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The Oxford Institute for Employee Relations (OXIFER) is a small research and teaching community based at Templeton College, Oxford. It aims to link advanced research with teaching and the widespread dissemination of findings, focusing primarily on the role of management in employee and industrial relations and examining aspects of employee relations. Four research projects are currently under way. The first, Development and Dissemination of the Industrial Relations Audit, involves identifying an organisation's existing industrial relations practices and comparing and contrasting these with the desired position as perceived by senior managers or a joint body of senior managers and union representatives. Line Management of Industrial Relations uses data from the audits conducted in the first project to study the industrial relations role of line managers. The Management of Employee Relations in the Multidivisional Company focuses on the strategic choices open to senior line managers and personnel management. Management of Change and the Contribution of Industrial Relations Training aims to gain a better understanding of the process of change in a variety of organisations with particular reference to the contribution which industrial relations training in its broadest sense can make to change. Common themes running through the projects are methodology, employment relations and the management of change and the apparent current managerial concern with quality.

An Act to amend the law relating to employers and workers and to organisations of employers and organisations of workers; to provide for the establishment of a National Industrial Relations Court and for extending the jurisdiction of industrial tribunals; to provide for the appointment of a Chief Registrar of Trade Unions and Employers' Associations, and of assistant registrars, and for establishing a Commission on Industrial Relations as a statutory body; and for purposes connected with those matters. [5th August 1971]

This paper seeks to examine the impact of labor‐management partnership on organizational performance and industrial relations quality at Korean firms.

Data were collected from 139 firms for organizational‐level research. Hierarchical regression analyses were employed.

The research showed that the partnership principle and the five practices of management efforts to secure jobs, information sharing, fair financial rewards, investment in employee training, and worker participation in management were significantly and positively associated with the quality of industrial relations. The partnership principle and two of these practices (investment in training and fair financial rewards) had significant and positive effects on organizational performance.

The results suggest that the partnership principle on its own does not necessarily lead to improved organizational performance or industrial relations quality, and that a company needs not only to adopt the principle of partnership but also to implement it effectively through specific practices.

The paper examines the impact of the partnership model in Korean contexts and offers practical implications for managers seeking effective implementation of the labor‐management partnership model.

The aim of this research is to study the relationships between occupational commitment, industrial relations and turnover intention, as well as the moderating role of turnover intention.

Empirical data for this study were collected using a questionnaire survey method. A total of 600 copies of the questionnaire were sent out by post or email to firms and 429 valid responses were finally obtained, yielding a response rate of approximately 71.5 per cent.

Except for the limited choices commitment, affective commitment, normative commitment and cumulative costs commitment are found to be significantly and positively related to industrial relations. Employees’ turnover intention may be detrimental to industrial relations, as our results show that it has a negative correlation with industrial relations. We also find that it negatively moderates the relationship between occupational commitment and industrial relations.

Our results shed light on human resource management practices in Chinese firms, and managerial implications are made to enhance Chinese employees’ occupational commitment.

This study extends the current literature and provides new insights into the relationship between the four dimensions of occupational commitment and industrial relations in the Chinese context. It also provides an understanding that this relationship is conditioned on employees’ turnover intention.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

The purpose of this paper is to seek greater academic discussion of gender and gender change within industrial relations. It attempts to move the theoretical discussion of gender away from universal systems theories of analysis to a more micro multi‐layered approach that can accommodate what is a complex and subtle situation, gendered industrial relations. It commences to theorise why women in certain institutional frameworks progress whilst women in others do not.

A qualitative empirical case study approach has been taken to uncover the nuances of women's daily experiences of work relationships including industrial relations in Keylockco, a lock manufacturer.

The findings indicate that Bourdieu's theory can be successfully used to analysis gender change within industrial relation and to explore how women's differing access to capital can facilitate their positional progress within hierarchical gender‐stratified industrial relations. While the paper does not offer solutions for improving the position of women within industrial relations it does seek to stimulate discussion around the positional requirements of industrial relations actors where greater social, economic, cultural and symbolic capital has accrued to men.

The analysis of empirical data with Bourdieu's theory of habitus and capital has the potential to be extended to other sites of industrial relations than the Keylockco case study. It offers us the possibility to evaluate empirically the progression of women, for example, in female‐friendly unions such as Unison. It is also possible to apply the theory to both national and international experiences of gendered industrial relations.

It is now widely accepted, perhaps with some qualifications, that the dominant British school of industrial relations in recent years has been the liberal‐pluralist or volutaristic‐pluralist school. Its centre has been Oxford and its main members have included Hugh Clegg, the late Allan Flanders, W E J McCarthy, G S Bain and A Fox. The influence of this group has been exhibited in its impact not only on industrial relations teaching and research, but also on policy, especially through the Donovan Report. Indeed, several writers have chosen to characterize it as a problem‐solving rather than a theoretical approach. However, it is important to acknowledge that a practical orientation may not in itself constitute an a‐theoretical position. Hyman and Fryer thus, for example, use the label ‘pragmatism’ to describe a component of the theoretical orientation of the ‘Oxford school’, thus recognizing that while its ‘theory may be only semi‐articulated and ….. partially developed’, the work of the school is not a‐theoretical.

In the British social formation, especially after 1960, there has been a tendency towards an external mode of control of industrial relations which is based upon the internal regulation of labour collectivities. The article argues that corporatism and hegemony are both inextricably linked facets of the same process — the ideological control of the IR system, embodying both corporate agencies and hegemonic relations, by a state which has various forms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine European Union (EU) industrial relations in their development over time. It describes and analyzes their main constituent parts, which are deployed along four interlinked institutional dimensions: tripartite concertation; cross-industry social dialogue; sectoral social dialogue; and employee representation and negotiation at the transnational company level. The focus lies strictly on the emerging EU layer of industrial relations, which is common to the different Member States and not on comparative European industrial relations.

The paper is conceptual in nature. It considers the differences and mutually interdependent legal and political processes, policies and institutions between EU industrial relations and national industrial relations.

The findings substantiate that EU industrial relations constitute an incomplete but perfectly traceable transnational reality distinct from industrial relations in the Member States. EU industrial relations are not to supersede but to supplement national industrial relations. Neither the EU institutional framework nor the European social partners have the mandate, legitimation or desire to perform a more ambitious role.

More empirically oriented research would further support the findings in the paper.

The paper presents a conceptual review based on a comprehensive and critical reading of the literature on EU industrial relations. It also puts labor strategies at the forefront of the analysis in corporate relocation.

Since the late 1970s, the study of the role, structure and functions of personnel management in the United Kingdom has been greatly facilitated by surveys emerging from a number of large‐scale surveys. A major interest in interpreting the data from these surveys has been to evaluate the impact of recession, and, latterly, recovery on the power, structure and roles of personnel departments and personnel specialists in recent years. The survey data are used comparatively to evaluate the empirical plausibility of the different scenarios which have arisen, and to account for the results that emerge.