Strategic Choice and Industrial Relations Theory

Abstract

Industrial relations in the private sector of the American economy has been changing in a number of important ways in recent years, most visibly in collective bargaining where we have seen important wage, benefit, work practice, and employment security concessions and tradeoffs negotiated in a number of major industries (Cappelli and McKersie, 1983). However, other important changes have been occuring more quietly and more incrementally over a longer period of time at the workplace level, where new forms of employee participation and alternative forms of work organization have evolved, and at the highest levels of managerial decision-making where corporate business decisions are made and basic policies regarding human resources, technology and the status of unions are formulated (Kochan and Cappelli, 1983). Unfortunately, our theories for explaining and understanding these changes are not yet well developed.Indeed, these changes appear to be important enough to warrant examining the basic paradigm that has governed industrial relations research in recent years, a conclusion echoed in recent commentaries by Derber, Strauss, Kerr, and Cummings (1982). The common theme linking these arguments is that most of the currently popular theories of industrial relations and the empirical evidence supporting them were generated during periods of relative stability in U.S. collective bargaining and industrial relations and consequently are too static in nature. Thus, they have difficulty explaining the behavior of the system when its basic parameters appear to be changing. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to add a more dynamic component to industrial relations theory by developing the concept of strategy, or strategic choice, in a way that we believe can help explain some of the changes in industrial relations that have occurred or are currently unfolding. The Prevailing ParadigmThe debate over the appropriate theory for industrial relations In contrast to these efforts to build global theories, research since the 1960's shifted toward middle range models designed to explain variations in the process and outcomes of collective -2-III bargaining. In addition, the theories being used to explain these concerns have shifted back toward the basic social science disciplines (Kochan, Mitchell, and Dyer 1982). There are a number of anomalies in current industrial relations, however, that cannot be explained with these middle-level theories. Nor can they be easily reconciled with the systems approach. A brief outline of some of these unexpected developments will help illustrate the inadequacy of the current theoretical approaches. Further, only one of the plants opened by this firm since the mid-1960s' has been organized by a union. While it is difficult to generalize from a single firm, our case studies of other organizations reveal that this pattern is the norm.-3- IIIVarious efforts have been made to explain this development, and they typically look to characteristics of the parties and the environment for the cause of decl...

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