A future for IR academics? 2018 AIRAANZ presidential address

Abstract

I began my career as an academic around 15 years ago, and the day-to-day working experience then was (according to my older colleagues and mentors) very different from the work people did 15 years prior to that, and the next 15 years will be very different again. As industrial relations, scholars we are not unfamiliar with uncertainty – and what lies ahead is a great deal of uncertainty. Reading the future though, is fraught with danger. Plenty of people predicted the age of leisure that we would all be living by the 1990s, sadly that has not eventuated. The paperless office may seem a step closer depending on your organisation, but still seems out of reach. There are countless other failed attempts to predict our future, so it is with some trepidation that I embark upon this discussion of the future of industrial relations research and teaching when we add the variable of artificial intelligence (AI) in to the model. The only certainty is that these are uncertain times.