Changing Disciplinary Characteristics of Industrial Relations and Labour

Research: An Analysis of Scholars Over Time

Bernd Brandl
Department for Industrial Sociology
University of Vienna
Bruenner Strasse 72
A-1210 Vienna, Austria
Tel.: ++43/(0)1/427738314
Fax: ++43/(0)1/427738318
Email: bernd.brandl@univie.ac.at

This article provides an assessment of shifts in the disciplinary character of industrial relations
and labour research by tracing back and investigating the disciplinary background of authors
who published articles in industrial relations and labour journals from the early 1980s to now.
Findings reveal, first, that the share of authors with an educational background in economics
increased steady and second, authors with educational backgrounds in sociology and political
science are constantly publishing in industrial relations and labour research. Third, the share
of authors with disciplinary backgrounds from a variety of other disciplines such as in
particular from the humanities decreased substantially. These results indicate that the
disciplinary variety of industrial relations and labour research decreases. On the other hand
the share of authors with an explicit training in industrial relations increased steadily which
can be interpreted as tendency that industrial relations has become a distinct discipline.
Reasons for the shifts and methodological implications of the exploratory empirical results are
discussed and contrasted.

Background, motivation and previous research

Shifting characteristics of industrial relations and labour (IR) research have always been of
interest and have been discussed in context of the nature, characteristics, size and boundaries
of the discipline. The continuous discussions may be explained by the fact that, in contrast to
other social science disciplines like economics, sociology or political science, IR has always
been a ‘small’ discipline - at least in terms of the number of distinct scholars, departments or
publication media. It is often said (e.g. Frege 2005, 2008) that IR has its roots in economics
and succeeded to establish itself as a distinct discipline since the mid 20th century. For these
reasons, early work on the nature and characteristics of IR research was concerned with
defining IR as a discipline. For example, Reed Tripp (1964) investigated how IR as a
discipline manifested itself in the academic ‘life’ in terms of teaching programs. Laffer (1974)
elaborated the methodological and theoretical characteristics of IR research. In the following
decades scholars concentrated their analysis on shifts in IR research characteristics over time,
and many found methodological shifts in IR research characteristics, in particular away from
earlier inductive and qualitative research characteristics towards deductive (theory building)
and quantitative (theory testing) research (Whitfield and Strauss 2000). Some found shifting
theoretical accentuations in IR research like the role of ‘institutionalistic’ research activities
(Sisson 2007). Some detected country-specific variations in IR research and tendencies
towards convergence in IR research traditions (Frege 2002, 2005).

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Other analyses on the characteristics of IR research found sub-disciplinary accentuation shifts
towards labour economics and human resource management (HRM) combined with shifts in
methodological accentuations accompanied with accentuations of theory as well as in the
‘quantity’ of interpretational parts in literature (McMillan and Casey 2007). One problem with
these analyses on the (methodological) differences and contribution of HRM research for IR
research and how they are related with teaching at universities (Kaufman 1993) is that there is
often confusion as there is still uncertainty about the exact domains and boundaries of sub-
disciplines. For sub-disciplinary IR discussions on the research domains (and on respective
shifts) there still exists the need to instruct ‘authors to explicitly describe what they perceive
are the distinguishing features […]’ to avoid misconceptions (Kaufman, 2001: 337). IR
research sub-disciplinary shifts are therefore highly dependent on individual feature settings.
Other studies on the characteristics and nature of IR research argued shifts in (comparative)
IR research in the accentuation towards regression and statistical research, which is negatively
correlated with interpretational accentuations (Hyman 2001). A number of studies have found
swings over the years in the ‘relevance’ of IR research. Unfortunately, more evidence was
found on the existence of downswings expressed by a number of IR research facilities,
publications and departments (Cappelli 1985; Godard 1994; Jacoby 1990). Many explanations
for the ‘relevance-swings’ have been found including exogenous - e.g. decline of unions and
collective bargaining - and endogenous - e.g. methodological (Brown and Wright 1994).
However, a lot has been written about shifting characteristics and developments in IR. In the
tradition of literature on the characteristics and nature of IR research the aim of this work is to
expand the discussion on the disciplinary characteristics and knowledge integration of IR
research with other social science disciplines. Empirically, the aim of this work is to assess the
changing cross-disciplinary links between IR and other disciplines.
Literature on the stance of IR in the social sciences usually stresses the knowledge exchange
between IR and various other disciplines (Kelly 2004), but empirical studies on the exchange
are scarce. On the basis of the knowledge transfer from other disciplines to IR literature this
study will asses the disciplinary changes in the characteristics of IR research. For this purpose
a quantitative evaluation and measurement of the disciplinary knowledge transfer from other
disciplines to IR will be undertaken. With exception of the recent work of McMillan and
Casey (2007), scientometric analysis for IR research is scarce, even though popular in other
disciplines. The work of Frege (2005) was one of the first in IR literature which dealt (among
other things) with the question of the changing disciplinary characteristics of IR research by
investigating the affiliations of authors publishing in IR journals. In her study authors that are
publishing in a selection of IR journals were classified in three disciplines: (i) IR, human
resources (HR) and business, (ii) economics and (iii) other social science disciplines. The
results showed that in today’s IR research the highest share of authors are from disciplines (i)
and (ii), even though differences in the shares among countries can be found. For example, in
Britain the share of authors from discipline (ii) is relatively moderate (in the 1990s) while the
share of authors from discipline (i) is relatively high; while in the US at the same time the
share of authors from discipline (ii) is high. Motivated by the work of Frege (2005) and
McMillan and Casey (2007) this study aims to take a closer look at the shifting disciplinary
characteristics of IR research. This study differs from previous work in many ways. First, it
assesses the disciplinary characteristics of IR research by investigating (disciplinary
educational origin of authors. Second, a larger sample of authors (and articles) is analyzed as
well as a more detailed time span is covered. Third, a more detailed disciplinary
characterisation including a variety of disciplines (including for example mathematics,
statistics, philosophy, history) is used. The study therefore also highlights the ‘knowledge
input’ from disciplines that are usually skipped.

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