10 Facts About Industrial relations

Nevertheless, industrial relations has frequently been concerned with employment relationships in the broadest sense, including "non-industrial" employment relationships.

In recent times, industrial relations has been in decline as a field, in correlation with the decline in importance of trade unions and with the increasing preference of business schools for the human resource management paradigm.

Industrial relations has three faces: science building, problem solving, and ethical.

Industrial relations scholarship assumes that labour markets are not perfectly competitive and thus, in contrast to mainstream economic theory, employers typically have greater bargaining power than employees.

Industrial relations scholarship assumes that there are at least some inherent conflicts of interest between employers and employees and thus, in contrast to scholarship in human resource management and organizational behaviour, conflict is seen as a natural part of the employment relationship.

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Industrial relations has its roots in the industrial revolution which created the modern employment relationship by spawning free labour markets and large-scale industrial organizations with thousands of wage workers.

Institutionally, industrial relations was founded by John R Commons when he created the first academic industrial relations program at the University of Wisconsin in 1920.

Industrial relations was formed with a strong problem-solving orientation that rejected both the classical economists' laissez-faire solutions to labour problems and the Marxist solution of class revolution.

The number of academic programs in industrial relations is therefore shrinking, while fields such as human resource management and organizational behaviour grow.

The challenge for industrial relations is to re-establish these connections with the broader academic, policy, and business worlds.