How the field of industrial relations remains relevant for understanding the global political economy of work

This chapter demonstrates the continued relevance of the industrial relations field for understanding work and employment. Having collective labour organisations, and the nature (and governance) of the employment relationship - that is multi-level power relations - at the centre of analyses remains pertinent for understanding the political economy of work in both the Global North and South. The field has moved beyond the dominant focus on, not just trade unions, but long-established unions, to include spontaneous issue-based movements and mobilisations as well as the movements that have emerged in the ‘gig economy’. Industrial relations academics have turned to studying these movements as they have emerged, and the balance of research in the field has shifted, largely, in line with the changes in the nature of labour conflicts and worker organising. Underlying these turns in the field we find the added value of industrial relations approaches, that research is empirically based and (often) embedded within and politically aligned to the sites of resistance and communities of struggle, which helps us understand and theorise the shifts in relations of power in the political economy of work. The chapter demonstrates the continued relevance of industrial relations through a discussion of developments and evolutions in traditional approaches, and two sets of contemporary contributions in the field. First, mobilisation theory and frameworks for understanding the micro social processes of collectivism, and, second, the theoretical and empirical developments in comparative industrial relations, particularly in the dynamic and interactive frameworks for understanding precarious work and solidarity, which reveal new forms of industrial relations and how relations reinforce each other and change.