Editorial Statement

Abstract

Industrial relations remains a vibrant inter-disciplinary field with a strong policy orientation.The British Journal of Industrial Relations has been leading the changes in its focus in the past twenty years and the editors are determined that this should continue to be the case in the new millennium.If anything, they would like to quicken the pace of change.Readers' comments offer support for this.Feedback suggests that the Journal needs to keep expanding its scope, both methodologically and substantively.Readers acknowledge that the Journal has been at the forefront of a more theoretically driven industrial relations and they have welcomed the growing sophistication of the empirical work that is being published.They also recognize the value gained from having authors from an increasing range of countries.But some readers question whether the Journal has been at the leading edge of recent debates on some of the issues that underlie developments in industrial relations, most notably the changing nature of work and the organizations in which people are employed.At first sight it might appear that these changes have sucked the lifeblood Ð collective bargaining and unionism Ð from the subject of industrial relations.Certainly if one looks outside the subject, the institutions of industrial relations, once so central to core arguments within sociology, economics, and political science, seem to have ceased to be of such consuming interest.Yet the key issues surrounding industrial relations at the beginning of the twentieth century are remarkably similar to those of central concern at the dawn of the twenty-first.This is particularly well illustrated by the British case: `new unionism', low pay and skill deficiencies, so central today, were all concerns at the turn of the last century.However, the core issue that underlies much current debate Ð the nature of work in the future Ð has no strong parallel in the discussions of the late nineteenth century.Much recent social science pre-empts the debate, as unanalysed assumptions about trends are packaged in such phrases as `post-Fordism' British