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With the decentralization and deregulation of the labor market over the past decade or so, there has been considerable debate about the future of industrial relations as a discipline or field of enquiry in Australia. Much of this literature assumes a discipline in decline, or at least at a crossroads, in terms of its purpose and continued relevance. In order to both evaluate these general claims and provide a more nuanced understanding of the future of the field in Australia, this chapter examines industrial relations in terms of three major dimensions: as a field of teaching, research, and practice. This exercise reveals important differences about the situation facing the discipline. Despite advances by human resource management (HRM) in universities, the teaching of industrial relations remains important even if its separate identity is contracting slightly at the present time. In terms of research, the multi-disciplinary and policy-oriented approach has much to contribute to understanding the changing world of industrial relations in Australia and remains a strong dimension of the field. However, in the area of industrial relations practice we observe a major decline as industrial relations and human resource professionals in Australia have become less important both in the wider regulation of work and within business organizations. We conclude that the field needs to broaden its focus to ‘work and employment relations’, seek more theoretically informed ways to explain contemporary developments in labor markets and societies, while at the same time remain committed to its traditional goals of equity and efficiency.

The primary objective of this paper is to understand the extent to which Australian industrial relations academics took up the different heuristic frameworks from USA and U.K. from the 1960s to the 1980s. A second objective is to begin to understand why, and in what ways ideas are transmitted in academic disciplines drawing on a “market model” for ideas. It is shown that in the years between 1960s and 1980s a modified U.S. (Dunlopian) model of interpreting industrial relations became more influential in Australia than that of U.K. scholarship, as exemplified by the British Oxford School. In part this reflects the breadth, flexibility and absence of an overt normative tenor in Dunlop’s model which thus offered lower transaction costs for scholars in an emergent discipline seeking recognition and approval from academia, practitioners and policy-makers. Despite frequent and wide-ranging criticism of Dunlop’s model, it proved a far more enduring transfer to Australian academic industrial relations than the British model, albeit in a distorted form. The market model for the diffusion of ideas illuminates the ways in which a variety of local contextual factors influenced the choices taken by Australian industrial relations academics.

The decline of collective representation and rise of individual employment rights is a transformative shift in employment relations that has changed the landscape of workplace dispute resolution. I propose a model that seeks to provide a new approach to understanding how workplace dispute resolution functions in the era of individual employment rights.

The model I propose focuses the analysis on the elements that connect the structure of rights that are enacted to the patterns of employment practices in the workplace.

My argument is that the systems for enforcement of individual employment rights and the mechanisms of representation for the employees affected are as important as the substantive rights themselves in determining the impact of the individual rights regime. These three elements combine to determine the degree to which the individual employment rights serve as an effective source of power for employees in relation to their employers.

The establishment of these sources of power is what then results in the individual rights regime producing an effect on the employers’ patterns of practices in the workplace and ultimately determining the nature and character of the employment relationship.

This paper argues that creative compliance tactics are an innovative union renewal strategy. Creative compliance involves the observance of the letter of the law while undermining its spirit. This regulatory inconsistency stems from indeterminate legal outcomes and discretion in legal interpretation and application. Drawing on interviews with senior union officials in four case studies in Australia, this paper reveals that two particular types of creative compliance tactics have been used by the unions to achieve positive outcomes: work-to-rule and the exploitation of loopholes. These opportunistic and proactive approaches to ‘anti-union’ legislation at the national level since 1997 represent a sea change in union tactics and a viable union renewal strategy, because they augment the individual ability of unions to shape and advance an agenda and therefore, adapt and transform at an organisational level. Consistent with adaptation theories on organisational-environment relations and strategic choice theory, the findings reinforce that unions ‘own’ strategic choices and that they can, in response to environmental scanning, adjust their tactics accordingly.

Although many employers continue to adopt various forms of worker participation or employee involvement, expected positive gains often fail to materialize. One explanation for the weak or altogether missing performance effects is that researchers rely on frameworks that focus almost exclusively on contingencies related to the workers themselves or to the set of tasks subject to participatory processes. This study is premised on the notion that a broader examination of the employment relationship within which a worker participation program is embedded reveals a wider array of factors impinging upon its success. I integrate labor relations theory into existing insights from the strategic human resource management literature to advance an alternative framework that additionally accounts for structures and processes above the workplace level – namely, the (potentially implicit) contract linking employees to the organization and the business strategies enacted by the latter. The resulting propositions suggest that the performance-enhancing impact of worker participation hinges on the presence of participatory or participation-supporting structures at all three levels of the employment relationship. I conclude with implications for participation research.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge the boundaries separating strategic and comparative institutional perspectives on human resource systems and employment relations. Each research tradition has investigated the role and outcomes of corporations as they operate in an increasingly global economy. Researchers in these traditions, however, ask different research questions and draw on distinct social science disciplines, theoretical assumptions, and research methodologies. While they have pursued parallel but separate tracks, we argue that they have important lessons for each other. In this paper, we review the core characteristics and critiques of each research tradition, provide a series of examples of efforts to bridge their differences, and offer suggestions for future integration.

In this paper, we draw from our own empirical data on worker organizing and identify important concepts that bridge social movement (SM) and industrial relations (IR) theory. In a context of traditional union decline and a surge of alternative types of worker mobilization, we apply SM and IR concepts related to the mobilizing structures and culture to cases of labor organizing via worker centers and community–labor alliances in the United States and China. From an analytical perspective, we argue that the field of SMs and IR can both benefit from this type of cross-discipline theorization.

The paper provides an empirical analysis of the development of and perspectives on industrial relations (IR) in Germany. The first part deals with forms and degrees of institutionalization, which can be used as measures of the maturity and the potential impact of an academic discipline: IR within universities and research institutes, the professional organization, journals, and textbooks. More recent developments are more in line with those in other continental European states than with Anglo-Saxon countries. The weak, slowly progressing degree of institutionalization leads to the conclusion that IR does not constitute a unitary academic discipline. Nevertheless, research and scholarly interest exist. The second part surveys the structure of scholarly research and disciplinary participation. The German case reveals both common and divergent features compared to other countries. An obvious feature of IR is its disciplinary rather than holistic and interdisciplinary character. Empirical research has been less quantitative, and in more recent times less econometrically oriented than in some other countries. Human resource management's (HRM) institutional as well as personal ties with IR are weak and interdisciplinary debates are rare. Another distinctive feature is the large significance of labor law whose study also follows the strict departmentalization of the university structure in Germany. Empirical research in law is still rare and has definitely no solid position within law schools. On the other hand, industrial sociology has had a substantial impact on IR research for several decades and has covered various parts of IR territory. The third part discusses research topics. For quite some time, trade unions and collective bargaining have been the dominant topic. More recently, the focus of interest has shifted from the meso (sectoral or branch) to the micro (enterprise or shop floor) level. Various forms of codetermination, the institutionalized forms of participation in managerial decision-making, have constituted the other traditional research subject. Throughout the 1990s, the process of German unification constituted a “critical juncture” for IR and was an unexpected new topic. More recently, this kind of “unification research” has come to a natural end. Since the early 1990s, there has been a remarkable increase in scholarly work on IR issues concerning employment regulation and governance within the European Union. Last but not least, some traditionally ignored topics are discussed. Numerous labor market-related issues have been of very limited interest for the core of the IR community. Interest in types of atypical or non-standard employment has remained limited. The same limited attention is true for IR in the expanding non-union sector. Another neglected topic is labor relations in the public sector. The outlook discusses future trajectories of IR research. It is argued that the prospects will be encouraging if younger scholars manage to develop a broader, more integrative definition of the field (e.g., “regulation of all aspects of the employment relationship”).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature and development of industrial relations as a field of study. This paper employs bibliometric and social network analyses to examine the scholarly work published in the top industrial relations journals over the past 40 years. By examining the citation and co-citation patterns at the journal level and the article level, it is possible to empirically describe the field of industrial relations in terms of its parameters and its “paradigms” – the generally agreed on sets of research questions and methodologies – at different time periods throughout its development. Our findings illustrate that the intellectual base of the industrial relations field has moved from a more traditional, applied labor economics view of industrial relations to a broader “employment relations” view of the field.

This paper examines the exercise of Black employee voice in South Africa over the past 53 years. Black workers constitute almost 4 out of every 5 workers in the country and experienced racial oppression from the time of colonisation up to the end of apartheid in 1994. They are still congregated around the lower skilled occupations with low incomes and high unemployment levels.

The paper draws on the theory of voice, exit and loyalty of Albert Hirschman, but extends voice to include sabotage as this encapsulates the nature of employee voice from about 2007 onwards. It reflects a culture of insurgence that entered employment relations from about that time onwards, but was lurking below the surface well before then.

The exercise of employee voice has gone through five phases from 1963 to mid-2016 starting with a silent phase for the first ten years when it was hardly heard at all. However, as a Black trade union movement emerged after extensive strikes in Durban in 1973, employee voice grew stronger and stronger until it reached an insurgent phase.

The phases employee voice went through were heavily influenced by the socio-political situation in the country. The reason for the emergence of an insurgent phase was due to the failure of the ruling African National Congress government to deliver services and to alleviate the plight of the poor in South Africa, most of whom are Black. The failure was due to neo-patrimonialism and corruption practised by the ruling elite and politically connected. Protests by local communities escalated and became increasingly violent. This spilled over into the workplace. As a result many strikes turned violent and destructive, demonstrating voice exercised as sabotage and reflecting a culture of insurgence.