Industrial Relations Research and Social Theory

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to consider the connexion between social theory and research in the field of “industrial relations,” drawing particularly upon the empirical data which have been acquired by a sociological investigation of the city of Windsor, Ontario. Even a cursory investigation of a city like Windsor indicates certain tendencies to be at work in highly unionized towns which do not seem to be adequately encompassed by the existing literature of industrial relations. We are concerned here to define what these tendencies are, to suggest some of the inadequacies of existing theory to handle them and to indicate a more adequate theoretical basis for the discussion of them. The traditional academic and research approach to trade unionism has always been that of economics, and it is usually within an economic framework that unionism is discussed. A sociologist, however, who approaches the subject for the first time, begins immediately to wonder why trade unions should have become, in our universities and research institutions, so exclusively matter for study by economists, whereas other social groupings in which men live and to which they give their time and their loyalties—churches, for example, or gangs, or families—have not excited the slightest interest on the part of that discipline. The answer to this question has its roots, it would seem, in the classical view that since everything in the market is a commodity, and labour is in the market, therefore labour is a commodity, and as such, has to be treated and studied by the academic discipline whose job it is to analyse market factors, of which labour costs are one.

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