Collective Actors in Industrial RelationsCollective Actors in Industrial Relations
Collective Actors in Industrial Relations: What Future?
IIRA World Congress, Track 4
Rapporteur’s Report 1
Thomas A. Kochan
MIT Institute for Work & Employment Research
And
MIT Workplace Center
April 2003
The term “actors” in industrial relations gained currency in John Dunlop’s
Industrial Relations Systems (1958). He proposed that three parties—employers, labor unions, and government-- are the key actors in a modern industrial relations system. He also argued that none of these institutions could act in an autonomous or independent fashion. Instead they were shaped, at least to some extent, by their market, technological and political contexts. A longstanding debate in our field has been: How much volition or discretion these actors have in responding to changes in their environment?
This debate takes on more urgency today than at any point in recent history.
Changes in the environmental contexts in which work takes place and employment relationships are formed are placing great pressures on employers, unions, and government to adapt and update their practices and policies. The sources of change are well known: globalization, new technologies, changes in both workforce demographics and in the very role that workers and their human capital play in labor markets and organizations. These changes pose several additional questions: Can these actors regain control over their destiny and over the destiny or performance of their industrial relations systems in light of changes in these external contexts? Are new actors and/or new structures emerging that require reconceptualizing our theories of industrial relations?
What institutional innovations will be needed from policy makers and practitioners in our field? These are some of the questions raised in the papers prepared for this Track of the
IIRA’s 13 th World Congress. I will summarize how these papers address these questions and offer several thoughts of my own. But before beginning, let us reflect on another
IIRA World Congress, Track 4
Rapporteur’s Report 1
Thomas A. Kochan
MIT Institute for Work & Employment Research
And
MIT Workplace Center
April 2003
The term “actors” in industrial relations gained currency in John Dunlop’s
Industrial Relations Systems (1958). He proposed that three parties—employers, labor unions, and government-- are the key actors in a modern industrial relations system. He also argued that none of these institutions could act in an autonomous or independent fashion. Instead they were shaped, at least to some extent, by their market, technological and political contexts. A longstanding debate in our field has been: How much volition or discretion these actors have in responding to changes in their environment?
This debate takes on more urgency today than at any point in recent history.
Changes in the environmental contexts in which work takes place and employment relationships are formed are placing great pressures on employers, unions, and government to adapt and update their practices and policies. The sources of change are well known: globalization, new technologies, changes in both workforce demographics and in the very role that workers and their human capital play in labor markets and organizations. These changes pose several additional questions: Can these actors regain control over their destiny and over the destiny or performance of their industrial relations systems in light of changes in these external contexts? Are new actors and/or new structures emerging that require reconceptualizing our theories of industrial relations?
What institutional innovations will be needed from policy makers and practitioners in our field? These are some of the questions raised in the papers prepared for this Track of the
IIRA’s 13 th World Congress. I will summarize how these papers address these questions and offer several thoughts of my own. But before beginning, let us reflect on another
References: Dunlop, John T., Industrial Relations Systems. New York: Holt, 1958. (September,2002), 521-42. Katz, Harry C. and Owen Darbishire, Converging Divergences. Ithaca, NY: Cornell ILR Press, 2000. Stiglitz, Joseph E., Globalization and its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. (September, 2002), 403-30.