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The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the development of industrial relations (IR) in Spain since the democratic transition and analyses the current dilemmas of its social and political actors in the context of the long-lasting economic downturn.

Combining a political economy, identifying Spain as a particular variety of modern capitalism, and actor-centred historical institutionalism approach, outlining the formation and strategies of the main social actors, the paper draws on the broad range of research on IR in Spain and its theoretical debates, including proper research in the field.

The legacies of the latecomer industrialisation and the semi-peripheral development model still shape the Spanish economy and IR. The impact of the current economic and political-institutional crisis affects the entire institutional IR system and its actors shifting power towards the individual employer thus weakening trade unions, labour rights and collective bargaining. Regarding the theoretical debate on corporatism, the Spanish case provides ambiguous results. The lack of a coherent institutional system and efficient political administration limits the effectiveness of corporatist arrangements and reduces them to contingent concertation strategies. Spain confirms that IR still largely depend on the specific national variety of capitalism that condition economic development and resources for political exchange.

The paper presents an original, theoretical-informed reconstruction of the Spanish IR and allows an understanding of the current institutional transformations and strategic dilemmas in the light of historical legacies. Additionally, the theoretical debates on neo-corporatism and semi-peripheral development are enriched through its application to the Spanish case.

Based on the 1991 Shirley Lerner Memorial Lecture, a discussion is conducted of the challenges and opportunities facing teachers and researchers arising from the rapidly changing practice of industrial relations. A widening of the scope of the subject, to include its individual as well as collective aspects, it is argued, is fully compatible with seeing the main focus as the employment relationship. The challenge to the subject′s research tradition of empirical enquiry, multi‐disciplinarity and above all, its integrity, is much more fundamental. Maintaining this tradition is not only vital for industrial relations, but also for the future direction of the business schools in which most industrial relations teachers and researchers find themselves.

Capital, through its practices and narratives of global competition, is able to play unions in different locations off against one another through the construction and exploitation of difference. Trade unions and their activists have responded through formal institutional responses and with new forms of network‐based cooperation which is, at best, limited to action supported by the interests of union actors involved at a given juncture. This article seeks to argue that these forms of organizational responses are in themselves insufficient to allow unions to overcome the prisoner's dilemma inherent in their operating at a lower geographic level than capital.

The paper brings together ideas and insights from various interventions made by the authors and is a based on a review of a large part of the literature.

To regain control over labour markets would require either more systematic and structured union organizations of a transnational scope or a more concerted attempt at new forms of networking and the construction of a convincing radical counter‐narrative to that of global capitalist competition. The paper also argues that on close inspection the internationalization of capital itself exhibits significant Achilles Heels and may actually facilitate these new labour developments.

The paper argues that trade unions need to build their international coordinating strategies through a range of democratic and participative approaches. It also claims that transnational corporations are much more exposed by globalization than many commentators admit, trade unions and worker activists can and do exploit these gaps.

The power of transnational corporations fails to create consistent regimes of regulation and social progress. These in turn create a series of evasive strategies that do not contribute to consistent international dialogue.

The article asserts that the network structure of transnational labour unionism is in itself an ineffective response to capitalist globalization and the narrative of global competition.

The purpose of this paper is to explore performance management in four UK trade unions. Specifically, the extent to which managers in the four unions accept or dismiss the unitarist, disciplinary and performative values that arguably characterise performance management practices.

A qualitative research design was adopted to investigate trade union managers’ interpretations of performance management. Managers were targeted because they held the power to shape performance management practices in their specific areas. The research employed qualitative semi-structured interviews.

Performance management in trade unions is linked to the structure, purpose and orientation of different types of trade union. It is also linked to the wider environmental context. The trade union managers’ interpretations of performance management are linked to disciplinary and performative values. As such they are comparable to the unitarist forms of performance management described in the literature. There are moreover, similarities and differences between the approaches to performance management between trade unions and for profit or public sector organisations.

The paper adds to the emerging literature on internal trade union management by highlighting a particular aspect of human resource management.

This paper provides insights as to how a Confucian-inspired Junzi style of leadership translates into initiatives toward human capital development in Singapore. After reviewing tripartite governance in Singapore, we discuss the character of Confucian leadership: how does this value system inform the moral economy of the Singaporean corporatist model and inherently come to impact upon the conception and significance of human capital.

The case approach was employed using multiple sources of secondary data, supplemented by interviews with high-profile informants in Singapore. Multiple sources led to data triangulation in presenting a mutually consistent set of evidence. The paper also draws from a longitudinal observation of Singapore's industrial relations and human resource development (HRD) policies over the last 10 years since the Global Financial Crisis.

Organized along two thematic areas: governance and human capital development, this paper proposes and finds that governance in Singapore displays an institutionalized form of Junzi leadership that translates into policymaking toward human capital development.

This paper brings about an Asian perspective of Junzi leadership toward management and governance. The Confucian value system intrinsic to tripartite governance provides an original heuristic lens that helps shed a light on the significance of human capital development in Singapore.

This paper aims to examine the role and experiences of women working in the industrial relations (IR) academy and to explore the recent claim that the subject of industrial relations has “been very receptive to the contributions of feminist analysis”.

An examination is made of the liminal position of women IR scholars in the IR academy and their concern for feminist and gender analysis. Parallels are drawn with IR and trade unions, focusing mainly on Britain, which also occupy, simultaneously, insider and outsider spaces. This approach draws on the relevant literature and is then tested through a questionnaire survey of women scholars working in the field, the author included, together with interviews and interactive discussions about the findings.

Gender politics remain highly contested in the IR academy, with women and their work experiencing considerable marginalisation and exclusion. Nevertheless women IR scholars display a high level of commitment to the field, especially its emphasis on policy and practice. The conclusion is that so far, a “gender turn” has yet to occur in the field in the way that women's studies is claimed as being part of a new knowledge movement.

A limitation of the study is a relatively low response rate to the questionnaire, with a bias towards older, more senior women academics.

For probably the first time the role and experiences in the IR academy of women researchers/ academics are examined and published. The study reveals that the exclusion and sexism experienced there closely reflect the gender and diversity analyses in the IR field.

Access to the Literature of the Social Sciences and Humanities. Proceedings of the Conference on Access to Knowledge and Information in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

The 50th anniversary of Fox's Beyond Contract and Man Mismanagement coincides with another vital contribution to the sociology of work from 1974: Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. This article analyses these two scholars' complementary approaches to job design and the extent to which Fox's ideas influenced subsequent labour process thought.

The article's methodological approach is a historiographical reading of Fox and Braverman's thought in the context of their times and later scholarship.

The article demonstrates that despite some noteworthy overlap with Braverman concerning scientific management, Fox's insights were marginal to later iterations of labour process analysis. It delves into the reasons for this relative neglect, providing an understanding of the dynamics at play.

This paper's value lies in its combined industrial relations and labour process historiography. It offers a fresh perspective on Alan Fox's relationship to the latter field of study.

This chapter examines the rise and fall of the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations (Dunlop Commission) in the early 1990s. It uses the events surrounding the Commission to provide an insight into the dynamics of the struggle over federal labor law reform. The inability of the Dunlop Commission to get labor and management representatives to agree on proposals for labor law reform demonstrated, yet again, that employer opposition is the greatest obstacle to the protection of organizing rights and modernization of labor law. For the nation's major management associations, labor law reform is a life and death issue, and nothing is more important to them than defeating revisions to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) intended to strengthen organizing rights. The failure of labor law reform in the 1990s also demonstrated that the labor movement would never win reform by means of an “inside the beltway” legislative campaign – designed to push reform through the US Senate – because the principal employer organizations would always exercise more influence in Congress. Instead, unions must engage with public opinion, and convince union and nonunion members about the importance of reform. Thus far, however, they lack an effective language with which to do this.