Bridging industrial relations and critical management studies: Work,resistance,and alternate imaginings in late capitalism

Abstract

The study of work is central to understanding how changes in organizations and their environments impact lives and livelihoods. While industrial sociology and its concern with the organization of work are foundational to management and organization studies, scholars have bemoaned the waning interest in work and its evolution within these fields. In this article we seek to re-energize this tradition, arguing that Critical Management Studies (CMS) and Industrial Relations (IR)—two disciplines whose core interests concern work and its changing nature—have much to gain from further cross-fertilization. As Organization becomes a recognized platform for scholarship on the organization of work, we submit that more could be done to bring IR’s intellectual legacy into CMS approaches, and that doing so will yield mutual benefits. We focus here on IR’s core concerns with rules and regulatory frameworks, and collectivities over individualities. Similarly, IR can benefit from integrating and building on insights developed in CMS. We argue that CMS as a whole offers lessons for IR in at least three ways: (i) the emphasis on cultural dominance over workers; (ii) recognition of social and identity-based fault lines that define life and work experiences; and (iii) attention to the social construction of subjectivities. In closing, we suggest four areas that cross-fertilization between IR and CMS is likely to greatly contribute to: resistance in late capitalism, alternative organizations, inclusion, and the “future of work.”

The study of work is central to understanding how changes in organizations and their environments impact lives and livelihoods (Barley and Kunda, 2001). While industrial sociology and its concern with the organization of work are foundational to management and organization studies, scholars have bemoaned the waning interest in work and its evolution within these fields (Delbridge and Sallaz, 2015). In this article we seek to re-energize this tradition, arguing that Critical Management Studies (CMS) and Industrial Relations (IR)—two disciplines whose core interests concern work and its changing nature—have much to gain from further cross-fertilization. Our argument is partly inspired by our own beneficial experiences of collaborating with CMS colleagues. More importantly, we believe that cross-fertilization between CMS and IR can help illuminate pathways for greater resistance and re-imagination by workers and communities under late capitalism.

As Human Resource Management (HRM) and Organizational Behaviour (OB) have gained an increasingly strong foothold within Business Schools, IR has suffered a concomitant decline in standing (Godard, 2014). By contrast, CMS has continued to expand its reach within this educational context (Adler et al., 2007); even in the face of recent challenges (Fleming et al., 2022). Contemporary CMS scholars may have had limited exposure to IR, and thus feel less inclined to explore opportunities for cross-fertilization. Here we seek to provide a rationale for why CMS and IR scholarship would benefit from a reciprocal exchange of insights. ¹ We also assert that Organization is uniquely placed to foster increased collaboration between these two broad fields. While both authors of this article have IR backgrounds, we also actively engage in dialogue with organizational studies (e.g. publishing, conference convening). Here we approach CMS in the spirit of curiosity and goodwill, rather than as disciplinary experts. Space limits impose the usual caveats around comparing two disciplines without oversimplifying their respective complexities.

On the face of it, the paucity of dialogue between CSM and IR is puzzling, given that both share a fundamental concern with power, control, exploitation, resistance, and conflict in the socio-economic realm of work. Beyond the usual challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship, barriers to greater scholarly collaboration between CMS and IR include differences in epistemological and ontological stances. Although both disciplines accommodate a broad range of epistemological positions, in the past decades poststructuralism has arguably been the dominant paradigm in CMS (Adler et al., 2007), whereas mainstream IR has leaned on the pluralist perspective (Heery, 2016). This research tradition recognizes that workers and employers have a range of shared and conflicting interests, creating scope for both cooperation and conflict at work. From IR’s standpoint, the primacy of capital over labor within capitalist political economies gives employers the power to extract a surplus from workers. This embeds an element of tension—what Paul Edwards (1986) termed “structured antagonism”—at the core of the employment relationship. Under this dynamic, workers gain protection from the vulnerabilities imposed on them by market failures and inherent power imbalances through the mechanisms of collective action and regulatory intervention.

While the dominant approaches in CMS and IR have not enjoyed much epistemological affinity, the two disciplines share philosophical roots in the Marxist tradition, embodied by critical theory and labor process theory in CMS, and by the critical perspective in IR. Beyond epistemology, we argue that there is scope for the two disciplines to collaborate as capitalism regains momentum as an object of critique and work in its material sense has become more central to CMS approaches in recent years.

Organization is conventionally known as the journal of CMS, yet IR has never been far from the publication’s concerns. The journal’s second volume published in 1995 contained a series of articles on the state of labor organization in Western democracies, including a lively exchange between Richard Edwards and commentators on market-based alternatives to labor organization in the U.S. (Edwards, 1995), along with John Kelly and Jeremy Waddington’s rebuff of individualism in British unions (Kelly and Waddington, 1995). Although since its inception Organization has come to be associated with critical and non-positivist approaches, critique in the journal has represented diverse traditions, including, for example, labor process theory, and more recently, new materialism. Many special issues of Organization have addressed topics that would be equally at home in IR journals, including worker cooperatives, extreme and normal work, alternative economies, foreign workers, food labor, work and life during COVID-19, and solidarity. Interestingly, all of these special issues were published in the last decade, signaling the journal’s growing role in this space and, we hope, a renewed recognition of work and employment as central to a critical understanding of organizations. Lastly, the first author was invited by the chief editors to serve as an associate editor of Organization a few years ago, an indication of the journal’s commitment to multi-disciplinarity and a reflection of the growing volume of papers on work and employment issues being submitted to the journal.

Bringing IR into CMS

As Organization becomes a recognized platform for scholarship on the organization of work, we submit that more could be done to bring IR’s intellectual legacy into CMS approaches, and that doing so will yield mutual benefits. We focus here on IR’s core concerns with rules and regulatory frameworks, and collectivities over individualities.

IR originated in the wake of industrialization in Western democracies whose tumultuous effects on society prompted the need for rules to govern the organization of labor. Since Sidney and Beatrice Webb proclaimed the need for regulation to ensure worker protection and industrial democracy at the turn of the 20th century (Kaufman, 2013), IR has concerned itself with rule-making across local, sectoral, national and increasingly transnational levels to govern work. This interest in rule-making has extended to a focus on institutions and the organized actors involved in the institutionalization of particular regulatory mechanisms such as arbitration. CMS articles investigating work arrangements often tend to focus on the work and its social arrangements without a nuanced analysis of the historical and institutional contexts of rule-making. Inquiries into how rules themselves and the institutions governing rule-making differ nationally and across sectors, and how transnational systems of rules emerge and are dominated by key actors (Helfen et al., 2018) would be important for CMS studies that increasingly examine work arrangements in the Global South.

Similarly, IR’s conceptualization of parties to the employment relationship as collective and agentic can inform CMS perspectives in important ways. While CMS articles on work and employment are excellent at analyzing workers’ subjectivities vis-à-vis managerial expectations, there is often room for a more nuanced delineation of groups and group interests. Likewise, conceiving of actors and actions as anchored in agency would go a long way in providing narrative clarity around the social relationships (who does what to whom) underpinning relatively abstract concepts frequently invoked in CMS perspectives, such as “neoliberalism,” “managerialism,” or “bureaucratic/algorithmic control.” Moreover, while we believe that the interest poststructuralism has shown in all groups marginalized in modernity is a strength, scholarship in the IR tradition has demonstrated that marginalized groups are not all equal. IR’s attention to jurisdictional competition and job control interests among workers, as well as its concern with the social segmentation of labor markets, has meant that both diversity and commonality in workers’ interests are recognized (Doellgast et al., 2018). Taking an IR perspective enables scholars to examine how work is occupationally structured (e.g. Cobble, 1991) and how industries are shaped through common interests rather than primarily by markets (e.g. Commons, 1909).

Bringing CMS into IR

Similarly, IR can benefit from integrating and building on insights developed in CMS. We are not experts in CMS and recognize that it is a diverse discipline with large differences between the critical theory and poststructuralist approaches (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000) as well as more recent approaches. Nevertheless, we venture to argue that CMS as a whole offers lessons for IR in at least three ways: (i) the emphasis on cultural dominance over workers; (ii) recognition of social and identity-based fault lines that define life and work experiences; and (iii) attention to the social construction of subjectivities.

First, in contrast to traditions in IR that have characterized worker exploitation primarily in economic terms, CMS scholarship has outlined the ideological underpinnings that uphold and legitimate social and institutional arrangements, as well as the role of hegemony in producing workers’ consent in the labor process (Thompson and O’Doherty, 2009).

Second, IR has been slow to recognize that mobilizing workers based on common material interests is limited because workers’ plights are defined as much by social inequities as they are by economic concerns (Piore and Safford, 2006). By contrast, intellectual pathways lighted by feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory in CMS have effectively demonstrated that work and employment structures are fundamentally shaped by social identities and historical renderings of the “other” in patriarchal and colonial societies (Linstead and Pullen, 2006; Liu and Baker, 2016).

Third, CMS’s insight into the pervasiveness of power as hegemony has been interested in how individual subjectivities are influenced by dominant discourses. By contrast, IR’s interest in systems that produce win-win outcomes for both employers and workers has often relied on assumptions of instrumental rationality—hence, incentives held by organized labor and employers to collaborate for mutual benefit have been privileged in this tradition (Kochan and Osterman, 1994; Stuart and Lucio, 2002). Understanding how workers’ subjectivities are co-constructed within broader cultural schemas can benefit scholarship in IR.

Potential areas for cross-fertilization

In closing, we suggest four research areas likely to benefit significantly from cross-fertilization between IR and CMS: resistance in late capitalism, alternative organizations, inclusion, and the “future of work.”

Worker resistance in IR has historically been studied in the form of trade unionism (Frege and Kelly, 2004). More recently, as unionization has declined in most parts of the world, scholarship on workers’ empowerment in IR has branched out to the interfaces between social movements and unions (Gahan and Pekarek, 2013; Yu, 2013), community-union alliances (Holgate et al., 2012), and civic campaigns (Pasquier et al., 2020). While IR has typically focused on institutionalized power and organizational forms that enable collective resistance, CMS has theorized about diverse pathways to worker “emancipation,” ranging from questioning to transforming the means, ends, and social relations underpinning production. In recent years, a shift in focus to micro-emancipation, or everyday gains, in CMS has contributed to the concerns in the two disciplines diverging, yet there exist obvious possibilities for synergies between them. One such possibility would be an inquiry into the conditions under which “small wins” (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992: 459) aggregate into institutionalized power.

Second, both IR and CMS have examined alternative organizations in late capitalism that have the potential to invert, transform, or resist the often exploitative social relations underpinning the employment relationship. Hence, IR has inquired into new organizational forms that can potentially re-invent the employment relationship, such as worker-owned cooperatives or worker-occupied factories (Logue and Yates, 2006). CMS has similarly harbored a strong interest in alternative organizations in production, consumption, and other forms of economic exchange, including work on solidarity economies, democratic organizations, localism, and circular economic practices (Parker et al., 2014; Zanoni et al., 2017). Cross-fertilization between the two disciplines on alternative organizing as praxis and organization as end form can contribute to building the imaginings of a postcapitalist society.

Third, IR has historically conceptualized inclusion in terms of reducing economic inequality by empowering workers, typically by taking wages out of the equation in market competition (Perlman, 1966). In recent years the discipline has reflected critically on its traditional focus on institutionalized labor at the risk of neglecting marginalization prompted by gender, race, and sexuality (Lee and Tapia, 2021; Rubery and Hebson, 2018). At the same time, CMS scholars have reflected on the fact that much of the CMS work on diversity and inclusion has avoided the issue of class (Romani et al., 2021). Integrating the two approaches can ensure that inclusion is conceived as systemically as possible, addressing representation and acceptance of all groups in economic, social, and political spheres.

Lastly, scholarship at the IR-CMS interface is well-placed to bring clarity, nuance, and worker-centric granularity to a somewhat feverish, conjectural, and often-abstracted debate about “the future of work.” How we work is being transformed by powerful forces including digitization and automation, environmental crisis, new business and management models, social and demographic shifts and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. While these developments have fueled speculation about what the future of work could, or should be, too often these predictions for alternative models of work and society have failed to tackle questions of power, interests, conflict, and (in)justice. Taking, for example, the multi-faceted impact of automation and algorithms on jobs and work organization (Healy et al., 2017), IR scholarship has long highlighted that specific power relations mediate the processes and outcomes of technological restructuring in organizations and industries (Frost, 2000). One important way in which CMS complements and extends these insights is by highlighting the role of discourse in shaping the terrain in which struggles over the future of work play out. Finally, in discussing where work might be headed, greater dialog between IR and CMS can serve as a corrective to the temptation to discount existing quandaries in the “here and now” and help ensure that debates about the future of work are anchored in the myriad problems besetting work today.

We are encouraged by the fact that Organization already publishes work that combines perspectives from both IR and CMS and/or represents collaborations between scholars from both disciplines. At their core, IR and CMS share a unity of purpose: both are emancipatory projects, and both share an understanding of organization as imbued with antagonism. As a journal founded on advancing the ethics in organizational research, Organization is a fitting incubator of such projects.