The Processes of Good Industrial Relations

The proponents of structural reform emphasise that the creation of a formal system of industrial relations in the workplace or at company level is the most effective way to achieve good industrial relations. The benefits seem so extensive that surely all men and women of goodwill in industry would be bound to adopt and seek to maintain a system of this sort? Why then do we still encounter difficulties characterised by workplace disorder? Is it because of the British ‘indifference to the notion of highly structured institutions’, as Marsh has suggested (1973: 163). Or is it that the experience of day-to-day industrial relations, of coping, if only just, has led the parties to assume ‘that there is nothing to manage or administer since all is improvisation; that it is impossible, and even undesirable, to extract … any coherent strain of policy, or even any programme, of developing relationships between workers and management’ (ibid: 171)? Or is it that what the structural reformers were really concerned with was a radical change in attitudes and in the quality of inter-party and interpersonal relationships which were somehow assumed to flow from the adoption of new structures?