Industrial Relations: the Contribution of the Universities

Although I have spent most of my life in the practice, one way or the other, of industrial relations, my responsibilities now lie within a university and it seems to me that one must consider what a university can contribute in this area. In the very short period of twenty minutes, all I can do is sketch some thoughts for you. The fact that our session tonight consists of a number of brief and necessarily undeveloped views is an indication perhaps that this ancient society recognises that* there is a public preoccupation about industrial relations but does not really believe that it is the subject of serious academic study. My view naturally I suppose — is that it is indeed a matter of serious academic study and that such a study would make at least some cbntribution to meeting what has been described as the challenge of the times — although I am not without some anxiety that the ancient society may be correct and I may be mistaken. Universities in these islands have come very late into the field. It is only in very recent times that chairs have been established in the subject, first in UCD and now also in Trinity College. But, surprisingly, even in the United Kingdom the subject did not really emerge as of academic significance until after the war, until in fact in 1949 when two major appointments were made, one in Oxford and the other in the London School of Economics, all this in spite of the early and remarkable pioneering work of people such as the Webbs, G.D.H. Cole, and Henry Clay. But the subject itself was particularly unmanageable in academic terms; worse than that, as Professor Kenneth Walker of INSEAD has remarked, "practitioners of industrial relations are commonly as suspicious of theory as they are of experts, regarding theory as the opposite of practice (and) many . . . would applaud its absence". And yet how can one proceed without at least some understanding of what one is engaged in? In large measure, it seems to me, the problem lies more in the practitioner's uneasiness with such theories as are presented to him — with their apparent irrelevance to what he understands he is about than in any opposition to theory as such. One recognises for example a good deal of respect for the work of economists in the labour field, and much of their material is in common use in the daily business of bargaining and planning. The sociologist has not had as happy a journey, in this country at least. An early experiment by the Tavistock Institute in the case of CIE bus men — although in a number of respects of great practical interest — caused some hostility and resentment, as also did a subsequent study in Shannon, and while in the years between some very interesting work has been done, sponsored in some degree by the Human Sciences Committee, the results on the whole do not seem to have had as much impact on practitioners as we had originally hoped. Although one can see the economist, the sociologist or the psychologist using phenomena in industrial relations as material for their studies, the question that was raised particularly in the UK was whether or not some decent academic discipline particularly related to industrial relations might be devised. Naturally, the first instinct of scholars in British universities was to describe and attempt to classify what they found in the field, moving gradually to more speculative endeavours, analysing pay structures, examining bargaining systems and attempting to link such practices with the traditions of the law. There developed as well the human relations school — which has had quite an influence on developments in this country — and finally the great flush of activity that accompanied the Donovan Commission which sat from 1965 to 1968.