Prof. John T.

Dunlop’s
Systems Approach Model
 Introduction
• The systems approach has been a combination of traditions,
customs and a web of action, reaction and interaction
between parties.
• The systems approach is given by Prof. John T. Dunlop of the
Harvard University (1958) and is also referred as Dunlop’s
Approach.
• Dunlop analyses industrial relations system as a subsystem of
the society.
• He suggested that industrial relations system could be divided
into three interrelated elements comprising certain actors, an
ideology binding the industrial relations system together and
a body of rules created to govern the actors at the workplace.
Dunlop’s Approach to Industrial Relation
 Elements of System Model of Industrial
Relation-Dunlop

• The Actors in the system

• Environmental Forces of Industrial Relations
System
• The Network or Web of Rules
 The Actors in the system
• A hierarchy of managers and their
representatives in supervision
• A hierarchy of workers (non-managerial) and
any spokesman
• Specialized government agencies (like labor
courts) created by the first two actors
concerned with workers’ enterprises and their
relationships.
 The Contexts of systems

• The technological characteristics of the workplace and work

community. Changes in technology enhance the employers
expectations about the skills of workers. The work processes
and methods with modern techniques reduce manual work and
workers acquire greater control over work and higher
production can be achieved.
• The market or budgetary (economic) constraints also
influences industrial relations because the need for labor is
closely associated with the demand for the products.
• The locus and distribution of power in the larger society in
the form of power centers-the workers, the employers and the
government also influences the relationship between labor and
management
 The Network or Web of Rules

For Dunlop, the establishment of procedures

and rules is the centre of attention in an
industrial relations system. These rules may be
expressed in a variety of forms:
• The regulations and policies of the
management hierarchy.
• Collective bargaining agreements.
• The customs and traditions of the workplace
and work community
Shortcomings/Criticism of Dunlop’s Theory
• It is static, not dynamic in time.
• It concentrates on the structure of the system ignoring the processes within it.
• It focuses on formal rules and neglect important informal rules and informal
processes.
• It is problematic because we do not know what happens when the actors do
not share a common ideology.
• It is environmentally biased and provides no articulation between the internal
plant level systems and the wider national systems.
• It makes no special provision for the role of individual personalities in industrial
relations as the actors are being viewed in a structured way rather than in a
dynamic sense