Labour Law and Industrial Relations: Toward Renewal?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores paths for the renewal of the study of industrial relations and labour law. Through a comparative historical review of these two fields of study, it examines their common roots and legacies and a range of renewal initiatives. It is argued that both fields need to reappropriate core values: recognition of the fundamental inequality of the parties to the employment relationship; and recognition of the need to compensate for this inequality through collective processes. The seeds of this renewal are identified in both labour law and industrial relations. Their future lies in the emergence of an integrated field of study of work and employment and in the role and future of work as a vector of democracy. Summary Industrial relations and labour law both suffered a relative decline during the latter decades of the 20th and the early 21 st centuries. Through a comparative historical review of the field of study, this article explores current and past efforts by scholars in industrial relations and labour law to examine their common legacies in order to transcend the overly narrow confines of their fields and identify avenues for renewal. Both industrial relations and labour law have long shared a common object of study—work and employment—and would benefit from more systematic integration of their findings. Such an integration will be explored by broadening both analytical perspectives. Neither jurists nor industrial relations specialists should confine their understanding of law to the formal rules within state law. They should instead turn to analysis of the “living law” through empirical studies of its nature and effectiveness. Industrial relations, whose focus is on the future of work and society, requires a more substantive engagement with the social sciences, while both fields need a normative project to advance citizenship at work and democracy. In line with Arthurs’ observations on labour law (2011), such renewal also requires an understanding of how both can be used to challenge hegemonic institutions and initiate alternative approaches.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.034 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".