ABSTRACT
It is intended in this chapter to deal with part of the area of study called ‘industrial relations’, to complete a review of the sociology of industry on the organisation-role level. Industrial relations, however, is an extensive field to which many others than sociologists have made contributions from different perspectives-economists, lawyers, psychologists, political scientists, and so on. There is considerable common ground between what these people study and what the sociologist studies, but the approaches are different. The industrial relations scholar has a more limited field than the sociologist but takes an interdisciplinary approach to that field, i.e. he is part economist, part political scientist, and so on). The industrial sociologist has a wider field-which includes industrial relations-but he does not take an interdisciplinary approach and concentrates instead on using the theories and methods of sociology.
