Industrial Relations Journal 33:1
ISSN 0019-8692
Reframing employment
relations: the case for
neo-pluralism1
Peter Ackers
Industrial Relations can no longer stumble along, gathering
empirical data, without reframing its underlying theoretical
assumptions. The ‘new problem of order’ focuses on links
between employment and society. Recent social science and
public policy concepts develop the Durkheimian assumptions
of IR Pluralism. Neo-pluralism offers a more credible IR paradigm than Kelly’s Marxism.
Introduction
Times have changed. I remain committed to the main thrust of my arguments in the 1970s, though
I would qualify some points and express others differently. In the past ten years, however, I have
felt the need to move from broad generalisation—which inevitably oversimplifies—to a narrower
focus on investigations and analysis; and also to adapt arguments, first presented at a time of
advance and confidence, to a very different political and economic context. (Hyman, 1989: ix)
Industrial relations (IR) has proved generally incapable of restating or revising its
core paradigms, as they were established in the 1970s. Most of us have indeed settled
for ‘a narrower focus on investigations and analysis’, as if this could proceed effectively without rethinking the underlying theoretical framework of the discipline.
Kelly (1998) has recently broken this spell, by redefining Marxism as an IR paradigm
for the new century. No equivalent revision has been spelt-out for Pluralism, though
it stumbles on as the unspoken assumption of most practical IR research. In 1979,
Clegg defined IR as:
the study of the rules governing employment, together with the ways in which the rules are
made and changed, interpreted and administered. Put more briefly, it is the study of job regulation. (Clegg, 1979: 1)
1
An earlier, very different version of this paper, ‘IR and the Spirit of Community’ was presented at
the BUIRA Conference, De Montfort University in Leicester, July 1999.
❒ Peter Ackers is Reader in Employment Relations at Loughborough University Business School.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA.
2 Industrial Relations Journal
As I have already argued, this formulation offers scope for expansion beyond its
original narrow remit of trade unions and collective bargaining (Ackers, 1994). That
is particularly evident once we couple it with Flanders’s earlier definition as ‘the
institutions of job regulation’. As Clegg (1979: 450) noted, in response to Hyman’s
criticisms: ‘For some people the word “institutions” may signify formal rather than
informal organisations; but it does not have to do so.’ Finally, Clegg also anticipated
the latest attempt at a working definition of IR by recognising that ‘the employment
relationship is central to industrial relations’ (p. 452). One legacy is a number of
useful words, to which we shall return: rules, regulation, institutions and employment
relationship. Yet these words offer limited solace to the contemporary IR researcher,
unless we can breath some new spirit into them. That is the objective of this essay.
Below I attempt to define a neo-pluralism, which can serve as a viable theoretical
basis for the rejuvenation of IR, or employment relations as it is now better understood
(see Figure 1). This approach builds upon the pragmatic institutional emphasis of the
Oxford Pluralist school, established by Clegg and Flanders, while recovering some of
its original sense of ethical and social purpose, and retooling its conceptual apparatus
for a very different employment world. I argue, first, that the ‘problem of order’,
which has been located traditionally by IR in the workplace, has shifted to the
relationship between employment and society. IR by its continuing economistic
emphasis on internal workplace relations and its exclusion of explicit ethical considerations, has become stranded by the shifting tide of social change and cut off
from the major public policy debates about the future of Western society. Next, I
sketch a new agenda for studying the employment relationship and society, by surveying several novel concepts as they relate to the current debate on social cohesion
and the problematic relationship between work and society. This section draws from
a range of ideological backgrounds and social science disciplines; all from outside
conventional IR. A number of current themes—social breakdown and cohesion,
moral communities and social institutions, civil society and democratic rights,
relationship capitalism and stakeholding, and employment regulation—together suggest a new conceptual repertoire for IR as a discipline. While this new language
reflects the changed character of work and society in the new century, it also returns
us to the sociology of Durkheim, as it animated the foundational work of Flanders
and Fox. My conclusion contrasts this neo-pluralist perspective to Kelly’s (1998)
Marxist manifesto, and suggests how neo-pluralism can offer a more viable basis
for the regeneration of IR, by extending the traditional focus on rule-making social
institutions to address this changed employment agenda. I close with a putative new
definition of Employment Relations for today.
Figure 1: Foundations of neo-pluralism
The crisis of industrial relations
A frequent and well-known effect of the branching-off of scholarly disciplines is that the link of
the new specialism with the main area of research becomes tenuous; the mainstream is little
affected by the concerns and discoveries of the new specialists, and soon also by the peculiar
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.
Reframing employment relations
3
language and imagery they develop. More often than not, the branching-off means that the scholarly interests delegated to specialist institutions are thereby eliminated from the core canon of
the discipline; they are, so to speak, particularised and marginalised, deprived in practice, if not
necessarily in theory, of more general significance; thus mainstream scholarship is absolved from
further preoccupation with them. (Bauman, 1989: x–xi)
The family and community have moved to the heart of public debate about the future
of modern Western society, especially in Britain and North America. Symptoms of
wider social breakdown, notably crime, have been widely associated with failing
families and communities. For conservatives, the source of the problem lies with the
welfare state, which has encouraged economic dependence and undermined personal
moral responsibility. On the other hand, liberals and radicals point to the destructive
consequences of unregulated market forces and the insecurity of modern employment. Between these two mirrors, each reflecting only one part of reality, several
social critics have attempted a new theoretical synthesis that acknowledges, at once,
social and individual responsibility, state and business culpability. However, the
economic and employment side of this analysis remains underdeveloped, largely
because the central debate has taken place within various other social science circles,
at some distance from the main literature on the employment relationship. At the
same time, IR has largely ignored this debate as something outside its province or
competence. Since applied sociology has bifurcated between the inhabitants of social
policy departments and business schools, Bauman’s fear of disciplinary myopia and
mutual incomprehension has been realised. As a result, much of this recent social
analysis lacks a firm anchor in the employment relationship, while IR has lost sight
of family, community and the wider society.
Why might IR benefit from a new stock of ideas and principles? After all, the
employment relationship remains central to capitalist society, much as always. As
Sennett (1998: 4) observes,
The new order has not erased the brute fact of dependence; the rate of full-time self-employment
in the United States, for instance, has held steady at about 8.5 percent for the last forty years.
The future of IR as an academic discipline, however, is less assured for a number of
reasons. First, IR was born of a particular industrial era of full, stable employment
and male breadwinners, working in large unionised manufacturing plants. These
circumstances of the 1950s and 1960s generated a public policy emphasis on the
problem of labour control internal to the workplace. Strikes were the visible, historically specific manifestation of the more general ‘problem of order’ in modern society,
as identified by Durkheim a century before (Flanders, 1974: 241–276; Giddens, 1978;
Parkin, 1992). Secondly, that time looks to have passed, while the current problem of
order is not centred on the internal life of the workplace, but on the troublesome linkage
between employment and society. This has emerged most concretely in a growing concern with the impact of modern employment patterns on family relations, and the
backlash from family and community social breakdown on to work relations themselves. Thirdly, IR has been slow to adjust to this new public policy agenda. This
essay calls for the discipline to re-engage with contemporary society and social
theory. Bauman’s opening quote meditates on how a central event of modern, Western society, the Holocaust, became the preserve of academic specialisation, and hence
failed to reshape our entire sociological understanding of the nature of Modernity.
To study IR in its current shape is increasingly to experience the corollary: an overspecialised academic sub-discipline committed to a myopic research agenda, which
finds less and less resonance in the wider debates about the future of our society.
Finally, British IR has unconsciously shared one general weakness of the social
sciences: the exclusion of ethical considerations from its analysis. As Bauman notes,
Sociology has ‘promoted, as binding rules of its own discourse, the inadmissibility of
ethical problematics in any other form but that of a communally-sustained ideology’
(Bauman, 1989: 29). A striking feature of the new debate about Western post4 Industrial Relations Journal
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.
industrial society, discussed below, is how willing the protagonists are to blend social
science analysis and ethical argument, and to forge concepts that bridge the two.2
IR has developed as a significant social science discipline in most English-speaking
countries, where it has focused on the institutional relationship between employers
and trade unions, and especially collective bargaining. It has no exact equivalent in
continental Europe, where the study of work has always been more integrated with
the wider study of society and culture. While IR’s realistic institutional account of
collective bargaining offers a valuable corrective to the neo-classical economic model
of labour market behaviour (Nolan, 1983), the discipline shares the economist’s tendency to treat community and family as ‘externalities’ inessential to understanding
the employment relationship. A combination of Dunlop’s (1958) American systems
theory and the British voluntarist tradition has fostered an approach that abstracts
both substantive and procedural workplace ‘rule-making’ from the wider economic
and social dynamics of society. As we have seen, this blinkered vision accorded
reasonably well with the public policy agenda of the postwar ‘Golden Age’
(Hobsbawm, 1994). Since 1979, that perspective has broken down, as politics in the
form of Thatcherism and economics in the shape of globalisation have refused to
entertain a largely autonomous IR system. More than that, the decline of male, manufacturing employment and the rise of feminised service work begins to ask quite
different questions of the employment relationship. These revolve less around the
internal workplace ‘frontier of control’ than the tension between working and family
life—though the two may be connected.3
The neglect of work-and-family relations is perhaps the most striking single
instance of the anti-social character of traditional IR. Clegg’s (1979) classic preThatcher text contained no indexed reference to the family in its near 500 pages.
More recent textbooks, such as Edwards (1995) or Sisson (1994), have compensated
for the neglect of women’s paid work, typically by including specialist chapters on
equal opportunities. However, such discussions continue to treat men and women
as if they are atomised economic actors, neglecting how they combine in families to
support each other and their children. This assumes that the labour market is and
should be blind to family needs, which are presumably a problem for the separate
sphere of social policy. To take just one instance, Clark (1996: 46–50) discusses labour
flexibility in characteristic vein as ‘a management strategy’, without either noting the
family dynamics that have fostered the expansion of part-time female employment
or the broader consequences for social cohesion. In short, while IR has been alive to
the role of some social institutions, notably trade unions, in employment relations
processes and outcomes it has sustained an image of workers as unattached individuals in their out-of-work lives. This shortcoming extends well beyond the family per
se, to questions of work–life balance (including ‘stress’) and the community responsibility of business. According to Martin (1999: 1214), Marxists should take a broader
view, since their ‘focus is on the system as a whole’. To the contrary, IR radicals
have been among the worst offenders; reflecting the obsession of the postwar British
sectarian left with economic workplace militancy or ‘strikes in factories’. Thus
Hyman (1975) confined himself largely to conflicts between workplace actors. Even
Kelly’s (1998) recent challenge to the managerial agenda of mainstream IR and
human resource management (HRM) remains firmly within this economistic framework—as I argue below. At the heart of Marxist collectivism, we encounter a species
of social individualism. Instead of expecting major societal change to grow from the
germs of purely workplace grievances, as IR radicals have done, we would better
2
Ethics here should not be confused with a high-handed ‘moralism’. All societies need to make
certain basic value judgements about ethically appropriate social arrangements, rights and responsibilities.
3
This article restricts itself to the British IR tradition. For a historical analysis of the American tradition, shaped by ‘institutional labour economics’, see Kaufman (1993) for his broad definition of IR
(now Employment Relations) in contradistinction to Labour Relations or HRM.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.
Reframing employment relations
5
address our ethical and social science energies to the tension between the nature of
contemporary work and the quality of our family and community lives.
Martin (1999: 1213–1214) has recently restated ‘traditional pluralism’ in an interesting and provocative way as a
Functionalist tradition (that) has dominated the field historically, although usually implicitly and
without the theoretical apparatus often associated with functionalism in mainstream sociological
theory . . . the focus is on the subsystem, which may be analysed in the explicitly functionalist
perspective primarily in relations to the larger system of which it is a part. The ‘root metaphor’
is the organism, however disguised . . . The primary unit of analysis is the institution. Major
issues relate to the historical development of institutions, the relationship between institutions
and their environments and institutional interrelationships, especially collective bargaining. Institutional theory in general is concerned with cultures, structures, and routines, with the way in
which institutions become embedded in culture, and internalised by individuals; but the focus
is on institution and culture, not on the individual interest . . . This orientation is obviously more
congenial to sociologists than to economists.
This description will come as a shock to many practising IR pluralists. In the first
place, most would assume that they were operating with a conflict model, closer to
Marxism than functionalism. Indeed, the ‘organic’ root metaphor is routinely associated with the rival frame of reference, unitarism (and HRM), as a debased version of
Parsonian social consensus theory (Dunn, 1990; Fox, 1966). If most contemporary
pluralists were looking for a sociological lineage, they would be more likely to point
to Dahrendorf (1965) and Weber (Gerth and Wright Mills, 1991). Even so, Martin
disinterrs an old but still important point: that pluralism too was a once theory of
social integration, concerned with stability and order. As Clegg (1979: 451) argued:
It cannot be denied that the words ‘regulation’ and ‘system’ have conservative implications. Both
imply stability, for without order there can be neither rules nor systems. But the definition is not
necessarily the worse for that.
Yet, this does not make for a unitarist social consensus theory. For as Martin (1999:
1215) makes clear, ‘differential interests require continuous reconciliation, independently of the process of production’. In my view, this interpretation of traditional
pluralism suggests a further development. Contemporary neo-pluralism should pickup a functionalist emphasis on institutions, but one that owes less to Dunlop’s IR
sub-system, influenced by Parson’s, than to Durkheim’s more expansive and flexible
sociology of normative regulation (Giddens, 1971: 101–104). Whereas in the 1970s it
was fashionable to pour contempt on social theories that addressed the problem of
order, today there is a renewed academic and political interest in the question of
social cohesion (see Table 1).
Table 1: 1970s pluralism and neo-pluralism compared
1970s Pluralism
Interests
Workplace conflict and economic order
Trade unions and collective-bargaining
The forward march of labour
The frontier of control
Joint regulation
6 Industrial Relations Journal
Neo-pluralism
Interests and values
Social breakdown and social cohesion
Moral communities and social
institutions
Civil society and democratic rights
Relationship capitalism and
stakeholding
Ethical employment regulation
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.
The new problem of order: social breakdown and cohesion
The structures of human societies themselves, including even some of the social foundations of
the capitalist economy, are on the point of being destroyed by the erosion of what we have
inherited from the human past . . . the moral crisis was not only one of the assumptions of modern
civilisation, but also one of the historic structures of human relations which modern society
inherited from a pre-industrial and pre-capitalist past, and which, as we can now see, had enabled
it to function. It was not a crisis of one form of organising societies, but of all forms. The strange
calls for an otherwise unidentified ‘civil society’, for ‘community’ were the voice of lost and
drifting generations. They were heard in an age when such words, having lost traditional meaning, became vapid phrases. (Hobsbawm, 1994: 585)
Much managerial literature talks as if the problem of order has been solved. Strike
statistics are at their lowest level for generations, and it is hard to envisage any return
to the labour conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet there is ample evidence of a new
problem of order, with the emergence (in some sense) of a post-modern society in
search of new modes of normative regulation. Durkheim conceived this as ‘an anomic
state . . . consequent upon the fact that the division of economic functions has temporarily outstripped the development of appropriate moral regulation’ (Giddens 1971:
80). This concern has been expressed in widespread political rhetoric about moral
crisis and a corresponding search for social cohesion. Different definitions of the nature
of the problem and, therefore the terms of its resolution, have come from many
ideological directions. On the poles of left and right, it has been defined in pessimistic, melodramatic terms of social and moral crisis. In the middle ground, a more
optimistic and constructive mood prevails. All are united, however, in linking the
ethical and sociological dimensions of the problem. And, while the relationship
between employment and society (or in Martin’s language between the IR sub-system
and the larger social system) figures large in most accounts, there are also intimations
of a growing internal problem of organisational cohesion arising from the disorder
outside (see Ackers and Preston, 1997).
The veteran Marxist historian, Hobsbawm (1994: 567) describes a ‘historic crisis’
of Western capitalist industrial society characterised by ‘the hunger for a secure
identity and social order in a disintegrating world’. In his view, capitalism will pay
a price for social chaos, which destroys motivations such as family duty and trust
and ends ‘by sawing off at least one of the branches on which it sat’ (p. 16). This
crisis is not primarily about a breakdown of normative order within the workplace,
such as Flanders (1974) found with the unofficial strikes of the 1960s. Rather it is a
moral crisis emanating from the economic system, pervading the whole of society
and then recoiling back onto the employment relationship. Accordingly, free
enterprise capitalism dissolves, like acid, all human bonds and social institutions that
do not contribute directly to business profit, replacing these with commodity
relations between buyers and sellers. As Hirschman (1982; Adler, 1998) has demonstrated, this ‘self destruction thesis’ has a long intellectual lineage going back to Marx
and before.4 For Hobsbawm (1997: 167), the culprit for social breakdown is clearly the
global free enterprise economic system, as it spins free of effective social regulation.
Elsewhere, he adds:
In fact one reason why the past twenty-five years in world history have seen such profound social
transformations is that such pre-capitalist elements, hitherto essential parts of the operation of
capitalism, have finally become too eroded by capitalist development to play the vital role they
once did. I am thinking here, of course, of the family.
The family is central to the debate about social breakdown, as it still rages in
America and Britain (see Lloyd, 1998; Phillips, 1998). The greatest emphasis is on
those centres of multiple deprivation, such as the decaying inner cities and outer
council estates or abandoned former coal and steel communities, where families,
4
Marx and Engels famously stressed the simultaneously destructive and creative dynamics of capitalism, as did Schumpeter: see W.F. Stolpher (1968).
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.
Reframing employment relations
7
schools and just about everything else is ‘failing’. When the writer, William Finnegan
visited his childhood suburb of Los Angeles, he found:
Everyone close to my age seemed to have been divorced twice, had their mortgage foreclosed,
maxed out their credit cards, lost custody of their kids, or been addicted to drugs or alcohol or
gambling or sex or born-again religion. Even the success stories were sad. (quoted in Allen-Mills,
1999: 2)
This is an extreme case, but there are fears that it could portend a more general
community breakdown. Himmelfarb (1994), an eminent American conservative historian of Hobsbawm’s generation—who shares his pessimism—roots the problem
not in economic dislocation, but in moral decay. In her view, it is not the economic
system that destabilises community and family life, but the overweening welfare
state of the postwar era and the dependency culture which this has created. The root
of the problem is an ethical relativism in public policy which has made morals ‘a
matter of taste’ (p. 24) and normalised deviant behaviour, such as divorce and
illegitimacy. She contends that, far from capitalism destroying ‘traditional values and
institutions’ (p. 254) as Hobsbawm suggests, Victorian industrial society grew
increasingly moral and ordered, as demonstrated by stronger families and less crime.
These ‘Victorian values’ were grounded in, but not dependent upon, religious faith
and included: ‘the family as well as hard work, thrift, cleanliness, self-reliance, selfrespect, neighborliness, patriotism’ (p. 12). They were shared by working-class
people, who knew right from wrong, provided for their families, and valued ‘independence’ and ‘respectability’. In short, Himmelfarb sees the moral crisis spreading
from family, community and society to the economy, rather than the other way
round.
The American sociologist, Sennett (1998) develops the pessimistic theme in a highly
original way, by exploring how,
short-term capitalism threatens to corrode . . . character, particularly those qualities of character
which bind human beings to one another and furnishes each with a sense of sustainable self.
(p. 27)
Sennett claims that ‘flexible’—constantly changing, high-risk, bitty and short-term—
patterns of employment undermine any sense of meaning and identity in our work
and life. What has given great wealth and power to business leaders, damages
employees’ lives. Whereas the male breadwinner in the large, stable bureaucratic
organisation of the past, could plan his life in reasonable security and save to support
his home and family, the new flexible worker can hold no such long-term vision. He
has no coherent ‘story’ to tell of his life and work, to compare with the ‘career’ of
the former miner, car worker or engineering fitter.
To imagine a life of momentary impulses, of short-term action, devoid of sustainable routines, a
life without habits, is to imagine a mindless existence . . . .Transposed to the family realm, ‘No
long-term’ means keep moving, don’t commit yourself, and don’t sacrifice. (pp. 44 and 25)
This also spells the disintegration of the old industrial work ethic. And, as one of
Sennett’s characters fears, such work experience has little to offer as a ‘parental role
model’ (p. 26) for teaching commitment to your children:
In fact, for this modern couple, the problem is . . . how can they protect family relations from
succumbing to the short-term behaviour, the meeting mind-set, and above all the weakness of
loyalty and commitment which mark the modern workplace.
The problem, therefore, is not simply one of earning a stable income to support
family and community life, or even of having enough time with family, but of the
entire self-image of the contemporary worker. This applies almost as acutely to
middle-class groups, such as ‘downsized’ IBM executives, as it does to Sennett’s bluecollar bakery workers. In place of genuine, strong workplace social bonds,
‘teamwork’ represents both superficiality and duplicity, as managers and workers
fake co-operation and pretend that they share the same interests and goals. Sennett’s
argument is important because it goes beyond crude economic damage to delve into
8 Industrial Relations Journal
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what the breakdown of time routines has done to the human soul. He also challenges
facile business talk of ‘high-commitment’, ‘high-trust’ organisations. For: ‘”No long
term” is a principle which corrodes trust, loyalty, and mutual commitment’ (p. 24).
Hobsbawm, Sennett and Himmelfarb each put moral character and self-discipline
at the centre of the argument, but whereas the last expects family and community
to project these values into the workplace, the first two see the movement in the
opposite direction. These three pessimists offer little in the way of practical remedies
for public policy. All are nostalgic for a social order now past, with little prospect
of resurrection. For Hobsbawn, the very notion of remedy appears forlorn, while
Himmelfarb hankers after some revival of long-lost religious and sexual mores. Even
Sennett’s concluding recipe amounts to little more than a plea for greater selfawareness, in defence against the false hopes of business rhetoric. This is despite his
strong emphasis on the past role of trade unions in regulating work and giving it
meaning, coupled to an awareness that the corporate beneficiaries of short-term capitalism fear most of all a union resurgence. Perhaps, in a narrow sense, the pessimism
is justified: the old industrial order with its mass labour movements will not rise
again. However, a second group of more optimistic writers redefine the problem of
social cohesion and moral order in more manageable terms, while indicating some
practical strategies, which may aid its resolution. In their pragmatic, reformist mentality, they are close to the original spirit of IR pluralism.
Moral communities and social institutions
As we have seen, early pluralist IR theory built on Durkheim’s notion of moral communities and the role that social institutions could play in maintaining these. In this
sense, IR pluralism offered a functionalist theory of social integration, albeit confined
to union and management relations. This feature was lost as later IR pluralism was
reduced to a ‘realistic’ description of workplace industrial conflict, to the point that
it was effectively merged with materialist, Marxist conflict theory. Subsequent
suggestions that, in an era of HRM and social partnership, the solution is a synthesis
of pluralism and unitarism, rest partly on the false assumption that the former had
never concerned itself with social integration (see Provis, 1996). Perhaps the 1960s
battle with human relations, and behind this Parsonian social consensus theory, left
the impression that IR pluralism was about conflict per se—especially once it emerged
as 1980s ‘radical pluralism’ (Fox, 1974; Batstone, 1984: 1–34). In its original
incarnation, however, IR pluralism was about trade unions and associated normative
institutions, as mechanisms for regulating conflict and creating industrial order. It is
fascinating, therefore, to discover a variety of current social commentators deploying
a very similar Durkheimian framework to address the problem of contemporary
community and family breakdown.
Perhaps the most, broad ranging of these is the American sociologist, Etzioni’s
(1995; see also 1997) communitarian response to social breakdown. His work is as
notable for its style of analysis, as for its practical suggestions. The text is replete
with the usual examples of divorce, single parents and crime. Etzioni’s solution lies
in stronger moral communities and social institutions. Communities are defined as
‘social webs of people who know one another as persons and have a moral voice’
(p. ix). His declared aim is to rebalance a one-sided emphasis on individual rights
in American society with a greater emphasis on social responsibility. In this respect,
he works within a tolerant, liberal democratic framework, carving a middle path
between ‘moral majority’ authoritarians (such as Himmerlfarb) who wish to impose
a rigid moral code on society, and radical individualists who deny the need for any
shared values whatsoever. Etzioni insists that ‘no society can thrive without a moral
order’ (p. 52), but recognises that large parts of the world still suffer from the opposite
problem, a deficit of individual rights. In his view, this is far from true in America
and Britain:
The West is in the cold season of excessive individualism and yearns for the warmth of community to allow human relations to blossom. (p. x)
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.
Reframing employment relations
9
Etzioni echoes many of the themes discussed above, notably the importance of
developing good ‘character’. But he adds a practical emphasis on the central role of
community institutions in reconstructing the moral foundations of society. First and
foremost amongst his socialisation hierarchy comes the family, followed by schools
and then the looser ‘social webs’ of community. Etzioni implicitly affirms the contradictory destructive and constructive tendencies within modern society, as well as the
scope for human agency and community regeneration. The task, for instance, is to
build a modern, democratic family, not to rhapsodise an authoritarian past or start
again on the ashes of such a deep-rooted human institution. In this spirit, Etzioni
wants to modernise a society which, is ‘neither without community nor sufficiently
communitarian’ (p. 122), and this leads to a very concrete and practical emphasis on
regenerating existing social institutions. It is worth noting what small-scale and informal shapes these institutions can take. In employment terms, they might be a union
workgroup, a staff association, a European Works Council, or a joint consultation
committee. Moreover, they begin with what already exists:
The best time to reinforce the moral and social foundations of institutions is not after they have
collapsed but when they are cracking. (p. x)
Etzioni expresses a strong first preference for voluntary community action as the
engine of moral reconstruction, in a way that echoes both the voluntarist inclinations
of IR pluralism and the European notion of Social Partnership. But he is prepared
to countenance state action where there is a ‘clear and present danger’ to the moral
welfare of society. The weight of argument rests heavily on community institutions,
though it does recognise ‘professional or work-based communities’ (p. 32) and
employment receives a significant, if underdeveloped, treatment. Etzioni claims there
is a ‘parenting deficit’, caused by dual earner, middle-class families who neglect their
children to pursue careers. He also acknowledges that many poorer families have
less choice in the matter. In either case, badly brought-up children will become bad
employees. At a practical level, he advocates ‘family-friendly’ policies to corporations, such as parental leave, and entertains new laws to slow plant closures that
damage local community.
Too many business people no longer accept the responsibility of stewardship, at the very least to
leave their communities no worse off than they found them . . . no economy can thrive where
greed is so overpowering that few have a motive to invest in the long run and the highest rewards
go to those who engage in financial manipulation rather than constructive enterprises. (pp. 28–29)
For all this, Etzioni regards ‘business transactions’ as ‘private matters’ (p. 29), comparable to personal family relations, rather than as issues of public governance and
regulation. Therefore, trade unions only appear as ‘vested interests’ in the corrupt
American polity, paired with business and the gun lobby in exercising undue influence on government. Before this causes us to dismiss Etzioni’s work, we should recall
that Durkheim too was critical of the French trade unions of his time. But that does
not detract from the utility of their shared mode of analysis, for defending the central
role of such institutions as trade unions and professional associations, as sources of
moral and social cohesion.
Civil society and democratic rights
The concept of civil society is central to these debates. And, once more, it revives
a buried theme in pluralist IR theory. British trade unions, with their pragmatic,
occupational base, bear a strong resemblance to the occupational and professional
associations that Durkheim saw as central to the organic solidarity of modern society
(Giddens, 1971: 101–104). Moreover, bodies such as these and other articulated interest groups, constitute a central plank of pluralist political theory (Clegg, 1975). In
other words, trade unions are not just significant as countervailing worker organisations within the workplace—as IR academics so often portray them—but as part of
a democratic societal culture in which ordinary people achieve, not just the franchise,
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but full citizenship. This idea was central to Clegg and Flanders’s underlying social
democratic politics, and reflects the remarkable loyalty that British IR pluralists have
show towards the labour movement and its history.5 IR voluntarism set the stamp of
approval on this vigorous self-help tradition, which in the pre-war era also included a
powerful co-operative movement. Moreover, the concept of civil society offers a
much more persuasive defence of institutions dear to the heart of traditional IR than
economistic ‘value-added’ notions borrowed from HRM. In this light, the decline of
organised labour has not only created a ‘representation gap’ at work and removed
a source of social cohesion from local communities, but also weakened the fabric of
democratic society. The EU’s current agenda of human rights and citizenship offers
a new framework for these longstanding assumptions.
Gellner (1994), a British anthropologist and philosopher, defines civil society as,
‘the intermediary institutions like trade unions, political parties, religions, pressure
groups and clubs which fill the gap between family and the state’ (book jacket).
These are some of the very institutions that, according to Hobsbawm, the global free
enterprise system is eroding. In this sense, civil society accords very closely to
Etzioni’s usage of ‘community’. Gellner presents us with a historical paradox, after
Max Weber: ‘The miracle of Civil Society’ in the West rests upon the weakness of
our moral convictions, since we are no longer prepared to force these on others,
allowing ‘an a-moral order’, tolerant of diversity and pluralism (pp. 23, 137). Lest
we think that ‘remoralisation’ is a simple solution to declining social cohesion, the
notion of civil society suggests, with Durkheim, the need to marry pluralism with
social integration. There are limits to how far apathy and disintegration can go, nonetheless, since society still ‘needs a sense of obligation and commitment among its
members’. Gellner rejects the view that secular ‘society lives morally on a kind of
inherited moral capital, left over from the age of faith’ (p. 143). This leaves open the
question of where values, albeit weak ones, come from, and at what point social
values and institutions become too weak to hold society together? Here we may
follow Durkheim too, by answering that values arise almost spontaneously, or at
least are constantly resuscitated, by the very need for society. In an IR sense, some
value of employment partnership arises from the very nature of work as a purposeful, co-operative activity. Even so, Gellner recognises that untrammelled capitalism
can damage society:
The economy must be free enough to provide plural institutions with their bases, but not powerful
enough to destroy our world . . . the environment, cultural heritage, human relations. (p. 170)
Likewise, the state can stifle civil society by over-extending itself and providing centralised state services where local, voluntary ones are more effective. In the Soviet
system, for instance, trade unions were state controlled and thus unable to play their
normal role as independent, voluntary organisations defending ordinary workers.
The British sociologist, Giddens (1998; see also 2000), both champions civil society
as community and registers the dual threat to it from the over-reaching state and
unregulated global free enterprise. In this mood, he claims to strike a third way
between old-style social democracy (or Western socialism) with its undue reliance on
state collective provision and the neo-liberal obsession with free enterprise. Giddens
registers ‘the new individualism’ among his ‘five dilemmas’, but rejects any association with ‘moral decay’—as did Durkheim a century before (pp. 34–37). He stresses
the importance of habit, continuity and trust for social cohesion, but heralds a ‘society
that has broken away from tradition and nature’ (p. 63). His images of a ‘reflexive’
and ‘adaptable’ humanity in the future, are close to Gellner’s (1994: 97–102), ‘modular
man’, for whom, ‘Society is still a structure, it is not atomized, helpless and supine,
and yet the structure is readily adjustable and responds to rational criteria of
improvement’. Thus Giddens seeks ‘to re-establish continuity and develop social
5
Hyman (1978) distinguishes Clegg’s Pluralism as a societal theory of democracy from Flanders and
Fox’s stress as workplace social integration. Arguably, the two emphases are complimentary and
anticipated by Durkheim (see Brown, 1998; Rowley, 1998).
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.
Reframing employment relations
11
cohesion in a world of erratic transformation’ (p. 63), through new sources of
‘communal energy’, in place of the once dense community networks of families,
clubs, churches, trade unions and friendly societies. Giddens also has constructive
ideas about the part that international institutions, like the EU, could play in regulating global capital, but is less forthcoming on the role of trade unions and social
institutions in curbing business power. Pleas for regulation are balanced by a sense
of the need for personal re-adjustment,
Much stress is laid upon flexibility and adaptability in the workplace: the same needs to be true
of capabilities individuals bring to marriage and family relationship. (p. 94)
Altogether, the theme of civil society gives to community a crucial contemporary
pluralist dimension, and returns to traditional IR pluralism a long-lost democratic
element.
Relationship capitalism and stakeholding
Pluralist IR theory countered the de jure ownership rights of shareholders supporting
management prerogative, with the de facto power of trade unions, facilitated by legal
immunities. In this way, it side-stepped the question of who the business enterprise
was responsible to. Clear legal rights and responsibilities were of no great importance
so long as labour was able to exercise effective countervailing power. Indeed, most
IR pluralists assumed, after Dahrendorf (1965), that a separation of ownership and
control had taken place, with the latter in the hands of professional management;
and that this had permanently transformed the character of the capitalist enterprise.
Over the past twenty years, these assumptions have been undermined by the dismantling of the supporting legal and institutional framework, the dissolution of collective
employee power and the reassertion of shareholder priorities. As statutory individual
employment rights have gained a new salience, so there is a need to redefine policy
instruments and institutions, as with the National Minimum Wage and Statutory
Trade Union Recognition. Moreover, this rethinking needs to go beyond the ‘Internal
Social Responsibilities’ of business as outlined by Flanders (1974: 129–154).
It is now more fully recognised that people are citizens and customers as well as
employees, and that these multiple identities bring different, and at times conflicting
expectations of the business enterprise (Heery, 1993). In this way, the language of
stakeholding can extend the ideals of IR pluralism beyond the workplace to embrace
investors, suppliers, customers, employees and the wider community and society.
Stakeholder analysis has a long history in Business Ethics, indicating once more that
neo-pluralism should be not only be about compromising clashing material interests,
but also concern reconciling legitimate rights and responsibilities (Ackers, 2001a).
The notion of an ‘employment relationship’ has been understood, hitherto, in narrow
economistic terms, as the need for management to transform labour potential into
actual productivity. But this is not a mechanical task, nor is it one that can be
accomplished by force. The employment relationship may involve an element of raw
coercion, but it also suggests forms of co-operation based on long-term trust relationships of loyalty and mutual respect. Stakeholding too carries forward the key Durkheimian notion that ‘a contract is not sufficient unto itself’, but presupposes certain
external, non-economic social norms and relationships (Giddens, 1971: 69). In short,
the employment relationship should be conceptualised as a social and ethical relationship, as well as an economic transaction.
Conceived thus, stakeholding can take on a strong institutional form, underpinned
by changes in company law. Hutton (1995) addresses the reasons for British economic
decline, by contrasting our domestic capitalist regime unfavourably with the stronger
economies and more cohesive societies across the channel. For him, the roots of social
crisis lie in national economic decay, reflected in ‘the signs of social stress—from
family breakdown to the growth of crime’ whereby, ‘Social cohesion is deteriorating
year by year’ (pp. 1 and 325). The City, Britain’s large, globally orientated, financial
centre has pursued short-term profit maximisation at the expense of long-term
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investment in the nation’s economy. As a result, a ‘spot-market’ capitalism has
developed, creating a low-wage, low-productivity, low-skill, low-growth economy.
This Anglo-Saxon economic management regime contrasts with the relationship capitalism of countries such as Germany, where longer time-horizons and closer relations
between finance and productive industry have fostered ‘the benefits of collaboration,
trust and social inclusion’ (p. xix). This argument has been widely adopted by IR
specialists to explain the failure of HRM, and the propensity of British employers to
regard labour as a cost to control, rather than a resource to develop by investment
in training and welfare (see Sisson, 1994: 3–50). In Hutton’s view, ‘British capitalism
has gone too far in rejecting social values’ (p. xv), while 1980s Thatcherism exacerbated these negative features, forcing wages down to the lowest proportion of
national income since the 1950s, and encouraging profiteering and speculation. As
a result,
The notion of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, the idea that success will attend hard work
and that society should support basic institutions like families and children—all are evaporating.
(p. 9)
Hutton presents a major programme of institutional reform, reaching from the
political constitution to the company boardroom. Most significant for us, however,
are the proposals that public limited companies should not be merely responsible to
the short-term enrichment of shareholders, as in the Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal regime,
but also to other stakeholders, as in the European social market regime. Ideally, these
rights would be recognised in company law, providing a mechanism to return business to social goals and an institutional and regulatory framework capable of dealing
with the scenario of plant closure raised by Etzioni above. Hutton too fears ‘the
imposition of the market on society’ (p. 321) and his analysis overlaps with Sennett’s
view of the short-term nature of American capitalism and the impact of growing
economic injustice on prospects for social cohesion. He is less prone than Hobsbawm,
however, to blame capitalism in general, looking instead to the different social and
institutional forms it has taken already, and can take in the future. This openness to
alternative employment regimes is reflected in Hutton’s practical policy framework
for re-introducing societal considerations into business policy, while shaping strong
national and regional economies within the global market. Once more, there is a
clear synergy not only with IR pluralism, but also with some of the other perspectives
outlined above. Tam (1998: 170–195), for instance, absorbs a diluted version of stakeholding into his plea for ‘communitarian management’.
Ethical employment regulation
Together these various perspectives suggest some broad conclusions about social
cohesion and the employment relationship. One is that the roots of social breakdown
tap into social and economic individualism, in almost equal measure, and only by
addressing both at the same time and in combination can we hope to arrest and reverse
further erosion of societal cohesion. In addition, while social breakdown affects all
circles of society, it is the poor and economically vulnerable, and their children, who
suffer most from failing families, crime-ridden communities, bad schools and uncertain, low-paid, unstable employment. These are the people that trade unions and
institutionalised IR served pretty well in the postwar years to 1979, but have now
slipped its grasp (Ackers et al., 1996). They cannot put any social distance between
themselves and crumbling social reality. Giddens (1998: 103) notes the trend towards
social apartheid whereby,
Privileged groups start to live in fortress communities, and pull out from public education and
public health systems.
This not only makes life worse for the poor, but also accelerates general social breakdown. Finally, any society needs certain core ethical values to survive and social
institutions to disseminate these. Both capitalism and the state can corrode the moral
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Reframing employment relations
13
character on which society depends, and reform from below, through the institutions
of civil society, is to be generally preferred. Even so, the state has an essential, though
limited role to play in legitimising and institutionalising core social values. It remains
to explain how this broad social cohesion agenda can complement and develop conventional IR pluralism.
Towards a neo-pluralist employment relationship?
Those who find a plural society congenial therefore have an interest in arguing that behaviour
ought to accord with that model; for if that duty were generally accepted in plural societies, their
stability and adaptability would be ensured . . . However, the advantage in persuasive power
derived from transforming pluralism into a moral doctrine is not achieved without cost . . . pluralism ceases to be a mere description. (Clegg, 1975: 310)
Kelly (1998: 4–5, 18, 20–21) charts one route out of IR’s current theoretical impasse.
He argues ‘that the bulk of IR research neither derives from nor contributes to either
general or middle-range theory’ even if the field ‘is not quite so devoid of theory as
is sometimes imagined’. His main and legitimate concern is to wrest IR from the
managerial priorities of recent decades, as defined by the HRM literature. In so doing,
he re-orientates the discipline around ‘four central and enduring problems’: how
workers define their interests in collective or individual terms; how power relations
should be conceptualised between workers, employers and the state; what interests
are pursued by capitalist states; and how the relationship between worker and
employer interests should be understood (my emphasis highlighting author’s usage).
The most obvious problem with this approach, so ingeniously argued in the rest of
the book, is that Kelly has reverted to an old-style Marxist problematic as if nothing
much has changed in the world or sociological theory for twenty or more years—
notwithstanding an interesting late chapter on post-modernism (see Table 2). Martin
(1999: 1210) calls this ‘old wine in new bottles’, but also notes how much it leaves
out: legal and employer regulation, areas of co-operation and consultation between
employers and employees and so on. As he concludes, ‘even the most successful
theory of collective organization does not form the basis for reconceptualizing industrial relations’.
Kelly’s two favoured intellectual frameworks, mobilisation theory and long wave
analysis, turn out, on closer inspection, to be secularised and academically sophisticated versions of the Leninist model for the development of class consciousness and
Marxist crisis theory respectively. A more subtle flaw lies in his characteristically IR
reading of Marxism as a narrow theory of economistic workplace militancy. Individual
workers are led into collective action by a politicised cadre, with scant regard for the
shaping influences of family and community, or other identities as customers and
Table 2: Kelly’s Marxism and neo-pluralism compared
IR paradigm
Good society
Strategy
Tactics
Power source
14
Marxism
Neo-pluralism
Socialism
Social market capitalism and
liberal democracy
Workers mobilisation and
Social regulation and
capitalist crisis
partnership
Economic militancy and strikes Stakeholder consultation,
employee involvement and
integrative bargaining
Organised labour
EU, UK state, unions, public
opinion, enlightened employers
and managers
Industrial Relations Journal
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citizens. Perhaps the most intriguing and underdeveloped part of Kelly’s analysis is
the suggestion that workers must gain a sense of injustice, fostered by activists, in
order to become militant collective agents. Continental traditions of employment
relations, notably in Germany and Scandinavia, have long pursued explicit normative
goals (see Frege, 2002). Yet Kelly’s moral inflection is not anchored in any ethical
framework, merely accruing automatically to economic militancy. The view that
‘might is right’ at least for organised workers, has long since lost any credibility, let
alone practicality (see Hobsbawm, 1981). As Martin (1999: 1209 points out, moreover,
However the relevance of the sense of injustice is not a given but depends upon the prior values
of employees, who may give little weight to factors which might seem unjust to external observers.
In sum, Kelly is right to ask IR to re-engage with broader social theory, to distance
itself from managerial priorities, and rebuild around an ethical agenda (however
defined). He is looking in the wrong place, however, for a framework that can deliver
on these three promises.
Neo-pluralism is pluralism freed of Clegg’s self-denying ordinance regarding ethics,
and with it the illusion that any social science paradigm can simply ‘describe society’.
It does not introduce any startling new theoretical revelations into sociological
thinking. Rather, it revives Durkheim’s fundamental question about how moral communities and social institutions can bond work and society together. To this it adds
contemporary concerns about rights and responsibilities, and allows employment
relations to range, more imaginatively, across all aspects of the employment relationship and its links with the rest of society. Some of this was in the minds of the British
IR pioneers, though the discipline increasingly interpreted it as a narrow social engineering problem internal to the workplace; a view underlined by the 1968 Donovan
Commission. New public policy thinking around stakeholding, the third way and
communitarianism have re-opened the border between the workplace and society.
The syncretic, open-textured and non-dogmatic quality of these ideas—in stark contrast to Marxism—is especially helpful in bringing together many different specialisms. While Etzioni (1995), for instance, underplays employment, there is ample
scope to insert a tougher stakeholding perspective into his accommodating framework.
Indeed, so long as work is marginalised, notions such as communitarianism
become a pious and one-sided moralism. For nothing is more central to the reconstitution of community and civil society than rethinking work, which consumes so
much of our daylight hours, confers income and status, and shapes life-chances in
so many ways. Neo-pluralism perforce has to address the thorny question of how
to regulate corporate, global capital, by guiding its vast resources towards the construction of a more socially sustainable society. Huge transnational corporations, such
as Ford, Coca-Cola and Microsoft, are hardly small community organisations, fearful
of the nation state. Rather, their decisions, such as the closure of Ford’s Dagenham
plant or the withdrawal of Nike from satellite plants in Indonesia, have the potential
to decimate families, communities, even nations. Some employers have argued, in
resisting the notion of worker rights and industrial democracy, that business organisations are not properly regarded as part of civil society (Towers, 1999). At present,
there is a certain, ironical truth in this: business corporations often behave like large
carnivores in a community of small, placid herbivores. In Britain, ‘free enterprise’
has already colonised and destroyed many voluntary not-for-profit organisations,
such as building societies, insurance mutuals and co-operatives. Against this corporate power, the institutions of civil society alone can achieve little, unaided by the
state. The logic of neo-pluralism calls for institutional mechanisms to ensure that
business makes a constructive contribution to community and civil society. In practical public policy terms, the only real alternative to neo-pluralism is a neo-liberal
agenda of the ‘nightwatchman’ state, market (and corporate) domination of civil
society and managerial unitarism in the workplace (see Table 3).
In principle, neo-pluralism puts the health of society first, encouraging policy
initiatives, in IR as elsewhere, which are driven by social concerns and not a narrow
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.
Reframing employment relations
15
Table 3: Neo-pluralism and neo-liberalism compared
Neo-pluralism
State policy
Civil society
Workplace
Regulation
Associational
Partnership
Neo-liberalism
Nightwatchman
Market domination
Managerial
unitarism
business agenda. Moreover, it suggests a key role for social institutions other than
business, notably self-help bodies, such as trade unions, acting in concert with the
state at different levels. In this respect, the new public policy thinking has particular
lessons for how we can carry forward the IR tradition of public policy problemsolving and institutional reform. Much of this recent thought is cut from the same
pragmatic, common-sense cloth as British IR pluralism, with the crucial added insight
that the employment relationship should no longer be studied in isolation, but in
relation to other social relationships, problems and institutions. Current British and
European public policy anticipates, at least at the level of rhetoric, the integration of
social policy and IR reforms. ‘New Labour’ has acknowledged influences from
Etzioni and Hutton, and popularised a new political vocabulary of social partnership,
stake-holding, social cohesion and inclusion (see Ackers and Payne, 1998). Giddens
has been actively engaged in a government think-tank asked to find a philosophical
underpinning for a range of policies dealing with social breakdown and regeneration.
These extend from ‘Fairness at Work’ and the subsequent legislation which wraps
union recognition and ‘family friendly’ policies in an ethical employment framework,
to a ‘Welfare to Work’ programme that connects social and employment policy
(Department of Trade and Industry, 1998). In January 1999, Tony Blair made a speech
in South Africa, advocating a ‘third way’ between socialism and free enterprise capitalism. The tone of these policies connects with the EU agenda on the social chapter,
working time, works councils and human rights (though there are significant tensions, such as New Labour opposition to a wider programme of works councils).6
And, finally, there are even faint signs that these concerns have begun to seep into
IR academe through the unlikely channel of The 1998 Workplace Employee Relations
Survey, with its special section on ‘family friendly policies’ (Cully et al., 1998: 20–21).
But neo-pluralism can also provide a new justification for old IR concerns, such as
strong trade unions, effective channels for employee ‘voice’ (Marchington et al., 2001),
good wages and stable working conditions. Arguably, a cohesive society depends as
much on these basics as on the more recent novelties.
Neo-pluralism also re-introduces ethics into the social sciences, both as a guiding
light and by comprehending the state and civil society as a network of normative
institutions and rule-making processes. Rather than follow Kelly in denigrating the
conventional institutional emphasis of IR—without which the discipline would cease
to exist except as a branch of economistic Marxism—neo-pluralism provides an
opportunity to deepen and broaden this approach as part of the ethical constitution
of society.7 It carries forward the old pluralist IR emphasis on the social institution,
be it a trade union or a family, as the means for bringing to our lives, social order
and stability, structure and meaning. As Etzioni (1995: 113) affirms, ‘A special role
6
It is not my purpose here to assess the efficacy of these policies. For a jaundiced view, see Smith
and Morton (2001). McCarthy (2000) refers to a new era of ‘Juridification’, but this is to emphasise
just one aspect of the new approach.
7
The giste of Hyman’s (1978) pre-Thatcher assault on pluralism was also that it neglected ‘substantive’ working-class advances for institutional or ‘procedural’ benefits’, ‘form rather than content’ (p.
36). The events of the following decade suggest that IR institutions have very direct implications for
pay and conditions. And commentators on social partnership (Tailby and Winchester, 2000) now
rightly query its current weak institutional framework.
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Industrial Relations Journal
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.
in this return to community is played by institutions’. The search is on for what the
historian E.P. Thompson (1993) once called ‘a moral economy’ of employment, in
which ethical choices in favour of community and family are made explicit. As we
have seen, the very concept of the employment relationship bears hidden ethical connotations of trust and responsibility in relation to other human beings. Once that
relationship comes to resemble the transient market transaction, as it has for millions
of insecure and casualised workers, this too has profound implications for their family lives and the stability and prosperity of the communities where they reside. Stable,
long-term trust relationships in both economic and social spheres depend on strong
normative institutions. In work or family life, it is the quality of personal relationships between employer and employee, man and woman that count. But in either
case, the absence of long-term commitment threatens to harm the vulnerable and
undermine the structures that give meaning and order to our lives. For neopluralism, this means that certain normative and institutionalised relationships are
of central importance in creating those long-term, stable relationships of trust and
loyalty that constitute a cohesive society (see Ackers, 2001b).
Neo-pluralism will face the familiar challenge from radical IR ‘realists’, that it is
‘soft on power’ and prone to unitarist delusions about the business organisation.
There is no doubt that New Labour, at times, is guilty on both counts and reluctant
to tackle business vested interests. And the spirit of neo-pluralism does stress social
values over interests, co-operation over conflict and trust over power (Provis, 1996),
just as did the ethical socialist founders of the British labour movement. Yet to talk
about power, loudly, incessantly and abstractly, as many radicals do, is not the same
as doing something practical about it. Indeed, this criticism misses the point, that neopluralism combines an ethical image of what society might become with a realisable
programme for social and institutional reform. Moreover, this adds (rather than
subtracts) an ethical dimension to the longstanding appreciation of IR pluralism that
the employment relationship is normally an asymmetrical one, skewed towards the
employer. Ethical hegemony, where it is earned, will strengthen the hands of
employees against socially irresponsible employers (Ackers and Payne 1998). Even
the communitarian vision of ‘an ethical community with shared values and a cooperative mode of working’ need not be interpreted as a sentimentalised description
of existing reality or a recipe for management cultural dominance. As Korczynski
(2000) argues, trust in economic relations will only become a reality if power
inequalities are not excessive and some sort of institutional framework exists to
underwrite people’s expectations of each other. In these stringent terms, social
cohesion awaits a strong measure of economic justice and democratic participation
at work. Yet the task of IR is an immediate and practical one, affecting the lives of
ordinary people now—it cannot await some ultimate resolution of the problem of
power. What is called for is an IR theory that engages with the issues and policies
of the moment, yet has a vision that looks beyond them.
To conclude, neo-pluralism offers a perspective to rejuvenate the ageing limbs of
British IR. It does so by connecting the old and rather tired pluralist and voluntarist
frames of reference to new questions raised by contemporary society. Neo-pluralism
addresses, above all, the central manifestation of the problem of order today: the
two-way linkage between employment and society. More than this, it furnishes an
explicit ethical foundation for policies like social partnership which, hitherto, have
been too easily dismissed as short-term, opportunist accommodations to business
power (see Kelly, 1998). We should note that in the IR tradition, Flanders saw no
necessary contradiction between realistic pluralist social analysis and a Durkheimian
ethical agenda of social integration. In this light, neo-pluralism can combine a vision
of how work and society should be organised, with specific institutional mechanisms
for taking this forward in a piecemeal fashion for the here and now. Rather than
awaiting, hopelessly, some swing-back to long-lost trade union militancy, or some
world of ethics after capitalism, neo-pluralism can offer a critical social philosophy
from which to ask serious questions of current business practice. Finally, and crucially, neo-pluralism promises a new and dynamic rationale for IR’s long-standing
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.
Reframing employment relations
17
emphasis on rule-making institutions and agencies, and especially trade unions. All
this suggests a new definition of IR for our time. Employment relations is the study of
the social institutions involved in the normative regulation of the employment relationship
and business’s interaction with other stakeholders in society.
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Adrian Wilkinson, Ed Heery, Brian Towers, Marek Korczynski
and several anonymous referees for their comments on the essay. My work has been
influenced by work on two European Commission funded projects led by Linda
Hantrais of the European Research Centre at Loughborough University: DGV Project
No. Soc 97 100931, Interaction between Family Policies and Social Protection in the Context
of Recent and Future Socio Demographic Changes (1997–1998); and Framework Programme 5 (HPSE-CT-1999–00031), Improving Policy Responses and Outcomes to SocioEconomic Challenges: Changing Family Structures, Policy and Practice (IPROSEC 2000–
2003).
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