ABSTRACT
This chapter offers the development of industrial relations theory and its preoccupations at any particular moment as reflecting a position in relation to national and international policy debates that roughly mirrors that of neoclassical economics. The industrial relations system receives inputs from its environment in the shape of requirements arising from the technological characteristics of industry, product, labour and capital markets, and the ‘locus and distribution of power’. Institutionalism’s competitors in the argument were the policy manifestations of the cooperation assumption. The main theoretical argument in Industrial Democracy is focused on the external dispute with economics. Anti-system conflict is a clash of ideologies rather than an institutionalised resolution of differences that remain within certain agreed boundaries. The balance between capital and labour having normative substance in itself as the outcome of compromises consciously made by ‘reasonable men’, the web of rules is a technical artefact; an outcome of processes operating largely beyond the intentions of those involved.
