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Since the 1980s the U.S. has experienced a variety of partnership arrangements between labor and management focused on improving industrial relations and organizational performance (Ichniowski et al., 1996; Kochan et al., 1986; McKersie, 2002; Rubinstein & Kochan, 2001). Yet there is an absence of research comparing these partnerships across industries and evaluating the factors that: (a) contribute to their success; (b) seem to be barriers to achieving their stated goals; or (c) predict which ones will stand the test of time. (For exceptions see Preuss & Frost, forthcoming 2003; Rubinstein, 2001b). This paper summarizes recent U.S. experience with partnerships; identifies factors that seem to influence the formation and sustainability of partnerships, including the development of network ties across traditional boundaries; and suggests theoretical and empirical implications of this experience in building and sustaining partnerships at work. We draw on a variety of types of evidence from the authors’ cumulated experience and research with more than 50 such partnerships in the U.S., spanning multiple industries and multiple decades.

The authors link High-Involvement Work Systems (HIWS) with social network research both theoretically and methodologically by conceiving of these work systems as networks and by using network methods to better understand and evaluate these arrangements. Their approach is to integrate the institutional perspective of industrial relations with the analytical methodology of social network analysis. They use a longitudinal data set collected before and after the introduction of an HIWS in a pharmaceutical company to measure the impact on patterns of employee communication as well as communication between the union and management. Improvements were found in customer satisfaction, and positive effects were seen in the pattern and structure of organizational communication with an increase in the density of lateral and vertical interdepartmental communication, and a decrease in hierarchy. These results were confirmed using survey data on employee perceptions of particular types of communication and interviews with employees at various levels of authority.

Over the past decade the policy debate over improving U.S. public education has focused on market solutions (charter schools, privatization, and vouchers) and teacher evaluation through high stakes standardized testing of students. In this debate, teachers and their unions are often characterized as the problem. Our research offers an alternate path in the debate, a perspective that looks at schools as systems – the way schools are organized and the way decisions are made. We focus on examples of collaboration through the creation of long-term labor-management partnerships among teachers’ unions and school administrators that improve and restructure public schools from the inside to enhance planning, decision-making, problem solving, and the ways teachers interact and schools are organized. We analyzed how these efforts were created and sustained in six public school districts over the past two decades, and what they can teach us about the impact of significant involvement of faculty and their local union leadership, working closely with district administration. We argue that collaboration between teachers, their unions, and administrators is both possible and necessary for any meaningful and lasting public school reform.

This paper evaluates the only industry-wide process initiated by a union through collective bargaining to reorganize traditional work systems and transform labor relations. It analyzes attempts over the past decade by the United Steelworkers of America to introduce its model for a more participative work system in an effort to gain access to business information, share in business decision making, improve quality, reduce costs, and build better relations between management and the union in the U.S. basic steel industry. This study shows that the Cooperative Partnership Agreements have produced mixed results. Using survey and interview data, the paper compares plants that successfully implemented the CPA with those that did not and analyzes the reasons for the variation in their impact. Further the paper draws out the lessons from this unique union-driven contractual approach to industry reform.

Volume 20 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (AILR) contains seven chapters that deal with important aspects of employment relationships in a variety of industries, countries, and research contexts. The first three papers, each of which analyzes the effects of an exogenous variable (e.g., fiscal adversity, globalization, and new technology) on labor–management relations, have specific industry/sector settings, namely, public schools (primary education), civil aviation, and nursing homes (health care), respectively. The first and third of these chapters are set in the United States, the second in Britain. The next four chapters, each of which analyzes the effects of enacted or contemplated legislation on specific aspects of labor–management relations and workplace dispute resolution, are set in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, respectively. The research designs featured in these papers include quasiexperimental, case studies, interviews, surveys, and simultaneous equation modeling.

Volume 12 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (AILR) contains eight papers that deal with contemporary and historical aspects of unionism and other forms of union representation, union-management relations, union political activity, labor market regulation, and interpretations of selected leading labor scholars’ writings about the evolution of welfare capitalism in the U.S. Four of these papers, by Daniel & Siebert, Borgers, Rubinstein, and Pereles, were winners of the 2002 AILR/Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA) “best papers” competition.¹