Whither Industrial Relations: Does It Have a Future in Post-Industrial Society?

This article addresses the difficulties that industrial relations is experiencing both as a set of practices and as an intellectual tradition. It traces those difficulties to the changes in the basic structures of industrial society that have undermined the framework which the field grew up around and presumed. But it also relates them to the salience of Keynesian and Marxian thought, which defined the intellectual context in which industrial relations as a field was embedded and the way in which the decline of these traditions has undermined industrial relations as well.