Industrial Relations: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management

Until recently, the study of industrial relations centred around trade unions, collective bargaining and strikes - often in the manufacturing industry. Union decline and de-industrialization in the advanced capitalist world have raised major issues about the relevance of this focus. As a result, there is growing interest in alternative forms of worker representation, often in conjunction with HRM. But union decline is by no means universal, even in Europe, and there are regions of the world (South East Asia, some African countries and parts of Latin America) where unions are powerful and growing organizations. This set is designed to capture both the complexity of the field of industrial relations globally, as well as bring out the continuing relevance of competing theoretical approaches to the subject. The selection will cover neglected topics such as feminism, debates about post-modernism and the links between labour movements and politics.