Studying work in theory and practice: insights for a globalising academia from the IR trajectory in Italy

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12182
• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017
• Author: Stefano Gasparri

Studying work in theory and practice:

insights for a globalising academia from the

IR trajectory in Italy

Stefano Gasparri

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the relevance of context to the study of industrial relations

by analysing the trajectory of an under-researched case outside the Anglo-Saxon

hotspots, Italy. Three phases are put under the spotlight revealing a trajectory

anchored to the pluralist fulcrum, but with influence first from radical perspectives

and then from unitarist ones.

1 INTRODUCTION

Scholars in the field of industrial relations (IR) have long reflected on the relationship

between theory and context, highlighting the lack of a strong encompassing theoret-

ical framework (Hyman, 2004; Ackers, 2005; Edwards, 2005) and the presence of

national styles of IR research (Hyman, 1995; Kaufman, 2004; Frege, 2005; Meardi,

2012). The risk of a vicious circle is evident: the ethnocentric trait of IR might turn

into a form of theoretical nationalism that only a universal compass can prevent.

To clarify this issue, this article adopts frames of reference (FoR) (Fox, 1974) to

account for IR debates in different intellectual contexts. Each of the different FoR—

unitarist, pluralist and radical—reflects a vision of employment relations based on

the role assigned to their main actors (capital, labour and state) and, in doing so,

expresses the normative foundations of IR analysis (Budd and Bhave, 2008: 107).

The application of FoR by context mitigates the methodological and epistemological

perils related to cross-national analysis (Hyman, 2009: 18) by providing a more

ideational ground for comparing context-bound theories (Hyman, 2004). In fact,

although IR research is highly context-sensitive (Edwards, 2005), the underlying

dialectic between FoR presents some commonalities across the globe: after periods

of pluralist dominance, pressures toward unitarism, as pushed by the marketisation

of higher education systems (Budd and Bhave, 2008: 108; Godard, 2014; Meardi,

2014a), and toward polarisation along unitarist and radical lines (Heery, 2016; Tapia

et al., 2015) have been widely observed.

This article focuses on the dialectic between FoR outside the Anglo-Saxon IR core,

in Italy, where IR displays three basic features: quite a long history, dating from the

end of Second World War (WW2); a relatively small academic community and key

contributions to scholarship, such as ‘political exchange’,‘micro-corporatism’and

‘new social pacts’, discussed further below. The article asks what explains the process

❒Stefano Gasparri, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.

Email: stefano.gasparri@wbs.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 48:4, 310–325

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2017 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

of IR theory generation and reproduction, and search for a dominant pattern. Despite

major subjective and objective changes, we demonstrate that pluralism has remained

the dominant Italian IR theory and has evolved while rejecting competing paradigms.

This intellectual history of Italian academic IR fills an important gap in our knowledge

of the global evolution of academic IR and clarifies the current meaning, relevance

and transformation of pluralism in light of broad challenges such as ‘disconnected

capitalism’(Thompson, 2003), ‘neo-liberalism’(Heery, 2016), ‘post-democracy’

(Crouch, 2000) and ‘alienated politics’(Friedman, 2014).

2 FRAMES OF REFERENCE IN CONTEXT

Frames of reference constitute a valuable analytical classification for understanding

IR theory in context. Fox described them as ways ‘through which men perceive and

define social phenomena, and their perceptions and definitions determine their

behaviour’(1974: 271). Since then, FoR have been widely used in IR (Heery, 2016;

Edwards, 2017; Seifert, 2017). A shared definition treats FoR as ‘packages of values

and assumptions pertaining to the interests of parties to the employment relationship

—that is, the needs, wants, and aspirations of employees, employers, and the state —

and the degree to which these interests are compatible’(Budd and Bhave, 2008: 93).

Specifically, each of the three FoR—unitarist, pluralist and radical—reflects a peculiar

perspective on the nature of employment relations. The unitarist frame assumes a com-

mon purpose and shared goals between employers and workers, where conflict is path-

ological. The pluralist frame assumes competing interests and tensions between the

parties, where potential conflict is to be organised by effective institutions, to the ben-

efit of all. Finally, the radical frame assumes that the employment relationship is symp-

tomatic of structural contradictions underlying capitalism and argues for workers’

resistance against the resulting exploitation and coercion.

What makes FoR relevant to IR theory is their dialectic, which has always been

integral to IR: at its foundation, when IR was ‘conceived by [the Webbs] and born

out of the clash between radical Marxian political economy and unitarist neo-classical

economics’(Marsden, 1982: 236), and more recently, when radical and pluralist IR

engage with the rise of unitarist perspectives such as human resource management

(HRM). The presence of this dialectic does not mean that FoR are perfectly sealed

folders into which IR scholars can be accordingly filed (Heery, 2016). Indeed, each

frame displays a remarkable internal variety, as captured by further distinctions and

qualifications, which all suggest a parsimonious use of FoR. For instance, Godard

(1992: 242–245) identifies five perspectives along the unitarist–pluralist–radical

spectrum, ranging from the neo-classical to the managerialist, the orthodox pluralist,

the liberal-reformist and, finally, the radical. Within the dialectic between FoR, IR

scholarship has typically deployed the accusation of ‘orthodoxy’to contend/contest

the pluralist ground (Fox, 1979; Godard and Delaney, 2000; Kochan, 2000; Ackers,

2014; Edwards, 2014). These controversies demonstrate that the more the debates

amongst FoR intensify, the more important the context of IR becomes. As Hyman

puts it, “if ‘pluralism’is to be a useful component of the vocabulary of British IR, it

must be regarded as a loose and incomplete set of ideas, beliefs and values which

acquire coherence only when complemented by background assumptions which are

rarely articulated explicitly by pluralist writers themselves”(Hyman, 1978: 16).

Exploring these background assumptions, Hyman (2004) detects ‘ethnocentric’traits

in IR theory, mostly due to the fact that core social and economic policies as well as

311Studying work in theory and practice

© 2017 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd