Industrial relations systems

The present volume presents a general theory of industrial relations; it seeks to provide tools of analysis to interpret and to gain understanding of the widest possible range of industrial relations facts and practices. This is admittedly an ambitious and precarious undertaking. But the objective is made less difficult by a number of recent studies of industrial relations in particular enterprises and industries in single countries, by a growing num ber of intercountry comparisons, and by the various studies of industrial relations in the course of economic development in the larger project which has provided the opportunity for the present volume.
Chapter 1 presents the central concept of an industrial-rela tions system at a given point in time; the main characteristics and structure of a system are outlined, but there is no systematic concern with change in the system over time. The next three chapters (Chapters 2 through 4) indicate the consequence of each of the three major features of the environmental context of a system upon its body of rules. The three chapters consider in turn the technological environment, the market or budgetary con straints, and the power status or relations among workers, man agers, and governmental agencies. Extensive illustrations are used to illuminate specific problems and to develop the richness and the usefulness of the central concept.

Chapters 5 through 7 are designed both to illustrate the gen eral theory developed in the first four chapters and to present. results of research which need to be carried forward on a broad front to compare within countries and among countries the rules developed by different industrial-relations systems. Chapter 5 certain of the rules developed by industrial-relations systems in bituminous-coal mining in eight countries: United States, Great Britain, France, Germany (Federal Republic), Italy,
Australia, New Zealand, and Poland. Chapter 6 makes the same types of comparisons for rules developed by the building sectors in nine countries: United States, Great Britain, Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain, Yugoslavia, Australia, and the Nether lands. These studies probably constitute the first attempt to make such comprehensive comparisons among rules developed by in dustrial-relations systems. These results are significant because they permit careful study of the relative influence of technological and market or budgetary constraints on rules of the work place and work community compared to the influence of the national characteristics of an industrial-relations system. The chapters are designed to answer the question of the extent to which the rules regulating the work place and work community in bituminous coal mining and building are similar among different countries and the extent to which they are unique to particular countries. Chapter 7 is an account of the Yugoslav national industrial-rela tions system and is presented both because of its intrinsic interest and as a further application of the central ideas of the volume. It also introduces the problems of an industrial-relations system in the course of economic development.

Chapters 8 and 9 are directed to a systematic treatment of in dustrial-relations systems in the process of change over time and in the course of economic growth. Chapter 8 is concerned with the emergence of national industrial-relations systems, and Chap ter 9 treats changes in the rules of the work place and the work community in the course of economic development. These chap ters are particularly related to the Inter-University Study of Labor Problems in Economic Development in that these chapters use the ideas of industrializing elites developed with my colleagues in that project. Chapter 10 is a summation of the theoretical core of the volume.