Transcript The Employment Relationship: Some limitations

The Employment Relationship: Some
limitations of a useful concept
(or what we can still learn from Hugh Clegg)
Professor Peter Ackers
Loughborough University
Business School
'Sociologists complain, at times, that social
historians are insufficiently self-conscious as to
their own conceptualization, and that they tend to
offer their findings as particular findings, relevant
only to their particular context, and are excessively
cautious in making extended generalization. And
social historians, of course, offer exactly the
converse criticism: they sometimes find that
sociologists are over-anxious to derive from
particular evidence generalizations and typologies
which are then translated to inappropriate
contexts' (Thompson 1976: 387).
INTRODUCTION
* the employment relationship is the new master
concept in British IR theory
* this represents a new radical pluralist
conventional wisdom
* which has displaced the 1970s debate between
Pluralism & Marxism
THE PROBLEM
* the concept of the employment relationship is useful,
* as a Weberian ideal type way of looking at IR
* BUT there are IDEOLOGICAL & METHODOLOGICAL
objections to its over-extended use
* first, it smuggles in universalist Marxist assumptions
about power & conflict
* second, it tries to use a generic sociological concept to
explain what can only be explained by historical
institutional analysis
* Here we can still learn from Hugh Clegg
'He is determined that his categories shall fit all
instances, and provide the solution for every
problem...The attempt to apply functional
categories drawn from the cotton industry to
geographical differences in mining seems to me to
illuminate nothing and to obscure a good deal'
(Clegg 1963, Review of HA Turner, p.227).
CHANGING DEFINITIONS OF IR
Clegg and Flanders: The Systems of IR (1954-1979)
* so long as trade unions and collective bargaining were
central institutions in British IR practice, the concept of the
employment relationship was little used
Fox: Beyond Contract (1974)
Edwards: the Employment Relationship (1995 and 2003)
Blyton & Turnbull: The Dynamics of Employee Relations (2004)
'The activities of institutions, such as collective bargaining or
other "rule-making processes", in fact arise from the employment
relationship and cannot be understood in isolation from it. Thus
trade union activity, first and foremost, is the organised
expression of the grievances, deprivations and wider interests of
employees that arise from their (subordinate) role in the process
of good production or service provision...These activities can be
grounded in a theory of the employment relationship' (pp.41-2).
BUT the employment relationship doesn’t explain trade unions in
the real world
LIMITATIONS OF THE EMPLOYMENT
RELATIONSHIP
'The employer-employee or, as British law put it for so long, the
master-servant relationship is one of acute imbalance. The employer
possesses the economic power. The right of hire and fire,
remuneration levels, working hours, work practices, indeed all facets
of life at the workplace have been at the disposal and control of the
employer in a society such as our' (Jenkins & Sherman, 1977: 1).
1. The Neo-Liberal Objection
2. The Professional Society Objection
3. The Trade Cycle Objection
4. The Varieties of Capitalism Objection
5 The Flexible Labour Market Objection