Perspectives and Approaches - LSEpersonal.lse.ac.uk/fregec/PDF articles/2008 chp The History of... · [12:56 18/12/2007 5055-Blyton-Ch02.tex] Paper: a4 Job No: 5055 Blyton: Industrial

[12:56 18/12/2007 5055-Blyton-Ch02.tex] Paper: a4 Job No: 5055 Blyton: Industrial Relations (SAGE Handbook) Page: 33 33–52

PART ONE

Perspectives and Approaches



2The History of Industrial

Relations as a Field of Study

C a r o l a F r e g e

Industrial relations (IR) broadly defined asthe study of work and employment, wasestablished as an independent academic fieldin the 1920s in the US and subsequentlyafter WWII in Britain and other Anglophonecountries.1 Though originally established byUS institutional economists it soon becameto be seen as an interdisciplinary fieldincorporating labor economists, social psy-chologists, personnel management scholars,industrial sociologists, labor lawyers as wellas political scientists working on labor issues.In continental Europe and indeed in the rest ofthe world research on work and employmentremained, however, a subject within thosesocial science disciplines.

This chapter starts by outlining the differenthistorical developments of IR research in theUS and Britain as two examples of Anglo-phone countries with the longest traditionsin IR research. It is then contrasted withthe developments in Germany as an exampleof continental Europe. A major finding isthat research traditions and outcomes differfrom country to country and challenge the

classical notion of the universality of scientificresearch. This chapter argues instead for theembeddedness of IR research in national-specific path dependencies.

INSTITUTIONAL HISTORIESOF IR RESEARCH

The industrial revolution and its socialconsequences in Europe and the US inthe nineteenth and early twentieth centuryincreasingly drew scholars from a varietyof emerging social sciences (for examplelaw, economics, political science, sociology)to engage in the analysis of the mechanicsof capitalism and the ‘social question’, inparticular the ‘labor problem’ (poverty andsocial unrest related to the industrialization)(Katznelson, 1996). In the US and Britain (andsubsequently in other Anglophone regions) anindependent field of study of employment,industrial or labor relations, developed atthe beginning of the twentieth century.


36 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS

As outlined before, this development didnot occur in the rest of the world, inparticular not in continental Europe, whereIR research remained multi-disciplinary,conducted mainly by sociologists, politicalscientists and lawyers. The different insti-tutional developments across countries areaccompanied by specific research traditionsexemplified in different methods, theories andparadigms.

In the following sections I will brieflyoutline the historical development of IRresearch in the three countries.2 Generalizingand classifying national traditions is a poten-tially problematic task. Research is neverhomogeneous and there are always alternativelines of research. Note that this chapter doesnot attempt to achieve a complete coverage ofthe field of study in each country but merelywishes to outline its main, comparativelydistinctive features.

United States

The first IR course in the US was createdat the University of Wisconsin in 1920.Other universities such as the University ofPennsylvania (Wharton Business School,1921) and Princeton (1922) and Harvard(1923) followed. In the same year the NationalAssociation of Employment Managerschanged its name to the IRAA (IndustrialRelations Association of America), whichwas a forerunner of the current professionalassociation, IRRA/LERA (Labor andEmployment Relations Association), whichwas created in 1947. After the end ofWorld War II IR became increasinglyinstitutionalized as an independent field ofstudy in various US universities.

Historically IR as an academic field wasfounded in the US by institutional or politicaleconomists, such as Richard Ely, Henry CarterAdams and John Commons (the founder ofthe Wisconsin School), who were heavilyinfluenced by the German historical schoolof economics and felt increasingly alien-ated in their economics departments whichbegan to turn towards neoclassical paradigmsat the beginning of the twentieth century

(Hodgson, 2001). One can argue therefore thatthe ‘new political economy’ or institutionaleconomics arose in reaction to the ascendanceof the laissez-faire perspective within eco-nomics. The institutional economists found inIR a niche to pursue pragmatic, behaviorist,public-policy oriented research which tookinstitutional constraints in the labor marketinto account (Jacoby, 1990; Kaufman, 1993).Ideally, this perspective focused on the rulesand norms underpinning economic activity,viewing institutions of work and employmentas embedded within, and largely inseparablefrom, broader social, economic, and politicalinstitutions (Godard, 1994: 1).

One should note that these early theo-rists were not radical progressives however,but liberals and conservatives at the sametime. They were liberals in their desirefor reforming some of the social processesoperating in the US society and conservativesin their desire to preserve the contoursof a capitalist system and the parametersof wealth and power therein (DeBrizzi,1983: 8). As Commons would have put it,they wanted to preserve capitalism by makingit good. It comes as no surprise that whenthe IRAA was established in 1920 the toppositions were taken over by pro-managementconservatives. Their publication Personnelbecame dominated by the conservatives andadopted a strident anti-communist tone thatspilled over into more general anti-laborsentiments (in particular against militantworkers) but continued to remain agnosticon the question of collective bargaining(Kimmel, 2000: 197).

Moreover, the pioneers of the field in theAnglophone world, Commons in the US andthe Webbs in Britain, were heavily engaged inthe world of public policy (Hyman, 2001). IRwas therefore developed as a policy orientedfield of research, thus devoted to problem-solving (Kaufman, 2004: 117).

IR in the US arose as a relatively pragmatic,socially progressive reform movement, thus

occupying a position in the progressive centre tomoderate left on issues of politics and economics,and spanning a diverse and not entirely consistentrange of opinion with liberal business leaders on the


THE HISTORY OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS AS A FIELD OF STUDY 37

more conservative side of the field and moderatesocialists on the more radical side. (Kaufman,2004: 2)

The aim was to solve the labor problemwithout threatening capitalism. As Kaufman(2004: 121) states ‘the goals of efficiency,equity and human self-development weremutually served by an active, broad-rangingprogramme of social and industrial reform’.In other words, IR sought major change in thelegal rights, management, and conditions oflabor in industry, but at the same time wasconservative and non-Marxist in that it soughtto reform the existing social order rather thanreplace it with a new one. In fact, Marxistswere antagonistic to the new field of IR sinceit sought to save through reform what theyhoped to replace by revolution (Kaufman,1993: 5).

At the same time, HR practitioners (or whatwas formerly called personnel management)and managerial scholars also became inter-ested in the wider field of work andemployment (Kaufman, 1993: 19). Alreadyin the 1910s there was increasing inter-est in the scientific engineering of humancapital, as symbolized in the work byFrederick W. Taylor (Principles of ScientificManagement, 1911). According to Kimmel(2000: 5), by the end of WWI, however,academic researchers and practitioners inpersonnel management split in two camps,the ‘reformists’ and ‘managerialists’. Thereformists adopted liberal values and contin-ued to support progressive ideas of capitalistreforms and saw a role for personnel managersto meditate between workers and employersinterests. ‘They defined their professionaltask as the regulation of labor relationsin the public interest and the oversightof collective dealings between employersand employees’ (Kimmel, 2000: 6). Thesescholars and practitioners would borrow fromthe theory and methods of the institutionallabor economists. They were part of a widerprogressive group of policy makers andscholars from different disciplines who cameto the joint conviction that modern industrieswould need reform such as an employ-ment department which would promote

employee welfare, for example (Commons,1919: 167).

The managerialists, on the other side ofthe spectrum, embraced, according to Kimmel(2000), scientific expertise and objectivity asthe defining features of their profession andassumed a harmony between employers andemployees. Their task was to discover thesource of problems in ‘sick’ companies whereworkplace relations were not harmoniousand then to cure them. They used scientifictechniques for ‘adjusting’workers to industry,drawing in particular on industrial andsocial psychology. The idea was to improveworkplace relations by a special professionwhich would apply in particular the newscience of psychology to the ‘human factor’in industry.

Over time, the more reform-oriented HRmembers of the management professionfound themselves increasingly marginal-ized (Shenhav, 2002: 187). The triumphof managerialists meant a sharp splitbetween psychological approaches and polit-ical and economic approaches to the studyof IR. Managerialists favored psychologi-cal approaches which were seen as moreobjective. Industrial psychology became verypopular during WWI and thereafter and wasincreasingly regarded as the solution to thelabor problem (Shenhav, 2002: 183). Thisshift of the new profession of personnelmanagement away from reform and toward‘science’ also entailed a move away from abroad treatment of work and employment asinvolving economic and political, as well aspsychological and social factors, towards anarrow treatment of IR/HR as a fundamentallypsychological concern (Kimmel, 2000: 311).This approach gained dominance during the1930s and 1940s. In 1922 business leaderseven found their own rival organization topromote the field of employment/personnelmanagement. The American ManagementAssociation (AMA), as it was named, cam-paigned vigorously for the open shop andagainst organized labor. Thus, increasingly inthe early twentieth century the rising academicfield of management excluded concerns withlabor from their industry and personnel studies



and pushed those reformist scholars interestedto the evolving field of study of IR (Shenhav,2002: 187).

As a consequence, institutional economistsinterested in IR and reformist HR scholarsshared in the beginning a common interestin pragmatic research leading to solutionsof the labor problems. However, over timedisagreements arose in particular over tradeunions and collective bargaining (as onepossible regulatory solution) and the twofactions eventually split but learnt to co-exist and to divide the problem of work andemployment between them, with personneltypes handling the ‘human element’ and IRexperts handling the material and collectiveaspects of labor relations (Kimmel, 2000:312). For Kaufman (1993: 20), this divideremained a characteristic feature of thefield over the following decades. Thesecomplicated developments partly explain whytoday there are two sorts of HR scholarsin the US: the ones in the IR field underthe umbrella of LERA and the HR and OBscholars which belong to the Academy ofManagement. Another reason may also be thegrowing divide between business schools andfree-standing schools of labor relations.

It comes as no surprise that the broad field ofIR was perceived as an interdisciplinary studyrather than a distinctive discipline (Kaufman,1993: 12). For example, as the director ofthe IR section at Princeton 1926–1954, J. D.Brown, states, IR should include ‘all factors,conditions, problems and policies involvedin the employment of human resources inorganized production or service’ (quoted inKaufman, 1993: 201). However, interdis-ciplinarity was in reality pretty narrowlydefined. The leading assumption was that thefield should investigate a broad terrain bycombining economics as well as psychology(see for example the Committee on IndustrialRelations in their overview of the field ofstudy in 1926, quoted in Kimmel, 2000: 304).Interdisciplinary research did not mean thedynamic interplay of related disciplines suchas political science, sociology or history andtheir different methodologies and paradigms.Labor economics and social psychology

(in the tradition of the Hawthorne experi-ments) were clearly the leading disciplines inthe field of IR in the US.

After WWII the split between the twoeconomic and psychological groups becamelarger and the field became increasinglydominated by labor economists and otherinstitutionally oriented scholars interestedin collective bargaining (Jacoby, 2003;Kaufman, 1993). Thus, the quasi-stable co-existence of HR and IR started to disintegratein the 1970s and 1980s when the NewDeal system of collective labor relationsbegan to break down. Labor economistshave since then increasingly dominated theLERA activities and research programs aswell as publications (Kaufman, 1993: 193).According to Kaufman (ibid.: 155) it is nosurprise that the past academic presidentsof the LERA were all labor economists.Similarly, Mitchell (2001: 375) agrees that IRresearch in the US was always dominated bylabor economic paradigms, and probably noweven more than in its high days, in the 1950sand 1970s.

As mainstream economics developed dur-ing the 1970s toward a sharply focused analyt-ical discipline with a strong methodologicalconsensus centering on model-building andon the statistical-empirical verification oflargely mathematical theoretical hypotheses(Solow, 1997) this unsurprisingly also had animpact on labor economics and IR and endedup marginalizing the institutionalists. Thus,labor economics developed from an originalinstitutional focus towards increasingly neo-classical (rational choice) paradigms (Boyerand Smith, 2001; Jacoby, 1990). Straussand Feuille (1978: 535) argue that ‘ifcollective bargaining represents industrialrelations central core, then labor economicshas largely divorced itself from that core’.Labor economists are currently more inter-ested in micro level studies such as skill-wage differentials, labor contracts or training(for example the leading Cambridge Schoolin US labor economics) than institutionalresearch. Thus, institutionalism may have lostits theoretical link to labor economics (Jacoby,2003). This development can be linked to the



declining importance of institutions in the USlabor market such as trade unions or collectivebargaining.

In sum, it comes as no surprise thatlabor economics has dominated much ofUS IR research from its very beginning.Not only are most authors of American IRpublications labor economists but researchmethods, theories and paradigms of themajority of US publications are also shapedby labor economics (Frege, 2005).As outlinedabove, this does not deny the existence ofa large contingent of US labor scholarswho use non- economic, multi-disciplinarytheories and methodologies, but compared toother countries the share of labor economistsdominates the field. Thus, mainstream Amer-ican IR research is commonly character-ized by empirical, quantitative, deductiveresearch with multi-variant statistics and mid-range hypotheses and focused on the micro-level (individual or groups of employees)(Frege, 2005; Mitchell, 2001; Whitfieldsand Strauss, 2000). Moreover, most IRtheories are borrowed from economics orpsychology and produce rational choice orstrategic choice hypotheses or behavioristic,social-psychological approaches (Cappelli,1985: 98; Godard, 1994). There is alsoevidence that research published in AmericanIR journals, has increasingly focused onHR rather than IR issues (Frege, 2005).Finally, with regard to the underlying researchparadigms it is commonly suggested thatmainstream US research has generally inter-preted IR as a labor market outcome andhas been driven by a paradigm of contractuallaissez-faire which was traditionally definedas free collective bargaining and is nowincreasingly perceived as an individualisticcontractual system (Finkin, 2002).

Britain

British universities were initially more reluc-tant than their US counterparts to welcome anew field of social science research and thefirst university course in IR appeared in theearly 1930s when the Nobel-prize economistJohn Hicks offered a lecture series at the

London School of Economics (LSE) entitled‘Economic problems of industrial relations’.Only in the 1950s were academic appoint-ments in IR made, first at the LSE, and thenManchester and Oxford. The British counter-part to LERA, BUIRA (British UniversitiesIndustrial Relations Association), was estab-lished in 1950 and in the beginning onlytargeted academics and hesitated to acceptpractitioners for a long time. This was verydifferent to LERA, respectively IRAA, ofcourse which in the beginning was composedlargely of business people with an interest inHR (Kaufman, 1993: 5).

Scholarly work on IR issues in Britainhowever started much earlier with Beatriceand Sidney Webb, who wrote the first classicsin the field (Industrial Democracy, 1897;History of Trade Unionism, 1920) with theirinsights into the dynamics of unionism andbargaining and which have been constantlyreferred to by later generations of IR scholars.It could easily be argued that the Webbs werethe true founders of the Anglophone field ofIR rather than Commons (Gospel, 2005: 5).Also G. D. H. Cole, the outstanding Fabianof the post-Webb generation (McCarthy,1994: 201) had a huge influence on thefield. Cole founded Labor Studies in Oxford.Cole’s early ‘memorandum’ advocated publicownership and workers’ control (McCarthy,1994: 202). However, most of these scholars,though utterly political and interested intransforming the country by reforming theinstitutions of capitalism ultimately stayedwithin the parameters of liberalism similarto their counterparts in the US (Katznelson,1996: 27).

In contrast with the US however, thoughBritish economists had an interest in thefield, IR as a more institutionalized studywas mainly developed by a heterogeneousgroup of scholars who founded the so-calledOxford School of Industrial Relations, suchas Fox and Clegg who studied PPE (Politics,Philosophy and Economics) in Oxford andFlanders (who did not have an undergraduatedegree at all). The field was characterized by‘a strong current of positivist Fabian socialengineering, common sense and Anglophone



empiricism’ not too dissimilar to the earlyUS research (Ackers and Wilkinson, 2003: 8)though it stayed more inter-disciplinary andkept its institutional and historical approachto IR for much longer. Gospel (2005: 3) char-acterized this approach as mainly focused onthe ‘institutions of job regulation’, especiallytrade unions and collective bargaining.

There was no real split between IR andHR scholars in Britain. This was partlybecause the field was less under the control ofinstitutional economists than in the US, partlybecause behavioral sciences such as industrialpsychology were much less developed inBritish universities at that time. Moreover, theleading paradigm was a pluralistic approachto IR, thus the acceptance of differentinterests between labor and capital and theconviction that conflict can be regulatedbenefiting both parties (positive sum game).This pluralistic perception of the labor marketand of industrial unrest became a definingcharacteristic of the academic field in Britain,more so than in the US. It was also moreaccepted by the wider British public.

The 1970s saw the rise of a moreradical Marxist frame of reference whichopposed the pluralist desire of reachingstable employment relations and focusedinstead on class struggle and the subversionof the capitalist system. The radicalizationof the 1968 student revolution affected IRscholars and a new generation of academics,in particular sociologists, rejuvenated thepersonnel of the discipline and added muchneeded rigor to its theoretical and method-ological approaches (Gall, 2003). Prominentexamples are Hyman’s Industrial Relations:A Marxist Introduction (1975), or Fox’s laterwork Beyond Contract: Work, Power andTrust Relations (1974). This Marxist streamwas much less dominant in the US. Thegeneral absence of Marxist social sciencesin the US has been widely documented(Ross, 1991) and British social sciences arecommonly perceived as more progressive andideological than those in the US (but lessprogressive and more pragmatic comparedto continental Europe) (Katznelson, 1996: 18and 40).

What developed from this Marxistapproach were sophisticated ethnographiccase studies mainly by industrial sociologistssuch as Batstone et al. (1977), for example,and studies of the ‘Labor Process’ school.Yet, this radicalization did not last. As Wood(2000: 3) describes, ‘in the 1980s sociologyas the key discipline within IR tended togive way to economics. This partly reflectedthe advent of neo-liberalism, as well as thepast failings of the institutionalists to analyzeeconomic problems such as productivity’.Ackers and Wilkinson (2003: 12) put it into apolitical perspective:

the discipline’s best response to [Thatcher and] theNew Right was a skeptical empiricism. Followingpolitical defeat, and in the absence of any newideas, there grew a highly quantitative new empiri-cism, centered around the Workplace IndustrialRelations Surveys (Cully et al., 1998; Millwardet al., 2000), a unique national, longitudinal dataset on the state of British workplace relations.IR spent much of the 1980s and early 1990scounting, measuring, and at times denying, the veryobvious dismantling of Clegg’s ‘system of industrialrelations’.

In a nutshell, British IR developed a co-existence of sociological qualitative andeconometric quantitative studies, the latterbeing as exemplified in particular in the pub-lications of the British Journal of IndustrialRelations.

Finally, with regard to the research prac-tices there is evidence to suggest that the fieldhas been traditionally dominated by IR/HRscholars rather than by labor economists asin the US but also that the field remainsmore inter-disciplinary than in the US. Basedon a longitudinal cross-country survey ofIR journal publications during the 1970sand 1990s authors publishing in the UK aremostly affiliated as HR/IR scholars rather thaneconomists but that there is nevertheless awider range of other affiliations comparedto the US (Frege, 2005). Also, there is noevidence that the decline of traditional IRinstitutions such as trade unions and collectivebargaining in Britain has lead to a decliningacademic interest. In contrast, research onIR issues such as unions has been strongerduring the 1990s in British publication



outlets compared to the 1970s, for example.Moreover, the majority of British IR researchhas been characterized as mainly empirical butmore qualitative, inductive and if quantitativethen less based on econometrical analysiscompared to the US (Capelli, 1985). Themajor focus of research tends to be the levelof the firm rather than of the individual as inthe US (Frege, 2005). Finally, IR has beentraditionally defined as labor market outcomesas in the US though over the years the state andlegislation became to be seen as increasinglyimportant in shaping IR. Moreover, thereis a long tradition of analyzing workplacerelations in political terms (labor processdebate). The traditional research paradigmcan be described using Kahn-Freund’s famousterminology ‘collective laissez-faire’ (Daviesand Freedland, 2002) though individualemployment contracts are increasingly takingover collective regulations.

Germany

In Germany employment studies have a longtradition going back to Karl Marx, MaxWeber, Lujo Brentano and Goetz Briefs.During the twentieth century the field becamedominated by law, political science, butmost prominently by sociology with the firstuniversity institute specializing in industrialsociology in 1928 at the Technical UniversityBerlin (Keller, 1996; Mueller-Jentsch, 2001).Despite the fact that the relationship betweencapital and labor and the emergence of interestinstitutions were discussed in German socialsciences from the mid-nineteenth century, IRwas, however, not established as an indepen-dent academic discipline (Keller, 1996: 199).There is no IR department in any Germanuniversity. The same is true for all othercontinental European countries.

Research on work and employment issuesremained the subject of various social sciencedisciplines. A few indicators should sufficeto support this observation. First, althoughthere have been increasing attempts in recentyears to establish an IR discipline in Germany(for example the establishment of Indus-trielle Beziehungen – the German journal of

industrial relations) the academic communitydirectly associated with IR is still quite small.The German section of the IIRA (GIRA,established in 1970) counted 80 members in1995 (vs. 520 BUIRA members in Britain or3850 LERA members in the US in 1995). Ofthose members virtually all are affiliated witha department of sociology or another socialscience discipline.

Moreover, an overview of IndustrielleBeziehungen, the only specialized IR journalin Germany, between 1994 (its founding date)and 2004 reveals that published researchhas been conducted by researchers witha wide array of specializations: industrialsociologists, labor lawyers, political scien-tists, business administration scholars, andeconomists (Frege, 2005). Rarely does anyonecall themself an IR scholar. Industrial sociolo-gists are in the clear majority. One should alsonote that there is hardly any cross-disciplinarycommunication. Business administration orlaw scholars for example are rarely cited in theindustrial sociology literature and vice-versa(Muller, 1999: 468). The field is really multi-rather than inter-disciplinary.

Industrial sociology has made the mostsignificant contribution to the study of IR(Keller, 1996). Its central focus are core IRissues such as bargaining policies, workingtime, technical change and rationalization,and their impact on work organization andsocial structure, but not labor market issues(Baethge and Overbeck, 1986; Kern andSchumann, 1984; Schumann et al., 1994).From its very beginning industrial sociologyincluded a much larger field of topics com-pared to industrial sociology in Anglophonecountries. German industrial sociology wasclosely connected to social philosophy andgeneral sociology and in fact regarded as itsmajor sub-discipline (Mueller-Jentsch, 2001:222; Schmidt et al., 1982). It positioneditself within the broader societal context ofindustrialization, and focused in particular onthe role of organized labor.

Max Weber initiated the first systematicsociological research on German industryunder the patronage of the ‘Verein fuerSocialpolitik’ (first empirical research on



industrial work in large German firms) inthe late nineteenth century. The famous‘Verein fuer Socialpolitik’, founded in 1872by academics of the German historical school,intended to establish social fairness betweencapital and labor (Mueller-Jentsch 2001:223). Goetz Briefs developed the field of‘Betriebssoziologie’ (sociology of the firm),later subsumed under ‘Industriesoziologie’(industrial sociology) which became a majorapproach of research during the 1920s and1930s (Mueller-Jentsch, 2001: 222). Anothermajor research project of the ‘Verein’ waslaunched in the first decade of the twentiethcentury on the selection and adjustment ofworkers in different segments of Germanindustry (1910–15). According to Mueller-Jentsch (ibid.: 224) this was the beginningof systematic industrial research in Germany.The core question was what kind of menare shaped by modern industry and whichjob prospects (and indirectly life chances) dobig enterprises offer them? Weber wrote along introduction to the research project andoutlined various questions to be addressed:social and geographical origins of the work-force; the principles of their selection; thephysical and psychological conditions ofthe work process; job performance; pre-conditions and prospects of careers; howworkers adjust to factory life; their familysituation and leisure time (Mueller-Jentschibid.: 224). Methodology was based oninterviews and participant observation inselected companies.

Mueller-Jentsch (2001) argues that indus-trial sociology at that time was heavily shapedby the notion of workers exploitation and thiswas advanced not just by Marxists but also byliberal scholars. Lujo Brentano, for example,was an early liberal economist and antipodeof Marx and Engels but argued that ‘tradeunions play a constitutional role in capitalisteconomies since they empower employeesto behave like sellers of commodities. Onlythe unions enable workers to adjust theirsupply according to market conditions’ (ibid:225).

After WWII sociology was gradually(re)established as an academic discipline

(Mueller-Jentsch, 2001: 229). Industrial soci-ology quickly became a major focus (Maurer,2004: 7). In the early years after the warsociologists were primarily concerned withwhether the political democracy introducedby the Allies would stabilize in Germany.There was a common conviction that democ-racy is not only about institutions but thatit also needs a cultural basis in society.According to v. Friedeburg (1997: 26) thefear was that class conflicts either becometoo strong that they endanger the democ-ratization process or that they become tooweak and endanger the reform potential ofthe labor movement. Thus, the belief wasthat only self-conscious workers could bea counterweight to the restorative forces inpostwar Germany. As a consequence manysociologists focused on exploring workerconsciousness and beliefs, traditional IRtopics.

The first explicit project on IR after WWIIwas conducted by industrial sociologists inthe late 1970s at the Institute for SocialResearch in Frankfurt (Bergmann et al.,1979). The project entailed a large empiricalproject on trade unions in Germany from anexplicitly sociological point of view (Mueller-Jentsch, 1982: 408). In the same year IRwas first introduced as an official topic atthe German sociological congress (BerlinerSoziologentag, 1979). It is also symptomaticthat the first German textbook on IR waswritten by an industrial sociologist, WaltherMueller-Jentsch (1986) and called Sociologyof Industrial Relations.

To conclude, German IR research hastraditionally been dominated by industrialsociologists. Research focuses on IR ratherthan HR issues, is more theoretical oressayistic than empirical and if empiricalfavors qualitative, inductive research (Frege,2005; Hetzler, 1995). The focus is on thefirm level like in Britain. The dominantparadigm is to interpret IR as a socio-politicalprocess, thus as being shaped by economic aswell as political forces, and the emphasis ison corporatist social partnership approachesrather than collective bargaining (Hyman,1995: 39; 2004).



RESEARCH VARIATIONS AND THEIRNATIONAL EMBEDDEDNESS

The above brief overview has revealed differ-ent national developments in the IR researchfield. In the US labor economics was, fromthe early days, the leading discipline in IRresearch, initially with a strong institutional,policy orientation which was subsequentlytaken over by a more neo-classical approachto labor markets. In Britain prominent socialreformers started the field and hence IRdeveloped a strongly pragmatic public policyorientation which was less influenced by laboreconomists. Moreover, it received a strongMarxist influence during the 1970s which wasunparalleled in the US. The field became moreinter-disciplinary than its US counterpart andbecame dominated by scholars who receiveda degree in IR. Finally, Germany has a longintellectual (Marxist and liberal) traditionon researching work and employment issueswhich has been traditionally dominated byindustrial sociologists. Whereas the field hasnot established institutional independence inGermany but remains multi-disciplinary, IRbecame an independent academic field in theUS and Britain.

At the same time it comes to no surprise thatall three countries reveal variations in theirresearch practices: their major methodologies,theories and research paradigms. These vari-ations have been shown to be long-standingnational academic profiles (Frege, 2005;Kaufman, 2004; Whitfield and Strauss, 2000).Such diversity of research styles underminesassumptions of a universal, linear evolutionof social sciences and it also challengesrecent claims that globalization will evokea convergence of scientific research to auniversal, if not US-led model. Thus, atthis stage there is evidence of a continu-ing national embeddedness of IR researchdespite the growing internationalization ofacademia (international conferences, cross-national research collaborations, exchangeprograms etc.) and despite the increasingglobalization of IR practices throughout theadvanced industrialized world. To conclude,there remains distinctive national research

patterns which seem, so far, astonishinglyresistant to processes of universalization.

How then can we explain the ongoingdiversity and persistence of national researchtraditions? The chapter now turns to explorethe longstanding roots of national IR researchprofiles in specific structural, institutional andpolitical constellations within which socialscientists have tried to develop discursiveunderstandings of their IR systems. Forexample, a theory may gain acceptance in thefield not simply because it provides the most‘adequate’explanation for a phenomenon, but,rather, because the explanation it does offeris in a form that is particularly attractiveto a specific national culture or a particulargroup of scholars who are leading in thefield.

Explaining research variation is of coursean ambitious enterprise. No one single factorcan explain the variations across the differentresearch traditions. The inquiry seems torequire a complex set of multiple factors,reaching into various disciplines, and in needof a historical and comparative analysis. Thus,for the study of IR research, ideally, it seemsone would need a comparative history of IRand its ideas in Britain, Germany and theUS, a history of knowledge production, ahistory of the relations between IR and relateddisciplines, a history of influential academicsin the field, and a social history (studentsand their background). We would also needa theory to interconnect historical, structuraland cognitive determinants and the actionsof scientific community (Weingart, 1976).However, as Fourcade-Gourinchas (2001:398) argues, we do not yet have a satisfactoryencompassing theory of knowledge formationthat would allow us to account simultaneouslyfor the social structures and institutions ofknowledge production and for the latter’sintrinsic, substantive ideational nature. Andwe have no theoretical framework to ana-lyze cross-cultural variations between socialscience disciplines.

The remaining part of this chapter, there-fore, introduces three preliminary approacheswhich highlight the embeddedness of IRresearch in its national-specific context.



These are heuristic tools rather than a tight the-oretical framework, exploring interrelationsbetween variables rather than determiningcausalities. The first provides a substantiveapproach and focuses on how the subjectfield of academic inquiry and national IRpractices, shape research traditions. Thesecond approach highlights the institutionalembeddedness of IR research in nationalscientific traditions. The third and finalapproach discusses the relationship betweennational political traditions, in particularthe conception of political and industrialdemocracy, and IR research.

IR practices

This approach provides a contextual explana-tion of cross-country research variations bylinking ‘external’ IR practices to ‘internal’research practices. It is assumed that inparticular research topics, author affiliationsand academic paradigms will mirror thedevelopment and practice of IR institutions ina specific country. This position is essentiallyfunctionalist since it assumes an independentscientific space organized around specific self-referential understandings of the subject field,thus in our case IR practices (Wagner, 1990:478). In other words, academic disciplinesand specializations develop essentially asstructural reactions to changes in the externalenvironment.

This assumption is widely acknowledgedamong social scientists today and is instark contrast to the original positivist posi-tion which argued that scientific inquiry isindependent of the phenomenon observed(Delanty, 1997). Moreover, because IR is aproblem-oriented field of study it is evenmore likely to be shaped by the real worldof IR which differs from country to country.As Dunlop states, ‘different interests ofacademic experts seem largely a reflection oftheir type of IR system’ (1958: 329). Hyman(2001) points out that the different national IRsystems provoke different research topics: forexample an emphasis of Anglophone researchon collective bargaining and in Germanyon social partnership and codetermination.

Thus, the traditional lack of academic interestin the state or in social partnership in the UScan be explained by the traditional absenceof the state and of workplace democracyin American IR, whereas their dominancein German research mirrors their continu-ing relevance for the German employmentsystem.

In a similar vein, scholars have highlightedthat research follows changing policy ques-tions (Derber, 1964; Dunlop, 1977; Straussand Feuille, 1978). In particular, Capelli(1985) argues that shifts in research topicseasily occur as a reaction to shifts ingovernment, union or employer policies.For example, the increasing interest in HRissues in the US can be understood as areaction to the increasing number of non-union workplaces and anti-union employerand/or state strategies. Moreover, should IRregulations and practices increasingly con-verge in a globalizing world (see Chapter 7)one would expect a simultaneous convergenceof research patterns across countries. So farhowever this does not seem to have happened(Frege, 2005).

There can be no doubt that this approachhelps to explain research shifts over timein one particular country (for example thedecline of IR and the increase of HR topicsin the US) but also cross-country variationsin research. Moreover, this approach providesan explanation of why different professionsget interested in researching IR topics. Forexample, the more legalistic and corporatistIR systems in continental Europe attract morelegal scholars, political scientists and sociolo-gists whereas labor economists are primarilyattracted in Anglophone countries where mar-ket forces play a larger and more accepted rolein determining IR outcomes. The substantiveapproach is not a sufficient explanation,however, and for example is not helpful inexploring the different development of thefield of study, thus its institutionalization.

Scientific traditions

A second approach is introduced whichis historical in nature and embraces the



embeddedness of IR research within nationalsocial science traditions.

It is now widely recognized that socialsciences and their disciplines are socialconstructs, embedded in specific historicalcontexts and shaped by national culturesand philosophies (Levine, 1995: 100). Theyare not just the outcome of a universal,automatic progress of science, nor are theynatural, pre-determined categories, but canvary from country to country. In Ross’ words(1991: 1), ‘the content and borders of thedisciplines that resulted in the beginning of thetwentieth century were as much the productof national cultures, local circumstancesand accidental opportunities as intellectuallogic’. In particular, the development ofsocial sciences was closely connected tothe rise of modern universities and wereshaped by national epistemological tradi-tions.

University structures

It is during the late-nineteenth century inparticular that universities were resurrectedas primary knowledge-producing institutionsand that the idea of a research-orienteduniversity became predominant in Europeand the US (Wittrock, 1993: 305). Thisdevelopment was closely related to the rise ofthe modern nation-state and the new economiccapitalist order. Universities therefore cameto be key institutions both for knowl-edge production, in particular technologicalprogress and for strengthening a sense ofnational and cultural identity (ibid.: 321).As we will see, however, they developedin different ways in different countries.Major questions which were debated inall countries were, for example, betweenthe pros and cons of a liberal versusvocational education and pure versus appliedresearch.

The national-specific structures of univer-sities are useful in explaining the institutionaldifferences within IR research, thus itsinstitutionalization as a field of study in theAnglophone world but not in continentalEurope.

The close relationship between knowl-edge structures and research practices hasbeen widely accepted in the literature.Already Merton (1968: 521) observed thatresearch patterns are influenced by specificforms of knowledge organization. Fourcade-Gourinchas (2001: 400) points out that‘scientific discourses [research patterns] areinevitably driven by broader, nationally con-stituted, cultural frameworks embodied inspecific institutions of knowledge produc-tion’. And Ringer (1992: 26) convincinglyproposes that intellectual communities suchas academic disciplines cannot be adequatelydiscussed without reference to the history ofeducational systems in each country which areheavily dependent on the specific relationshipbetween state and society.

Applied to our context, this trajectory linksthe existence or absence of the institution-alization of the IR field to the differentnational university structures. Arguably, thedevelopment of the German university struc-ture of professorial chairs enabled a broaderresearch agenda for the individual professorsbut hindered the institutionalization of inter-disciplinary fields. In contrast, the more for-mal departmental structure as developed in theUS in the early-twentieth century, which waslater also introduced to British universities,narrowed the individual’s research area butfacilitated the creation of institutionalizedinter-disciplinary fields.

In other words, the strict classification ofdisciplines in US universities, which becamemore dominant than in Europe (Wagner, 1990:236), made it more difficult for individualscholars to integrate IR topics into theirown discipline but on the other hand createdthe opportunity to establish specific inter-disciplinary programs. US social science dis-ciplines tend to follow a strict methodologicaland theoretical canon and are more likelyto discriminate alternative views. In Ross’(1991: 10) words,

the importance of disciplines and disciplinaryprofessions to stabilize academic positions in the USsystem lead frequently to an ontological purificationof disciplinary discourses by excluding outsidefactors to strengthen disciplinary identification



whereas in Europe disciplines were less inhibited touse theoretical concepts from other disciplines.

The fact that in the US, IR institutes were firstcreated by institutional economists who feltincreasingly left out of their own discipline,substantiates this point.

In Germany, the Humboldtian reforms inthe second part of the nineteenth centurysupported an organizational structure aroundchairs which traditionally allowed a slightlyless rigid definition of the disciplines. Individ-ual professors were more able to follow theirown interests independent of the mainstream.Thus, a sociology or law professor interestedin labor found it easier to follow thisresearch topic even if it did not fit completelywith disciplinary boundaries. Therefore therewas less need to establish inter-disciplinaryforums. An additional reason was that inter-disciplinary, specialized or vocational fieldshad less chance to get accepted because ofthe traditional German emphasis on general,pure knowledge creation which was fosteredby Humboldt.

Finally, Britain is characterized by a lessrigid disciplinary structure than the US butalso by weaker professorial chairs than inGermany. Britain for a long time almostexclusively focused on elitist undergradu-ate education dominated by colleges andneglecting the development of graduate orprofessional schools like in the US (Fourcade-Gourinchas, 2001: 165). The great Britishuniversities in the nineteenth century werestrongly anti-professional. Professional edu-cation was dominated by practitioners outsideuniversities (Burrage, 1993: 155). Moreover,British universities for a long time developedas relatively insular, elitist institutions empha-sizing the classical subjects while neglectingnatural as well as social sciences. The firstsocial science research which arose out ofa response to the increasing social problemsof industrialization developed outside theuniversity such as in the famous ManchesterStatistical Society (1833) (Manicas, 1987:196). Thus, all these factors help to explainwhy IR as an interdisciplinary study wasdelayed for a long time in Britain.

Epistemological traditions

In addition to the university structures,epistemological traditions also shaped thedevelopment and patterns of scientific dis-ciplines in each country. These traditionshelp explain, for example, why a Germanand a US sociologist working on similarlabor issues may use different research tools,in particular different methodologies, despitetheir shared profession. And why a Britisheconomist and a British sociologist may havesomething in common despite their differentprofessions. In other words, it may providean explanation as to why the US is gener-ally leaning towards quantitative empiricalresearch whereas German IR research isusually characterized by qualitative researchand Britain exhibits traces of both; or why bothUS and British IR research tend to produceintermediate, middle-range theories whereasGermany is biased towards more abstract,general social science theories (Bulmer,1991).

Modern philosophies of knowledge devel-oped during the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies and influenced the countries’ con-ception of knowledge creation. In short, theidealist philosophy and humanistic universityreforms during the nineteenth century inGermany were strongly oriented towardsscience for its own sake (‘pure science’) ratherthan to be an instrument for larger societalpurposes (for example improving socialconditions) as it became the norm in particularin the US. There was an emphasis on holisticthinking in broad historical cultural categoriesand being informed by a philosophy whichrejected narrow-minded specialization whichprovided a challenge to mechanistic and com-positional thinking prevalent in Europe at thattime. As a consequence, when social sciences(including the academic treatment of work andemployment) were slowly established at theend of the nineteenth century they becamemostly concerned with elaborating a coherenttheoretical framework for societal analysisbased on philosophical foundations (Wittrocket al., 1991: 41). Social sciences wereoriginally interpreted as historical sciences



embedded in the humanities. This shapedthe tendency of the social sciences towardsdescriptive, historical, qualitative and theoret-ical research as we can still observe today, forexample in the case of IR research. Effortsat empirical research were very fragmentedas well as policy-oriented research whichcould hardly develop in the shadow of formaltheorizing (Wittrock, ibid.). This may haveinduced the strong presence of hermeneuticand Marxist epistemological approaches andheuristic methodologies in German socialsciences. In a nutshell, one can argue that thesetraditions may have facilitated a more politicaland critical awareness of social conditionsand problems. Social science was understoodas a tool to explore the genesis of modernsociety and it fostered the importance ofacademic freedom and supported the pursuitof pure knowledge rather than of instrumental,pragmatic research.

In Britain social sciences were caught inthe bind between the positivistic heritageof moralistic reformism and administrative(empirical) knowledge (Delanty, 1997: 26).Thus, they were characterized by a strongpositivist-utilitarian tradition, methodologicalindividualism and a naturalistic morality.British social sciences essentially go back toHobbes’ utilitarianism and his ideas basedon the methods of natural science (Halevy,1966: 153). J. S. Mill for example, who washeavily influenced by Hobbes, was critical ofscientific politics and stood for a model of‘useful’ knowledge. Empiricism was praisedas an inductive science of general causal laws.On the other side, British social science wascharacterized by a moral focus and sciencewas linked to the idea of moral improve-ment and a humane secular ethic (Delanty,1997: 26).As Manicas (1987: 197) highlights,the social problems of the industrializingBritish Empire were interpreted by the Britishacademic elite as a moral problem and were,accordingly, a problem of how to restore themorals of individuals.

The US developed in similar ways toBritain but with a more scientist, pragmaticapproach to the sciences, in particular socialsciences which was seen as a tool to improve

the social conditions of modern society. Thus,whereas British social sciences started as afusion of analysis and (moral) prescription,the US eventually favored a more scientific,detached approach to social questions whichwas modeled upon natural sciences (Bulmer,1991: 152). This ultimately induced a biastowards an empiricist ideology with a focuson quantitative scientific methods in the US(Ross, 1991).

In sum, these national knowledge systems,which originated in the nineteenth century,shape the different ways social sciences andtherefore IR research have been organized andpracticed in the three countries. British IRresearch, for example, always had a strongerpublic-policy agenda than the US and wasless interested in perfecting econometric toolsfor measuring IR practices and outcomes.German IR research on the other hand hasbeen heavily theory driven and if empiricalhas mainly pursued hermeneutic, descriptivemethods.

Political traditions

The cross-national variation of subject fields,as well as, the scientific traditions are anecessary but not sufficient explanation forcross-national research variation. For exam-ple, similar research topics can be researchedin very different ways. The fact that the UStraditionally has a strong interest in HR policywhereas German academics are more inter-ested in the labor process – both approacheslook at the workplace – indicates the existenceof different paradigms and aims of research.German social scientists have traditionallybeen more concerned about the labor processand its outcomes for workers as a socialclass than their mainstream US counterpartswho are more interested in individual workattitudes and workplace efficiency. Thesevariations cannot be sufficiently explained onthe basis of different subject fields or scientifictraditions.

A third and final factor then, is the politicalembeddedness of the research field. Theassumption is that political traditions have acertain independence of their subject matter



and of their academic institutionalization andcan shape research patterns in different ways.In particular research paradigms, aims andalso theories are likely to be influenced bypolitical ideas.

I focus on the national political discourseon work and democracy which originatesin the nineteenth century. I argue thatthe philosophical traditions of idealism inGermany or of liberalism and positivismin Britain and the US shaped the politicalunderstanding and subsequent writings on thestate, democracy and the economy during thenineteenth century. In particular, the relation-ship between political and industrial democ-racy crucially influenced the developmentof different research paradigms. The threecountries developed during the nineteenthcentury rather different political traditions onthe relationship between state, society andeconomy which shaped two different streamsof interpretations of industrial democracy:an Anglophone and a German (conti-nental European) stream. Germany devel-oped a legalistic, state-oriented approach(co-determination) whereas Britain and theUS developed a free collective bargain-ing approach (and eventually voluntary,employer-led direct participation schemes).Both constitutional traditions are based ontwo distinct concepts of industrial democracywhich I call ‘contractual’ and ‘communal’.

In essence, the US and Britain regardedthe capitalist enterprise as a ‘private affair’(firm as private property) and the economyas an assembly of free individuals joiningin contractual relationships. Private con-tracts rule. Industrial democracy is thereforefocused on the free bargaining betweenemployers and employees. Moreover, the lawprivileges individual rather than collectiveemployment rights. One should note thedifferences between Britain and the US:between a social democratic and a liberaldivide on industrial democracy the US emergevirtually exclusively on the liberal side of theline (Katznelson, 1996: 40). Britain, on theother hand, is slightly more infatuated withmarkets and experienced times, in particularafter WWI and II, of socialist attempts to

nationalize important industries and is ingeneral more committed to state interventionthan the US (Jacoby, 2003: 49).

In Germany, the main understanding was toperceive the firm as a ‘quasi-public affair’, asa social community, a state within the state,a constitutional monarchy, where workerswould receive certain democratic rights andthe monarch/owner would not have absolutepower as in a constitutional monarchy. ‘Theemployment relationship is not seen as oneof free subordination but of democratization’.This was the declaration of the famousWeimar labor law scholar, Hugo Sinzheimer(Finkin, 2002: 621). One could also saythat the US and Britain focused on ‘privatecontracts’ whereas Germany focused on a‘social contract’ within the firm, to adoptRousseau’s phrase.

The distinction between a private and pub-lic view of the firm has a clear reminiscenceto the mechanic and organic state theoriesand to civil and common law traditions. Therole of the entrepreneur is seen differently inboth traditions. In the Anglophone commonlaw tradition the enterprise is the propertyof the entrepreneur with workers relegatedto contractual claims, at best, on the surplusfrom production (Deakin, 2005: 12). The con-tinental or in our case German entrepreneursare members of the enterprise community andshare duties and privileges that this positionentails.

One can conclude therefore that democracyin the US and to a lesser extent in Britainhas been mainly conceptualized at a politicallevel and developed a much weaker placein economic life where democracy is limitedto certain individual rights and a minimumof collective rights (for example free laborcontracts and collective bargaining). In otherwords, the individual has only very limiteddemocratic rights at work, the main right beingto be in a free contractual relationship andtherefore to be able to leave the contract.The focus of Anglophone labor law onindividual rights therefore has a long tradition.Today this is emphasized even more in theincreasing decline of collective labor law andthe dominance of identity-based employee



rights in particular in the US. In contrast,in Germany industrial democracy has beenmuch more linked to the development ofpolitical democracy and has legally restrainedmanagerial discretion. The focus of labor lawis on collective rights.

In sum, this approach highlights the impor-tance of linking national research patternsto the historically embedded discourses ondemocracy at work. The different statephilosophies as they developed in Germany,Britain and the US during the nineteenthcentury shaped the perception of the capitalistfirm and subsequently the conception ofindustrial democracy.

Applied to the context of IR the differentintellectual traditions of political and indus-trial democracy can explain certain cross-national research differences. For example,the fact that German scholars traditionallywork on topics related to worker participationmay not just be due to their labor institu-tions promoting democracy at work (‘subjectfield’), but also because of a long-standingintellectual tradition in German social sci-ences to interpret industrial democracy as animportant adjunct to political democracy andhence as a value itself. This also explainsthe interest of German political scientists andlawyers in IR research. In contrast, industrialdemocracy in the US for example has notgenerally been seen as a precondition orattribute of political democracy and has beentraditionally perceived as individual rights,property rights on one side and no forcedlabor on the other side. Recent discussions onemployee voice (Freeman and Rogers, 1999)exemplify this individualistic conception ofindustrial democracy (but see exceptions suchas Derber, 1964).

CONCLUSION

This chapter has offered a brief descriptionof the historical development of IR as a fieldof research in Britain, Germany and the US,which represent trends in the Anglophoneworld as well as in continental Europe.It suggested that social sciences, such as the

IR field, do not necessarily develop in similarways across countries but are embeddedin broader national-specific cultures. Thereis no reason to assume that these varyingresearch styles are deviations from a standard,or delays in reaching that standard. Onthe contrary, the persistence of nationalintellectual profiles over time underminesassumptions of a universal, linear evolutionof the social sciences and instead highlightstheir national historical embeddedness.

This chapter further explored the embed-dedness of these research patterns in theirnational contexts. On one hand it highlightedthe significance of national institutions andpractices of IR in shaping research outcomes.On the other hand, the chapter also remindedus to conceptualize IR research as a socialscientific field of study which is inevitablyembedded in long-standing national traditionsof scientific knowledge production, suchas university structures and philosophicaltraditions of knowledge creation. Finally, thechapter outlined the importance of intellec-tual conceptions of political and industrialdemocracy and to what extent and how theworkplace was regarded as part of a widerpolitical democracy.

To conclude, IR research has developeddifferently in different countries and there isreason to suggest that this will continue forsome time. As of today there is no evidenceof a significant convergence of research stylesacross countries. Sustained divergence is theresult so far. This also challenges predictionsof various globalization and convergencetheories of the diminishing significance ofthe nation state. This chapter argues insteadfor the nation state’s enduring importanceat least for the field of scientific knowledgecreation.

However, this does not mean that researchpatterns should be seen as historicallydeterministic. They are potentially open forchange. Scholars may have had good reasonsfor choosing their scientific path, whichwas subsequently institutionalized, but theywere reasons consistently shaped by specifichistorical and cultural intentions (Ross, 1991).Given hindsight, we may find that there are



better reasons for choosing differently inthe future, in particular given the increasingacademic crisis of the IR discipline. Becomingaware of different national approaches, andthus of different research options, is a firststep. What should follow is a dialoguebetween the research patterns; how one couldbenefit from each other to ensure the long-term viability of the discipline.

NOTES

1 For the purposes of this paper, I use this term torefer to the following countries: Great Britain, Ireland,United States of America, Canada, Australia, and NewZealand (see Crouch 2005).

2 For more detailed country overviews see Fregeand Kaufman (2004).

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