Industrial relations, critical social science and reform: I, principles of engagement

• Date: 01 May 2015
• Author: Paul Edwards
• Published date: 01 May 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12097

Industrial relations, critical social science

and reform: I, principles of engagement

Paul Edwards

ABSTRACT

Industrial relations has long had a concern with the links between research and policy.

This concern connects with wider debates on emancipation in the related field of

Critical Management and in social science in general. This paper lays out an approach

to engagement with policy through four arguments. First, ontological realism pro-

vides a grounding for claims as to scientific truth. Second, we can also say from realist

principles that people have real interests. Third, links between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ can be

addressed through the normative arguments presented by Andrew Sayer. Finally,

dimensions of real interests, based on the work of Ed Heery, are identified. Part II of

the paper provides application and illustration.

Classical British IR [Industrial Relations] pluralism tied together critical social science, public policy

prescription and a broader underlying social philosophy of social democracy [Ackers, 2014].

How do you tie these things together? Ackers’s remark comes at the end of a paper

about analysis, and it is not explained in detail. What the founders of British IR might

have made of ‘critical social science’ would be an issue in itself. But the ambition to

make the links is valid, and this paper takes up the challenge of doing so.

The context suggests that the exercise is timely. Some social scientists espouse a

goal of contributing to ‘social transformation’ (Byrne, 2011: 206) or even the ‘bet-

terment of humankind’ (Delbridge, 2014). ‘The notion of emancipation’, remark

Fournier and Grey (2000: 19), lies at the heart of most critical social science.

Burawoy (2007) calls for a public sociology in which the social scientist engages

with an active public. This idea has been applied to the field of work and employ-

ment by Brook and Darlington (2013: 233) who advocate an ‘organic public soci-

ology of work in which the researcher is overtly partisan and active on the side of

the marginalized and labour’.

This burst of enthusiasm side-steps one theoretical and one practical issue. The

theoretical one concerns the connection between science as a dispassionate endeavour

and policy. A possible resolution lies in keeping the two clearly apart, a line argued

elegantly by Hammersley (2000) and Pawson (2006). Yet such a stark distinction is

too rigid: are there never situations in which a social scientist would choose to make

a policy intervention in the name of science, rather than as any other political actor?

The organic view goes to the opposite extreme of linking science directly to concrete

❒Paul Edwards is Professor of Employment Relations, University of Birmingham. Correspondence

should be addressed to Paul Edwards, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston

Park Road, Birmingham B15 2TT; email: P.K.Edwards@Bham.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 46:3, 173–186

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd