The focal point of my research is an analysis of how trade union rights have been weakened in recent decades through a combination of legislative controls and HRM management techniques. This has been significantly underpinned by judicial interventions since the 1960s, which have used characterisations of trade unions and industrial action that were developed during the nineteenth century. Essentially common law concepts and principles have been used to depict industrial action in the worst possible light and to castigate the traditional system of giving trade union rights through statutory immunities as privileges to break the law. I have called this process the legal mystification of industrial relations.

Just as oranges are not the only fruit, strikes are not the only type of industrial dispute. This thesis examines two other forms of bargaining breakdown: dispute procedure usage; and action short of a strike - particularly overtime bans. It therefore covers two distinctive phenomena but some of the issues examined are relevant to both forms of disputes, whilst others are specific to one particular type. Complementary issues include the evaluation of economists' theories of bargaining impasses and the relevance of both areas to the 'new industrial relations' debate. Both parts also shed light on the important conceptual implications of applying the body of largely North American theory to the UK context. Chapter 1 illuminates the linkages between the two areas at greater length, provides important definitions, explains the data used and summarises the six substantive chapters. Chapters 2 to 5 examine final-offer arbitration (FOA) in the context of Britain's new style agreements on criteria connected to five issues: the incidence of dispute procedures and their specifications; the core question of effectiveness in terms of deterring disputes; the incidence of industrial action under particular dispute procedures; the impact of procedures on negotiated and arbitrated settlements; and the functioning of dispute procedures in action. These chapters suggest that although the evidence is mixed, there is no convincing support for the superior effectiveness of FOA over conventional arbitration or other impasse procedures. The almost totally unresearched area of action short of a strike is examined in chapters 6 and 7. The relative incidence of strikes and non-strike action is assessed using data from various UK surveys over the period 1966-1990 and principally with newly available data source - the CBI Pay Databank. Data from this source are also used to test possible explanatory factors behind the tactics of industrial action.

Some historians have depicted industrial welfare as of small significance in the development of British industrial relations. This thesis contains case-studies of many firms and industries which illustrate the prevalence of company welfare provision between 1846-1939 and its usefulness to employers as a labour strategy. While there have been works on specific welfare schemes, this is a monographic study of industrial welfare enabling comparisons to be made between very different industries. The thesis also identifies the formative influences upon the organisation of company provision over a broad time span. Highly capitalised industries needed to invest more in the stability and reliability of their workforces than other trades. Moreover, market control enabled companies to exercise a greater degree of forward planning in the management of production, capital and men. As natural monopolies and the first large-scale enterprises, railways were innovators in industrial management and in the provision of industrial welfare. In more competitive trades, the passing of small firm and ex gratia paternalism and its replacement by more systematic welfare schemes usually followed the formation of large, corporate firms from the 1890s onwards. Changes in the organisation of industrial welfare tended to follow the establishment of the managerial bureaucracies and structures suited to the large company. The thesis argues that profit sharing can only be understood as an element of industrial welfare provision. It shows that, rather than welfare being mainly concerned with factory conditions, employers were more interested in the questions of income maintenance, sick pay and old age pensions. Consequently, employers lobbied Parliament to prevent their industrial welfare schemes from being made redundant by social legislation. By influencing the final form of government proposals, they ensured until the Second World War that company provision was able to continue as part of state welfare schemes.

A common feeling among the Industrial Relations community is that the field faces a crisis that challenges both its ability to address the phenomena it studies and its institutional structures. However, the literature is not clear on the reasons for this development. Some argue, predominantly in Britain, that the cause of this crisis is the penetration of Human Resource Management (HRM) or, as this trend is also known, of the New Industrial Relations (NIR) theory, in the intellectual and institutional edifice of the field. Others, however, especially from the US, believe that the reason for the inability of the field to deal with the external environment is its adherence to an oldfashioned paradigm that does not take into consideration the changing nature of industrial relations realities. For them, the solution is to incorporate the teachings of the NIR theory in the intellectual corpus of Industrial Relations. Thus, one is faced with two contradictory positions that have the same bases, namely that the field is in a critical condition and that, somehow, a theory is involved (or should be involved) in the picture. However, the discrepancy between the two theses poses important conceptual problems for the future of the field for it is not as yet clear who is to blame (if anyone) for its current situation. It is, therefore, the aim of this Thesis to clarify the above picture. To achieve this, both the above theses will be evaluated. To do so, it is imperative to study the epistemological implications of the NIR theory for the field of Industrial Relations, and then to examine the place the NIR theory occupies in the intellectual structures of the field in Britain. Once this is achieved, the issue of crisis will be tackled in more detail to determine whether British Industrial Relations actually face the crisis that the various voices in the literature ascribe it with. In the Introduction the general problem and the Research Questions of the Thesis will be discussed. Then, the First Chapter will set the theoretical context upon which the analysis will be based. Chapter Two will present the intellectual and institutional development of the field of Industrial Relations, while Chapter Three will be devoted to an analysis of the NIR theory. Chapter Four will examine the epistemic value of the theory for the field of Industrial Relations and Chapter Five will investigate the position that the NIR theory occupies in the British Industrial Relations fora of knowledge development. Chapter Six will complement the above discussion by examining the evolutionary dynamics of the NIR theory. In Chapter Seven the intellectual status of Industrial Relations will be examined to see whether the field faces an intellectual crisis. Then, Chapter Eight will analyse the dynamics of the field in Britain to evaluate the condition of the field’s institutions. Finally, in Chapter Nine, the institutional status of the field, together with some ideas about the field’s future will be further discussed, and some promising avenues for future research will be presented.

This submission for a PhD by published work looks at employment relations in the Civil Service and the National Health Service( NHS) over the last decade and in particular at management/union relations, pay determination and equal opportunities. The focus of research over this period was the extent to which private sector norms are advocated by the State impacted on public sector practices: a) in the Civil Service compared to the NHS b) in employing bodies within the Civil Service(ie executive agencies and employing bodies within the NHS (ie NHS trusts). The submission is in three parts. First, the distinctions between the private and public sectors are discussed along with the change agenda pursued by successive governments since 1979 to make the public sector more like the private sector. Second, four key debates are rehearsed: whether the state as employer is no longer a 'model' employer, whether there has been trade union renewal; whether the public sector ethos has been undermined; and whether the accession of the Labour government in 1997 was a watershed in respect of public sector employment relations. Third, the author's contributions to these debates are demonstrated.