Pluralisms? Social philosophy,social science and public policy in employment relations and human resource management

Abstract

Alan Fox's frames of reference has sparked over half a century of debate between employment relations/human resource management pluralists, radicals and unitarists. But the notion of industrial relations pluralism itself continues to be highly disputed. This commentary tracks the journey from classical pluralism to neo-pluralism, then addresses three articles that offer a variety of radical pluralist alternatives. A fourth paper discussed, suggests a quantitative approach to testing Fox's frames, but this article makes a case for retaining the qualitative, case study method. A fifth explores the revival of paternalism on the border between unitarism and pluralism. Overall, the article argues that classical pluralism, based on trade unions and collective bargaining, is now outdated, but that neo-pluralism is capable of carrying forward its pragmatic, institutional spirit to explore the empirical complexity of contemporary employment relationships around the world. Finally, the discussion of employment relations pluralisms needs to re-engage with the wider political pluralism debate about liberal democratic societies and market economies.

Introduction

Alan Fox introduced the sociological idea of ‘frames of reference’ to Industrial Relations (IR) more than 50 years ago. The associated concepts of pluralist, unitarist and radical have played a central role in IR social science ever since, lifting the field above descriptive empiricism and encouraging a lively and constructive debate about social philosophy, social science and public policy. The English-speaking world of work has changed dramatically since Fox’s original version, with the transition from white, male, manual, manufacturing industries with strong trade unions, to post-industrial, largely non-union economies with more diverse workforces. Global economic competition has intensified with the rise of South East Asia. Thus far, the 2020 pandemic has accelerated moves away from the traditional workplace and full-time, 9-to-5 patterns of working. All this makes this Journal of Industrial Relations special edition very timely. What still lives in Fox’s frames today? Do we need entirely new spectacles, or can we adjust the old lens to these changed realities?

The articles in this special edition raise important questions about three thematic dimensions of Fox’s frames: the cases for radical pluralism versus neo-pluralism (articles 1–3 below); the question of how to operationalize the frames as a research method (article 4); and the border between neo-pluralism and neo-unitarism, as a form of paternalism (article 5). First, I will outline my neo-pluralist perspective, briefly tracking its development through various articles. Then, I will address the five special edition articles, following the above thematic order and indicating where I and others have already addressed these arguments. My own examples come from the British IR scene, which I know best, but I reach for broader global conclusions. For all my criticisms below, the articles in this special edition make some very welcome contributions toward taking forward Fox’s approach.

From classical IR pluralism to neo-pluralism

To begin with, it is worth situating and isolating Fox’s contribution. The political science concept of pluralism was well developed early in the 20th century, while the IR version was adopted by Clark Kerr in the USA and Hugh Clegg in Britain a good decade before Fox’s (1966) article (Ackers, 2007; Clegg, 1951, 1960; Kerr, 1955). Fox was a pupil of Clegg and Flanders, who absorbed their brand of revisionist, Cold War social democracy, wherein pluralism was an alternative to communist or fascist totalitarianism, the big brother of his unitarism (Ackers, 2016a). Like another influential IR academic, Ben Roberts of the London School of Economics, Fox passed through Flanders’ Socialist Union (Kelly, 2010). Later, he added the radical frame, while remaining suspicious of political Marxism as a threat to liberal democratic values. Marxist IR radicals appeared, notably Vic Allen and Richard Hyman, but Fox remained a radical pluralist. Classical Oxford School pluralism was too conservative for his taste, too dedicated to institutional fine-tuning to preserve the British post-war social democratic settlement. He wanted larger reforms in the structure of industrial society but remained unclear what these reforms were. In my view, his new social philosophy failed to drive a distinctive empirical social science and practical public policy. That has been the failure of radical pluralism ever since.

If Fox did not invent pluralism or radicalism, the two active academic ingredients of ‘frames of reference’, he did introduce something equally important to British IR: the sociology of work (see Fox, 1971). Clegg and Flanders were rooted in politics as an academic and practical approach, in contrast to the main American IR emphasis on institutional labour economics (Clegg, 1975; Kaufman, 2004). Sociology was new to Oxford and they both distrusted it as either closet Marxism or Human Relations unitarism (see Flanders and Clegg, 1954, preface; Ackers, 2011a). Fox began as an historian, but also became a sociologist before he embraced radicalism, so he has two ideological persona: the early classical pluralist and the late radical pluralist. His sociology fed into my development of neo-pluralism, which was an attempt to blend political and industrial sociology (Ackers, 2002). As a Marxist Oxford PPE student in the late 1970s, I was tutored in sociology by two pluralists, Frank Parkin and Rod Martin, a Weberian and an Oxford School IR sociologist close to Fox. They left an imprint.

Classical IR pluralism was designed for a relatively sheltered, national industrial economy with powerful manual trade unions and almost universal collective bargaining. By the 21st century, all this was badly out of date and incapable of driving convincing social science and public policy. Unitarist HRM was in the ascendancy. Neo-pluralism ‘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 different employment world’ (Ackers, 2002: 3). First, this regained the proper balance between conflict and co-operation, by expanding on what Fox (1966) had termed ‘mutual advantage’ through productivity bargaining – something lost in the strike-ridden British 1970s. By 2002, this spelt ‘social partnership’, as promoted by the European Union (EU) and British Trades Union Congress (TUC), while practised in Sweden and Germany (Ackers and Payne, 1998). Second, neo-pluralism responded to the new, feminised service economy, by arguing that ‘the current problem of order is not centred on the internal life of the workplace, but on the troublesome linkage between employment and society’, citing ‘family and community social breakdown’ (Ackers, 2002: 4). This restored the workplace to society, broke with men-only factory sociology and opened the way to family-friendly policies. Both these moves were inspired by the ‘third way’ communitarian debates around Tony Blair’s early New Labour; ideas with international resonance.

These arguments seem just as relevant today, with two caveats. First, those debates took place at the tail end of western de-industrialisation, for Britain in the wake of the Thatcher revolution. Since then, New Labour has enhanced individual employment protection and introduced a National Minimum Wage, while service employment has been normalised. Second, despite some state support, trade union decline could not be halted and continues across the advanced economies of the world. As a result, a third neo-pluralist argument becomes increasingly important: trade unions can no longer serve as the only institutional expression of IR. This conclusion also reflects a growing awareness of other past and present employment patterns in Africa and India (see Ackers, 2017a; Bhattacherjee and Ackers, 2010; Khan and Ackers, 2004). Most recently, I have challenged the growing statist emphasis of mainstream IR, by reminding the field of the original voluntarist emphasis of IR pluralism, and recoupled IR neo-pluralism to normative pluralism by stressing the importance of free academic debate in the current period of growing censorship (Ackers, 2017b, 2019).

The five articles under review

(1) Gold (2021) is a champion of Fox’s later radical pluralist perspective. His interesting historical move is to explore this historically before Marxism became common intellectual currency. Gold does so by focusing on Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South (1855), which depicts the collision of unitarist employer ideas with radical worker responses, leading not to a state-socialist or free market victory of one side over the other, but to a pluralist resolution. Of course, in different ways, using a variety of institutions, this was the real pattern of IR in Britain and Australia for much of the 20th century. A real-life English employer of the next generation later comes to mind. Edward Cadbury (1873–1948), a progressive Quaker employer and advanced Liberal, campaigned against the sweated trades, supported the welfare reforms of the 1906 Liberal government, and worked closely with local ethical socialists and feminists to improve the lot of working women (Kimberley, 2016). It is rare to see the discussion of even social interest novels in an IR journal, and very welcome. Gold displays what a rich historical source they can be, so long as we bear in mind the novelist’s own vantage point.

Gold also reminds us that Fox’s frames were not plucked out of the academic air, as so many social science concepts are. There is an elitist intellectual temptation to believe that middle-class academics develop a social philosophy, which they translate into an empirical social science, and then use to change society through public policy. This is the way many radical ‘rationalists’ think about society (see Oakeshott, 1991). But academic IR developed in the opposite, inductive direction, by observing and extending what was already happening and working in society. In the British case, trade unions were established by the early 19th century. By the end of that century, national collective bargaining had spread across major industries, such as engineering and footwear, while the state, through the Labour Department of the Board of Trade, had begun supporting joint regulation. IR public policy was going strong long before the first Burton Chairs of IR were instituted in the late 1920s, whereas true IR social science awaited the 1960s Oxford School, who only fully reflected on their social philosophy ‘after the fact’ in the 1970s.

This raises the important question of how Fox’s frames relate to labour history and, more broadly, to societal context (see Ackers, 2017a; Ackers and Reid, 2016). For instance, my initial neo-pluralism was specifically designed to address the problems of IR in 21st-century, advanced societies, such as Britain or Australia. The proposed trade union partnership strategy of winning friends and influencing people assumes a fully liberal democratic context that does not exist in the early industrial past or many countries today. My later formulation was designed with a more global perspective in mind, but this entailed sticking to general principles, which have wider application, and leaving detailed IR strategy to local institutional context.

Sensitivity to historical context raises problems for Gold’s presentation of Fox’s later radical pluralism in relation to the classical pluralism of Clegg and Flanders. Elsewhere, he interprets this as an argument between narrow IR institutionalism and a more expansive view of power and equality in society (see Gold, 2017). Yet Clegg and Flanders saw themselves as progressive social democrats, who could focus on IR institutional reform because the entire British economic and social context had been transformed since the Second World War, with full employment, the mixed economy, a managerial separation of ownership and control and, above all, the state-sponsored rise of trade unions and collective bargaining. So, when Gold (2021) argues that ‘the solutions presented by Thornton face similar challenges to those presented by Fox, in Beyond Contract’, he is comparing historical chalk and cheese. Both men want to ‘change the system itself’, but in institutional terms it is not the same system! In 1855, there was no vote for most manual workers, no employment protection, no welfare state, and little management of trade cycles, while collective bargaining was in its infancy.

By contrast, the British neo-corporatist system Fox disparaged in the 1970s was close to what Thornton and his fellow mainstream trade unionists would have hoped for (once they had given up utopian dreams). Free collective bargaining was what the British trade unions asked for in 1945. Similar systems, like Sweden, were able to generate trust and high productivity. To understand why our own could not, we need to look at both sides of industry (see Ackers, 2018). Between 1945 and 1979, Britain had a failing co-ordinated market economy, as became clear once full-blooded neo-liberalism appeared under Mrs Thatcher after 1979. In my view, Fox, like many other radicals, became complacent about the important social democratic gains of that era and failed to explore what would happen if the existing system could not be made to work. The irony is that the latest public policy presentation of radical pluralism, which appeared in the 2017 and 2019 Corbyn British Labour Party manifestos, was a proposal for the state to resurrect en masse the classical pluralist world without any behavioural guarantees that it would work better this time (see Ackers, 2020).

Radical pluralism often promises much more than neo-pluralism at the levels of social philosophy, social science and public policy. But can it deliver, and if not, what is its real value to ordinary people at work? Radicals have long dreamt up big, all-embracing solutions to human problems. But down-to-earth, practical reformism, like classical pluralism in its time, has generated many more benefits and done much less harm. Promises of quick-fix solutions to difficult human problems, by changing ‘the system’, have proved to be illusory. The public policy outcomes have been either vague, as with the later Fox, or merely nostalgic, as with promises to return our trade unions to the 1970s. The same goes for quick and easy borrowing of other national ‘models’. As Bowden (2020: 129) observes, ‘That the Ghent system and the high level of unionisation that it sustains, is transferable to other societies is an absurdity that does not bear consideration’. Fox and Clegg (2020) thought the same when the 1977 Bullock Report proposed continental industrial democracy as a panacea for Britain’s IR ills. In Fox’s (1985: xiii) own telling phrase, IR change must ‘cut with the grain’ of national traditions, circumscribed by time and space (see Ackers, 2011b). Neo-pluralism invites you to conduct empirical research and customise realistic and partial pluralist IR reforms to your local scene.

(2) Dobbins et al. (2021) advocate radical pluralism as a more powerful IR ‘praxis’ than neo-pluralism. I have criticised earlier versions for an unduly pessimistic ‘iron cage’ social science approach to employment relations, with little or no positive public policy application (Ackers, 2014b; see Edwards, 2014). In their view, neo-pluralism neglects ‘more basic patterns of power and inequality’ (Dobbins et al., 2021), and accommodates too easily the needs of neo-liberal capitalism, verging on unitarism in its zeal for co-operation and mutuality. By contrast, their paired, comparative bus and rail case studies are presented as demonstrating a radical pluralist ‘structural antagonism’ in practice, with the complex dynamic of conflict and co-operation. Rather surprisingly, there is no concluding public policy proposal about how the patterns observed might either be improved or extended. So, we have instances of strong trade unions and strikes in these ‘old IR’ corners of the public sector, but what does this tell us about the larger future of employment relations?

Their version of radical pluralism seems heavily reliant on a structural Marxist critique of ‘Capitalism [which] has system effects’ (Dobbins et al., 2021). Thus, we have a familiar litany of concepts like ‘surplus value’, ‘exploitation’, ‘commodification’ and ‘capital accumulation’, while after Edwards (2003), the ‘employment relationship’ is straightforwardly between ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ (see Clegg’s earlier criticism, 1975: 315). To my mind, this framework has explanatory value only if you are comparing ‘capitalism’ to some other alternative, viable economic system, as old-fashioned socialists thought they were. Surely, the interesting, stand-alone debate today is largely institutional, about Varieties of Capitalism, taking in the many shades of grey found in real economies that lie somewhere between the black-and-white ‘liberal market’ and ‘co-ordinated market’ distinction (Hall and Soskice, 2001). In simpler terms, some advanced economies are more free market, while others have greater intervention by the state and other institutions. ‘Capitalism’ does not drive ‘neo-liberalism’ (another abstract concept that is easily over-extended) in any simple sense; global competition and public policy choices do.

This extends to the old chestnut of power and inequality. All historical societies have concentrated power in the hands of elites and displayed considerable inequality of power, wealth and income. Real socialist societies concentrated all three in the hands of a small party elite who controlled the socialised economy. As Clegg (1975: 314) points out, classical IR pluralism was never based on some notional equal balance of power, but on mutual recognition of rights and rules in a bargaining relationship. Growing inequality of wealth and income is an issue for both political and IR pluralists, but not one with some grand, easy solution. The real issue is what public policies could mitigate these inequalities and give more voice to ordinary people. And it is worth remembering that Hall and Soskice (2001) found strengths in both types of capitalist economy – something lost in most IR discussions.

And there are further pluralist complexities. As Kerr et al. (1973/1960: 272) described ‘Pluralistic Industrialism’ long ago:

conflicts between managers and the managed are the most noticeable, but by no means the only ones. Another is the control of collusion by producers against consumers, by any profession against its clients, and by labour and management against the public.

Ordinary people are not just producers, they are also consumers, taxpayers and citizens. In some spheres of life, they benefit from the extension of market forces. IR academics, focused on producer interests, criticise budget airlines, but low costs and fares have enabled the British working classes to fly to Europe. Moreover, paid employees are deeply fragmented, from senior managers with share packages, through university academics with pension schemes, to ‘white van man’ in the flexible labour market. And your low-paid taxi driver may be retired and topping up his pension or a student passing through that section of the labour market. Talking about ‘capitalism’ does not engage with any of this complex social and economic reality.

Dobbins et al.’s (2021) transport case study has all these complexities hiding in the wings. Let me focus on the UK RailCo case. To begin with, this appears to be a public sector organisation with private elements regulated by the state, not standard ‘capitalism’. Business strategies such as franchises, short-term contracts and reduced manning levels are borrowed from private sector models. But behind all this lies a debate about how to run a transport system that is efficient, affordable to the taxpayer and delivers good service to customers at a reasonable price. It may be that a centralised state bureaucracy would do this better, but that is up for public policy debate. Equally, we cannot read anything much from the general employment relationship: institutional context is everything! There are managers, well-paid drivers and other low-paid workers, represented by different unions. They do not all have the same interests and often they are competing for the same wage fund. That is the other fragmented social class dimension to pluralism, lost in the radical pluralist insistence on one simple ‘structural antagonism’.

Finally, in historical terms, RailCo is an institutional special case: a hangover from Britain’s old militant, skilled manual IR past, along with a few others, such as the fire brigades or power workers (see Hoskin et al., 2016). These enclaves have been protected from the market competition experienced in manufacturing or private services. Like coal miners in the 1970s, the unions retain a unique ability to disrupt services, inconvenience customers and embarrass the government of the day. All this amounts to strong sectional bargaining power, until the point when the state is prepared to challenge this, as happened to the miners in the 1984/1985 strike (Ackers, 2014a). In such circumstances, there is little active market pressure on the trade union to fully embrace partnership, while arms-length, adversarial IR remains possible. Hence, we might expect radical pluralist praxis to survive in this shrinking redoubt, but this has little application to the larger economy where trade unions are in rapid retreat and strikes largely a thing of the past.

That is the new 21st century social reality which neo-pluralism seeks to address. Let us return to the three stages of this argument: social philosophy (normative or ethical case), social science (application to employment practice) and public policy (possible institutional initiatives). Dobbins et al. (2021) argue ‘that Fox’s (1979) radical–pluralist distinction between pluralism as a “concept” and pluralism in “action” (praxis) is neglected by neo-pluralism’. I would dispute this. To begin with, Clegg’s (1960) concept of ‘industrial democracy’ defined British pluralism and was based on the collective bargaining ‘action’ he had observed. Fox added nothing new here. Further, I have defined neo-pluralism in conceptual terms, then, with others, applied this to the action around family-friendly policies and social partnership. Dobbins et al. (2021) overlook this ‘neo-pluralist expansion’ beyond the workplace and IR system to include tensions between employees, links to customers, and connections between work and family life (Ackers, 2014b: 2622). When radicals think outside the workplace box, they talk about ‘capitalism’; I regard it as more fruitful to begin with the market economy, civil society and polity as this occurs in different countries today.

In this way, neo-pluralism moves from social philosophy through social science to public policy. That means raising the question of what is practical and realistic for a given nation state, like Britain, Ireland or Australia, and how we balance the strengths of markets, civil society and state regulation to improve life for various employees, customers and citizens. As Bowden (2020) points out for Australia, there is no prospect of resurrecting trade union power by organising, partnership or state fiat. Instead, we are left to find other piecemeal public policy solutions to employment problems, such as recent British and German minimum wage legislation, capable of winning the support of a diamond of stakeholders: ordinary employees, employers, the state and public opinion (Ackers, 2015). To concentrate entirely on union-centred collective bargaining, as Dobbins et al. (2021) do, is to ignore most of the economy and society. The real test for radical pluralism is to develop a ‘praxis’ (or translation from social science to public policy) for the majority non-union world. This is the reason why neo-pluralism should be interested in good non-union participation schemes, in so far as they advance employee voice. That does not mean our ambitions need end there. There is scope to bolster collective bargaining, while I have suggested for Britain a state-sponsored consultative works council system, directly elected by employees, as something that might win public support (Ackers, 2020).

(3) Van Buren et al. (2021) offer a welcome broadening of the pluralism debate into political philosophy and political sociology. The IR field has been both intellectually insular and highly economistic (or narrowly materialist), obsessing on general employee interests and a limited range of institutions, notably trade unions and collective bargaining, once characteristic of 20th-century western societies. Equally, the pluralist IR political argument needs to break into the adjacent sociology of work, which so often neglects the reality that western societies are liberal democratic as well as ‘capitalist’ and that the two characteristics are connected (see Ackers, 2019).

Chantal Mouffe’s political pluralism based on agonism and dissensus has been portrayed as another version of radical pluralism (see Bevir and Reiner, 2012: 207–212, on her ‘Difference theory’). I found Van Buren et al.’s (2021) IR application interesting for several reasons. First, Mouffe’s approach is rooted in a brand of Gramscian, Eurocommunist political analysis that has shaped my journey to neo-pluralism (see Ackers, 2014a; Ackers and Payne, 1998). Here, political voluntarism gives priority to practical human agency. Second, Van Buren et al. (2021) address some central weaknesses of radical pluralism, notably the absence of an explicit normative or ethical argument linked to democratic theory and the reliance on a zero-sum notion of conflict. They argue that ‘bringing agonism into pluralism promotes a view of conflict as potentially productive through dissensus-based mechanisms’ (Van Buren et al., 2021). This revives an important Fox (1966) argument for the constructive value of ‘organised conflict’ channelled through appropriate IR institutions, as opposed to hidden, more corrosive forms of ‘unorganised conflict’, such as high labour turnover, absenteeism and low productivity. Third, their theory is tested on the new, cutting edge of supply-chain employment regulation in a developing economy, offering a novel mix of pluralist institutions.

Despite all these insights, I question whether this new approach ‘can bridge the chasm between radical pluralist and neo-pluralist frames’ (Van Buren et al., 2021), for a number of reasons. First, there is no ‘chasm’ at the level of empirical social science or even public policy, more a difference of emphasis. Most IR pluralists share the view that everyday employment is characterised by a mixture of conflict and co-operation to be discovered by context-sensitive empirical research, and that stronger trade unions and more effective state regulation may be part of the solution. At the level of social philosophy, there is a larger gap since radical pluralists hang on to elements of Marxian political economy that neo-pluralists can do without. Other than this, the positive arguments for agonism and dissensus are already part of the neo-pluralist argument or can easily be accommodated within it. These include the democratic ethical argument, and a more complex picture of conflict and co-operation, which I describe as ‘a potential tension between management and employee’ (see Ackers, 2014b: 2616).

In case that sounds too mild, verging on unitarism, as Dobbins et al. (2021) suggest, I am talking about the generic employment relationship, embracing ‘both millionaire footballers and the wretched of the earth’ (Ackers, 2014b: 2616). In order to understand the 2013 Rana Plaza tragedy, we need to grasp the complex range of contextual factors that made this group so vulnerable, using an historical institutional method. No a priori structural sociological theory can explain this before the facts. Some employment relationships are much worse than others! The new type of institutions involved – the Alliance and Accord – are instructive too, though the authors seem to hanker after an old-style western trade union solution. A neglected aspect of neo-pluralism in this special edition discussion is the break with the IR ‘factory sociology’ of the 20th-century, western male-breadwinner model, to embrace families with several earners and local community. As Khan and Ackers (2004) demonstrate, this is easily adapted to the developing world and different types of institutions.

So, while this is a revealing empirical study, there is little that could not be framed in the language of neo-pluralism, as an updating of classical IR pluralism. And there is a strong case for staying in that IR tradition, while looking for insights outside it. In philosophy, ‘Occam’s Razor’ argues against proliferating concepts in our attempt to understand the world around us. Likewise, Max Weber reminds us that such concepts are ‘ideal types’, best kept simple and sharp and not to be confused with empirical reality (see too, Billig, 2013). In both these respects, IR has remained a practical, empirical, inductive field, preferring everyday common-sense usages like collective bargaining, joint regulation or employee involvement. As the editors observe, many scholars have finessed the frames into different sub-types (Wilkinson and Barry, 2021), but my sense is that the social science longevity of Fox’s frames arises from the contrasting clarity of its three types. We can update them, as neo-pluralism or as a neo-unitarism that moves beyond old-fashioned command and control to embrace managerial forms of employee involvement. We can bolt them together, as with radical pluralism, when scholars want to combine elements of both types. Yet, until the elements of Fox’s triptych can no longer be usefully combined to approach various employment relationships, I think it is best to leave them that way!

(4) Kaufman et al. (2021) address the question of how we develop a research method to explore Fox’s frames. They argue that too often we are left with general ideological debates, or arguments of social philosophy, without testing these in empirical studies. The pluralist IR tradition has been resolutely empiricist and problem-solving, reluctant to attach itself to any ideological position. Clegg set the pattern, having the title pluralist thrust upon him by Fox’s sociology and Hyman’s Marxism. Most current pluralists operate without explicit social philosophy. Other than Fox and a few others, the IR field has been reluctant to identify with non-Marxist classical sociological theory, most notably Durkheim and Weber. A pluralist sociological account such as Ralf Dahrendorf’s (1959) Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society is rarely referenced by IR pluralists. On the other side, Marxists do not need the term ‘radical’. Thus, a strange intellectual division of labour has often figured in academic IR, with Marxists doing the theory, while pluralists get on with the empirical research and policy making.

I concur that IR would be a richer intellectual field if we openly debated and reflected on our frames of reference while conducting research. Kaufman et al. (2021) have undertaken an innovative and unusual experiment, applying Fox’s three basic frames to a large-scale quantitative comparative study of workforce ‘temper’ in four English-speaking countries. My first response, in the words of the DIY exponent observing a new job, is ‘interesting, but I wouldn’t have done it that way!’. To begin with, pluralism’s historical institutionalism has a natural affinity with a ‘context-sensitive’ case study method (Edwards, 2005). Descriptive aerial photographs like those of the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey help to situate local studies within larger patterns, of course. That said, ‘complexity and dialogue’ (Ackers, 2019) can only be observed close to the ground, as in Dobbins et al.’s (2021) approach of direct qualitative comparison of matched organisations in different countries.

In my reading, Fox’s three frames are most usefully regarded as broad paradigms or meta-theories (Ackers, 2007). Thus, they are best employed to loosely guide research questions, not as simple, tight hypotheses that can be tested directly against evidence – as Kaufman et al. (2021) seem to partly concede when they abandon ‘Plan A’. True, after Fox (1966), we often describe management style in organisations as ‘unitarist’ and ‘pluralist’, usually meaning little more than union or non-union. But Fox’s later, ‘radical’ frame sits uneasily as an organisational type. Perhaps the original one-dimensional frames are more suited to describe an actor perspective or ideology, whether employer or employee. As Kaufman et al. (2021) recognise, in Chapter 7 of Beyond Contract (1974), ‘Patterns of management-employee relations’, Fox moves on to six, two-dimensional organisational models, which combine both employer and employee frames: Traditional, Classical Conflict, Sophisticated Modern, Standard Modern, Sophisticated Paternalist and Continuous Challenge (see Ackers, 1995: 152). So, for instance, in Classical Conflict unitarist employers encounter pluralist employees, much as in Gold’s (2021) account of North and South.

Fox’s patterns have dated, carrying 1970s assumptions about the forward march of trade unions, but they are closer than the original frames to the sense of an employment relationship sought by Kaufman et al. (2021). By contrast, their one-dimensional testing scale is (unintentionally) disconcerting for any normative pluralist: ‘a summary measure of the state of workplace relations such that a low score signals a workplace approximating the radical frame, a medium score signals a pluralist frame and a high score signals a unitarist frame’. As the authors note when using measures such as peace, harmony and partnership climate, by definition we have ‘unitarist “best place to work” situations’. Yet a key neo-pluralist argument is that by representing and channelling voice, management–employee partnership may produce a higher order of trust relations, even greater productivity, than can be achieved in the unitarist firm. In order to understand why this has worked in German and Swedish manufacturing but not British, for example, would it not be better to return to context-sensitive historical and case study comparisons?

(5) Gasparri (2021) presents a fascinating study of the revival of company welfare in Italy. As the editors of this special edition point out, the unitarist frame has been little explored in the IR literature, often appearing as little more than a straw man. However, from the outset Fox (1966) was aware of the attractions of ‘generous paternalism’. And it is from this root that his handling of unitarism becomes more nuanced. For decades, paternalism or welfare capitalism has been regarded by IR academics (including Fox) as an out-of-date, historical curiosity, superseded by the post-war welfare state and collective bargaining. The Italian case challenges this assumption. Stimulated by ‘tax breaks’, following a financial crisis of the state arising from the 2008 global economic collapse, the article traces two overlapping sub-frames for implementing these schemes: consultative unitarism and collaborative pluralism, in my terminology neo-unitarism and neo-pluralism. The tension between these echoes the historical paternalism literature, with early 20th-century American employers tending to take the unitarist, union-avoidance route, whereas Europeans often combined sophisticated paternalism with pluralist IR (see Ackers, 1998).

That EU social policy incorporated collective bargaining came as a surprise to Anglo-Saxon IR, so used to separating the two spheres. A central call of the neo-pluralist expansion was to integrate IR and social policy in areas such as family-friendly policies (Hantrais and Ackers, 2005). Moreover, this Italian company welfare case has global application, since outside Europe the company, not the state, is very often the main provider of welfare services. Voluntary initiatives such as Luxottica bring to the surface the complex tension between IR pluralism (of all stripes) and equality in a liberal democratic society and market economy. As trade unions are occupational entities, free collective bargaining often tends to foster inequality, except where this takes the form of national, ‘solidaristic’ agreements (Ackers, 2016b). The sectional economic militancy so often championed by radicals exacerbates this problem, privileging well-organised, relatively advantaged groups, such as doctors and train drivers, over other stakeholders.

In the end, Gasparri (2021) sees the revival of company welfare in Italy as a unitarist instance of ‘capital’s class struggle against labour’. But business has been reluctant to carry heavy welfare costs, notwithstanding their HRM benefits. Indeed, global competitors such as car companies are happier to leave welfare to the state, paid for by the ordinary taxpayer. What has changed the Italian debate is ‘tax breaks’, which raises wider issues of public policy debate. How can we protect the poorer sections of society, what can the state afford and who is prepared to pay? And here ‘labour’ does not exist as a sociological or political reality. Some occupational groups, usually in good jobs at good companies, will benefit – as they already do with contributory pensions – while others are left out in the cold. State-socialists would prefer a monolithic, universal welfare system covering all wages and conditions, but this is inconsistent with a vibrant market economy and free political choice. Once more, the task of realistic pluralist public policy is to balance voluntary and state provision in a compromise that works, delivered by political and IR negotiation.

Conclusion: Re-engaging with political pluralism

The ‘worlds of labour’ associated with Clegg, Flanders and Fox’s classical pluralism c.1966 have dissipated, even disappeared. The IR collective bargaining sub-system is not central to understanding most current employment relationships. The working classes were always fragmented by skill and industry, but today society’s low-wage ‘battlers’, working in the flexible service economy, serving in supermarkets or tending the old in care homes, ‘are no longer found in much number in union ranks’ (Bowden, 2020: 105). Almost half of union members in Britain and Australia are relatively privileged, public sector middle-class professionals, with stable jobs and pension schemes, often in double-income homes. Class divisions remain central to contemporary society, but these cannot usefully be polarised between generic employers and employees. Fragmented, they have floated free of the old labour movement political categories.

In this context, IR pluralism needs to re-engage with pluralist political theory, as part of a broader debate about the nature of liberal democracy. Here, Gasparri’s (2021) ‘pluralist fulcrum’ remains central. Without it, there is no need for an IR field. Neither pure unitarists nor pure radicals need the underlying frames because there is a oneness about their thinking about the HRM present or the socialist future. In Modern Pluralism, Mark Bevir (2012) distinguishes between an empirical pluralism that arises directly from a realist observation of how liberal democracies operate through competing pressure groups and a normative pluralism that suggests that this is a good thing, to be encouraged. Classical IR pluralism, notably in Clegg’s writing on industrial democracy, moved smoothly from is to ought in this way (see Clegg, 1975). Trade unions were once strong and effective representatives of manual working-class people which curbed management prerogative; hence they were a public good to be encouraged by state policy. That was the message of the 1968 Donovan Report, for which Fox’s (1966) research article was written.

Bevir (2012: 15) also distinguishes between liberal pluralism and socialist pluralism, following the argument of Jackson (2012) in the same volume. Whereas pluralism was initially a development of radical liberal thought, in response to the rise of mass democratic society, some ‘socialists tried to provide pluralist spaces for trade unions’. This was hardly surprising given the central role of trade unions in emerging labour movements. But he over-simplifies for two reasons. First, because for many Marxian socialists (not just communists), the pluralism of free trade unions was provisional, awaiting the defeat of capitalism and the arrival of a planned, unitarist socialist society. Second, because loosely ‘socialist’ figures such as Clegg, Flanders and early Fox were in theory and practice revisionist social democrats, who had fully absorbed liberal pluralism into their worldview (see Ackers, 2016b).

Clegg deliberately transcended the Marxian guild socialism of his mentor, GDH Cole, who had designed an impractical ‘pie in the sky’ radical pluralist utopia. This said, the Ackers (2007) account of Clegg’s pluralism missed one crucial influence: Milne-Bailey’s (1934), Trade Unions and the State, written by a British TUC researcher. His book is referenced in Clegg’s first book and his key text on industrial democracy (Clegg, 1950: 14; 1960: 20). As Jackson (2012) reveals, Milne-Bailey’s early, pragmatic take on neo-corporatism was influenced by the socialist pluralist Harold Laski. But my general point stands: realist IR pluralism is the product of practical institutional reform within capitalist society, whether liberal democratic (USA), social democratic (UK, Australia, Sweden) or Christian democratic (Belgium, West Germany).

In my view, IR neo-pluralism is the rightful heir to this broad liberal democratic social philosophy. There would be no Swedish or German IR model today without world-class, competitive, private sector firms working in partnership with strong constructive trade unions. Garcia’s (2010: 19) history of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) argues ‘that free trade unions were greatly influenced by the liberal tradition’, choosing to operate in a regulated market economy. Mainstream IR pluralists have never sought to transcend capitalism, nor should they. Instead, they have sought institutions to re-balance the complex competition between employment interest groups. Across most of the English-speaking world, trade unions alone can no longer fill that central role. Neo-pluralism is no more and no less than an attempt to keep IR pluralism relevant to the contemporary world of work. This is not a moment to replace the economic boiler, but an opportunity to find new tools to keep it going!