Images of community, industrial relations and regional development

Abstract

The OECD is promoting a new approach to regional development - the 'New Regionalism' - which proposes a new and more positive link between work, worker organisation, community involvement and regional development. This relies upon the construction of a shared vision or image of region and its proposed pattern of development. In the first section of this article we provide a brief sketch of the New Regionalism. In the final section, using the Latrobe Valley's development as an example, we examine the link between industrial relations, history, community and locality, and in particular the dominant images or representations of a locality. We argue that these are complex and contested and militate against simple notions of community generated in some versions of the New Regionalism. Part of the problem, we suggest in the second section of the article, lies in the fact that academic approaches to industrial relations have tended to ignore or downplay the importance of place or locality.

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