Neo-Durkheimian Analyses of Economic Life and Strife: From Durkheim to the Social Contract

Abstract

“The task of the most advanced societies, is, then, a work of justice… Just as the ideal of lower societies was to create or maintain as intense a common life as possible, in which the individual was absorbed, so our ideal is to make social relations always more equitable… The harmony of functions and, accordingly, of existence, is at stake. Just as ancient peoples needed, above all, a common faith to live by, so we need justice…”

Recession in the Public Sector: Industrial Relations in Freightliner 1981–1985

“…For radical theorists the reduction of industrial conflict and the amelioration of its symptoms have been seen to lie in the prior reduction of the state of anomie in British industry. This, in turn, has been seen to require far-reaching measures to curtail social and economic inequalities, such as redistributive incomes and social policies or the introduction of industrial democracy (Gilbert, 1978). The value of the Freightliner case study is that it demonstrates significant change occuring in the outcomes of industrial relations where these far-reaching measures are most emphatically absent.…”

“…The durability of the substantive changes in industrial relations described above has frequently been seen as dependent on a deeper transformation in the complex of beliefs which underpin the industrial system (Gilbert, 1986). In order to investigate this question we examined the response of the workforce and its representatives to the series of initiativesset in train by Freightliner management.…”

Institutions and the Industrial Relations Tradition

“…Notably, there is evidence of cross-fertilization between Fox and Goldthorpe in the construction of their respective sociologies of IR (Fox 1971: vi;Goldthorpe 1975: 135). Considered alongside the later eff orts of the sociologist Michael Gilbert (1986), who sought to build upon Fox's and Goldthorpe's analysis, one can trace a particular 'school' of IR: one that emphasizes the anomic temperament of industrial relations and the dearth of normative constraints on distributional confl ict within advanced industrial societies (cf. Heery 2008: 73).…”

“…In Britain, while a latent functionalism was oft en apparent in the work of Oxford scholars, explicit sociological anchoring in Durkheim was used to explain the 'infl ationary disorder' that spawned the important Donovan Commission (Fox and Flanders 1969). As this tradition was seriously challenged by Marxist sociology and labour process analysis in subsequent years (Hyman 1975;Nichols and Beynon 1977), the Durkheimian sociology of IR institutions was in turn reconstructed and elaborated by radical-institutionalists to explain 'disorder' as a product of liberal market societies (Goldthorpe 1969;Fox 1974;Gilbert 1986). While such sociological underpinnings eroded as the full eff ects of the 'monetarist counter-revolution' were felt throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a space for such thinking re-emerged in subsequent developments around Durkheimian neo-pluralist approaches to the employment relationship (Ackers 2002(Ackers , 2012 and the varieties of capitalism (VOC) literature in particular (Frege and Kelly 2004).…”