The Oxford Handbook of Employment Relations: Comparative Employment Systems edited by Adrian Wilkinson, Geoffrey Wood and Richard Deeg (eds) Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, 762 pp., ISBN 978‐0‐19‐969509‐6, £95.00 hardback

• Author: Gary Slater
• Published date: 01 May 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12094
• Date: 01 May 2015

Book reviews

The Oxford Handbook of Employment Relations: Comparative Employment Systems

Adrian Wilkinson, Geoffrey Wood and Richard Deeg (eds)

Oxford University Press,

Oxford, 2014, 762 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-969509-6, £95.00 hardback

This is an extensive and ambitious volume. The ambition of the editors is to have

produced a ‘definitive book’ bringing together the literatures on national business

systems, social systems of production, regulation theory and varieties of capitalism in

order to provide a better understanding of how employment relations have evolved

since the 1970s. Linked by a common institutional and comparative theme, the book

explores these frameworks within 31 chapters arranged across five sections. Overall,

the aim is to link these approaches at a theoretical level in a way that incorporates

diversity and change, while introducing comparative empirical and applied work that

drills down to the level of the employment contract, its implementation and related

issues surrounding the organisation of work. The book also seeks to extend the scope

of analysis to developing economies in addition to its core focus on industrialised

capitalist economies.

Given the numerous contributions to the book, it is not possible to do justice to

them individually in this review. Rather, the focus will be on the thematic sections and

where a specific chapter is referred to this should be taken to reflect the idiosyncratic

interests of the reviewer, not a comment on the relative importance of the

contribution. The editors themselves provide an opening introduction which reviews

in a fairly broad-brush manner, the relationship between institutions and perfor-

mance, informed heavily by regulation theory. While such an approach may be able

to make sense of earlier phases of development, the obvious limitation of such an

approach is how to make sense of the current ‘between growth regimes’ situation. The

editors respond by noting that the interregnum is necessarily likely to be long, messy

and contested, and they proceed to interpret current global conflicts, political changes

and economic imbalances from this perspective. Ultimately, whatever the limitations

of such an approach, it leads the editors to reach an important if not particularly

remarkable insight that provides a thread for the chapters that follow: crises in the

macroeconomy are closely connected to workplace changes. This opening chapter

covers a lot of ground, introducing a wide range of actors, processes and outcomes. In

part, this reflects an attempt to weave an encompassing narrative around the equally

wide-ranging chapters that follow. Indeed, and perhaps inevitably, in such a lengthy

edited volume the range, coverage and focus of the chapters are variable with some

veering more towards the descriptive rather than the analytical.

The first section sets out some key theoretical discussions across two chapters

providing a broad framework of reference for what follows. The first reviews the

literature on comparative institutional analysis, drawing on economic, socioeco-

nomic and industrial relations approaches and argues for the linking of comparative

institutional thinking to firm-level work and employment relations. The second

focuses on the range of arguments for employment relations convergence, including

Industrial Relations Journal 46:3, 254–258

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd