Industrial Relations Research in the United States

An analysis of the present state of United States academic industrial relations research is complicated by the absence of clear definition of the field. This was less of a problem during the forties and fifties, when industrial relations had a clear identity as an interdisciplinary, institutionally oriented, problem-oriented field centred heavily on developments in collective bargaining. During that period, scholars from a number of basic disciplines — economics, history, law, psychology and sociology — dealt with roughly similar problems and much of the work overlapped a single discipline. Today, however, collective bargaining practice has become somewhat stabilized and union-management relations serve less effectively as a central organizing focus for scholarly effort. As a consequence, the basic fields have grown apart and the number of scholars who identify their work with industrial relations has declined. Further, even among those who call their field industrial relations, many are concerned chiefly with ‘manpower’ problems relating to poverty and unemployment. Manpower studies have little to do with collective bargaining, and the boundary between manpower and mainstream economics is quite blurred. Thus the focus and boundaries of industrial relations have become increasingly vague. Fortunately, recent developments provide mild hope that new paradigms will develop.