Institutions and Agency: Rethinking American Industrial Unionization

Abstract

Unlike other social sciences that have taken an interest in institutions only recently, it has long been understood in industrial relations (IR) that institutions “matter.” By this we mean that practices and outcomes in IR are shaped in critical ways by the institutional environment.The institutional approach of IR has not been without its problems. In the United States especially, mainstream neoclassical economists were able to marginalize the field because its institutional perspective was supposed to indicate a lack of theoretical ambition (and an excessive attachment to unions). Yet empiricism was no savior, as the field’s emphasis on analyzing existing (formal) industrial relations institutions and practices (rather than the tenuous context within which those institutions emerged and operated) left it totally unprepared for their eventual (but in retrospect unsurprising) disintegration.