Industrial relations now: Where are we? Where to next?

Abstract

It has been more than two decades since human resource management (HRM) was predicted to make our field of scholarship, industrial relations (IR), redundant. However, we see the discipline as being alive and well, with a productive overlap between HRM and IR as fields of both scholarship and practice with a focus on work itself, and relationships at work as well as the social, cultural and political elements that influence them. For a better understanding of workplace matters, it is essential to retain a critical scholarship towards the study of the employment relationship. The notable historian of IR Peter Ackers suggests that ‘IR, as IR can only meet the current challenge by retooling some foundation ideas’ and that we can ‘only find the future in the past’ (2011: 46). In answering this call, we thought it worthwhile to revisit the meaning, relevance and impact of IR as a field of scholarship and to attempt to understand where the field is going. As such, as editors of this special issue, we asked the authors who have contributed articles to do three things: provide a review of the themes in the extant research in their field of expertise; analyse the emerging issues in the relevant literature; and finally, present some suggestions as to the questions and topics likely to emerge in future scholarship. The six articles presented in this edition have been constructed to meet these three aims.