected] ii FRONTMAT.qxd 8/25/2004 11:56 AM Page iii To Jack Barbash, John Dunlop, and Noah Meltz, leaders in the development of industrial relations theory FRONTMAT.qxd 8/25/2004 11:56 AM Page iv FRONTMAT.qxd 8/25/2004 11:56 AM Page v CONTENTS PREFACE................................................................................................ V Bruce E.Kaufman CHAPTER1—Theoretical Approaches to Industrial Relations............ 1 Walther Müller-Jentsch CHAPTER2—Employment Relations and the Employment Relations System: A Guide to Theorizing...................... 41 Bruce E. Kaufman CHAPTER3—Employment Systems: Workplace HRM Strategies and Labor Institutions................................... 77 David Marsden CHAPTER4—Work, Employment, and the Individual........................ 105 E. Kevin Kelloway, Daniel G. Gallagher, and Julian Barling CHAPTER5—Labor Process Theory, Work, and the Employment Relation........................................................................... 133 Paul Thompson and Kirsty Newsome CHAPTER6—Theories of the Employment Relationship: Choosing between Norms and Contracts...................... 163 Michael L. Wachter CHAPTER7—Why a Balance Is Best: The Pluralist Industrial Relations Paradigm of Balancing Competing Interests.......................................................................... 195 John W. Budd, Rafael Gomez, and Noah M. Meltz CHAPTER8—The New Institutionalism, Capitalist Diversity, and Industrial Relations........................................................ 229 John Godard CHAPTER9—Is Industrial Relations Theory Always Ethnocentric?... 265 Richard Hyman CHAPTER10—International Comparative Employment Relations Theory: Developing the Political Economy Perspective................................................... 293 Roderick Martin and Greg J. Bamber CHAPTER11—Toward an Integrative Theory of Human Resource Management................................................. 321 Bruce E. Kaufman About the Contributors........................................................................ 367 v FRONTMAT.qxd 8/25/2004 11:56 AM Page vi FRONTMAT.qxd 8/25/2004 11:56 AM Page vii Preface Most of the research volumes published by the Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA) over the years have been on relatively applied, problem-driven topics. This orientation reflects both the nature of the field and the IRRA’s mix of academic and practitioner members. In something of a departure, I proposed to the association’s Executive Committee that the 2004 volume pursue a more overtly theoretical and academic topic. The topic proposed was industrial relations theory— rephrased for sake of generality and broad acceptance to “theoretical perspectives on work and the employment relationship.” The motivations for proposing this theme were threefold. The first was that the topic has considerable intrinsic interest and presents great opportunities for further advance. Ever since the industrial relations (IR) field coalesced into its modern form after World War II, leading thinkers in the field have sought to develop an integrative theory of industrial relations—or at least an overarching conceptual framework— in order to tie the disparate branches of the field together and guide empirical work and policy debate. The intrinsic interest of this project arises from the fact that theorizing gets to the core of what science is about, and few subjects are as important or interesting for theorizing in the social sciences as work and employment. Success in this endeavor, however, has been only partial and piecemeal, despite the best efforts of some of the field’s leading thinkers, and thus many exciting new ideas and theoretical insights remain to be discovered and developed. Since the IRRA was founded to promote research on all aspects of labor, a volume on IR theory seemed both highly relevant and timely. The second motivation came from the long-term decline in the academic fortunes of industrial relations and my desire to reverse this trend. As numerous people in the field have observed, industrial relations in this country—and to some substantial degree in many other countries of the world—has in the last two decades suffered a significant loss of intellectual energy and scholarly participation. The root causes are diverse, but surely one is the failure to develop a more substantial, integrative theoretical base for the field. To survive and prosper, an academic field must attract a critical mass of “paying customers” through one or a combination of three routes: by providing a body of theory or set of tools that attracts scholars because these ideas or methods are vii FRONTMAT.qxd 8/25/2004 11:56 AM Page viii highly productive in the conduct of scientific research, by addressing a real-world practice area or set of applied problems that is of sufficient breadth and depth of interest that it attracts a sizable body of students and considerable attention from policy makers, or by focusing on a subject that for ethical, ideological, or other normative reasons is deemed sufficiently important that numerous universities are moved to include it in their academic programs. The latter two have been the primary base of support for industrial relations in American universities in the post–World War II period but have weakened considerably in recent decades with the substantial decline in the power and size of the labor movement. Thus, one strategy for renewal of the IR field is to turn to the theory and methods dimension and work to strengthen it, which is in part what this volume seeks to accomplish. The third reason for undertaking this volume was suggested by Kurt Lewin’s well-known aphorism “There is nothing as practical as a good theory.” On the face of it, academic theorizing can be a highly esoteric and sometimes eye-glazing exercise of seemingly little relevance or applicability to people with practical problems to solve in the real world of industry and government. Recognizing this side of the matter, another far more positive side to theorizing also exists. The job of theory is to explain why A leads to B and under what conditions. A moment’s reflection reveals that without a backbone of theory, every recom- mended workplace practice and employment policy is, at the end of the day, no more than someone’s opinion or informed conjecture. A specific practice or policy may work in one situation, but we cannot be sure why it works or whether it will work in a different situation. In other words, practice and policy without theory are essentially ad hoc and always in danger of confusing correlation with causation. A theory, even if couched in a few words or a simple diagram, helps turn opinion and educated guesses into scientific propositions that have greater reliability, explanatory insight, and predictive power. Does higher pay elicit more work effort from employees? Should more firms adopt “high-perfor- mance” work practices? Do unions hinder or promote firm perfor- mance? A plausible, well-constructed theory is essential to answering all these types of questions—questions, I note, that are of great practical importance. The IRRA’s Executive Committee accepted these arguments and approved the volume. As part of the proposal, I pledged to include a mix of chapters that would be both inclusive and diverse: inclusive of the numerous disciplines, fields of study, and points of view that are contained within industrial relations and diverse with respect to subject areas and authors’ backgrounds. Another goal was to attract a comple- ment of well-recognized, leading scholars but also to open the door to viii FRONTMAT.qxd 8/25/2004 11:56 AM Page ix younger, less-established researchers doing significant work in the area of IR theory. For the most part these goals have been met. I sent out a call for papers using the IRRA newsletter and various Web sites and e-mail dis- tribution lists, explicitly aiming to reach not only IRRA members but also nonmembers in North America and other countries around the world. (Nonmembers are always potential new members!) A number of telephone calls soliciting author suggestions and commitments from prominent people in the field were also made. The result of these efforts is the 11 chapters contained in this volume. I believe readers will find these chapters to be a high-quality, in- sightful, and welcome contribution to the literature on IR theory. I also think they are fitting tribute to the legacy of Jack Barbash, John Dunlop, and Noah Meltz, three longtime IRRA members who made major con- tributions to IR theory and to whom this volume is dedicated. (Meltz passed away while his chapter in this volume was at a preliminary stage of development.) The 11 chapters are inclusive and diverse in that they span the gamut of subjects related to the employment relationship and provide a wide range of perspectives and theoretical orientations. The chapter topics extend, for example, from the micro or individual level to the macro or nation-state level; include fields such as organizational behav- ior, human resource management, economics, sociology, comparative politics, and history; and include various perspectives ranging from Marxist to managerialist and institutional to neoclassical. In several respects the authors are also quite diverse. People from five countries (Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, United States) are represented, as are authors from management departments, business schools, industrial relations departments, economics departments, and law schools. Two dimensions of diversity are less well met: female authors and younger authors. Despite concerted efforts to obtain more of both, success was modest. Very few of either write on IR theory, and an even smaller number answered the call for papers. Also unfortunate, one of the chapters commissioned for the volume written by both a female and younger author could not be completed. One final aspect of the chapter lineup deserves brief mention. Two chapters were commissioned but for regrettable reasons could not be completed. One was a survey of regulation theory (the French regulation school); the second was on theory in human resource management (HRM). I deemed the latter chapter to be crucial but did not learn that the original authors would be unable to complete it until very close to the publishing deadline. I immediately asked two other well-known scholars in the HRM field to take over the chapter, but when they ix FRONTMAT.qxd 8/25/2004 11:56 AM Page x learned that it had to be finished in a very short time period and had to contain new, original research, both demurred. Rather than have no chapter on HRM, I took a deep breath and wrote the chapter myself. In closing, I wish to thank all the authors for their patience, coopera- tion, and hard work; Paula Wells of the IRRA for her unflagging dedica- tion and valuable help and advice in all phases of this project; and Karen Bojda for excellent copyediting. BRUCE E. KAUFMAN x