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The article considers the utility of a pluralist perspective in the context of current debates around UK corporate governance reform. Oxford School pluralism advanced both a description of how industrial relations (IR) operated in practice plus a prescription for how it should operate. Whilst economic conditions are different today, a pluralist framing provides not only a useful way of understanding interests in firm governance (description) but also a solid grounding for a pragmatic reform agenda (prescription).

Drawing from key texts in the field, the article considers core concepts within pluralist discourse and discusses their relevance to contemporary policy debates.

The article provides a short outline of recent economic and political developments and considers how a pluralist framing helps explain firm-level interests, challenging the dominant narrative of shareholder primacy. It then asks what policy interventions might flow from this analysis of capital and labour investments, and how feasible they are in the current UK context. This allows a discussion of levels of analysis (evident in materialist theories such as “radical pluralism” and the “disconnected capitalism thesis”). Finally, it reflects briefly on the links between corporate governance and wider patterns of inequality, suggesting the pluralist position is consistent with a Durkheimian sociology focusing on the potential in state-led regulatory interventions to tackle anomie and strengthen social solidarity.

The article brings together literature from what are often treated as relatively discrete areas of enquiry (employment relations and corporate governance) and also considers the public policy implications of these connections.

Interdependence on the global economy and rapid technological changes raised the degree of uncertainty and complexity, leading to innovation challenges. Innovation depends on knowledge, and the solution might rest on how sound firms manage it, particularly in emerging markets such as India. The purpose of this paper is to examine how firms implement knowledge management (KM) in highly innovation-oriented firms (biotechnology and pharmaceuticals) and the factors affecting its implementation by examining knowledge interactions between individuals.

This study consists of a systematic literature review, a case study with embedded units and the use of grounded theory to analyse the data. The factors emerging from the results were examined from an individual and organisational lens. Next, complexity theory (CT) was used to understand the impact of these factors in KM by facilitating its incorporation as a system.

The findings of this paper suggest that constant technology adoption increases human-to-technology interaction, higher circulation of existing knowledge and more controlled environments, discouraging individuals from learning or sharing knowledge. From a system perspective, results of this paper suggest that firms self-organise around technology, indicating that innovation decreases as knowledge creation and sharing tend to reduce with lesser social interactions. This study shows the usefulness of using CT in analysing KM for innovation. The performance of the system is analysed based on its constituents and interactions.

This study contributes to advancing CT in KM in the context of innovation in highly knowledge-intensive firms, as few studies were found in the literature.