1995 The Comparative Poitical Economy of Industrial Relations

Abstract

For too long, comparative industrial relations has been treated as a subfield of industrial relations in the U.S. and has remained relatively isolated from the empirical contributions and theoretical insights of related fields, such as political sociology and comparative political economy. Many of the best works in our field have reached into other disciplines to try to make sense of the rapidly changing and often all too discouraging industrial relations scene both in the U. S. and worldwide. But few have done so self-consciously and with a view to picking out industrial relations trends that unify the experiences-and can illuminate new strategic directions-of labor movements throughout the world. This is the ambitious task that we undertook-as political scientists who have chosen to make our homes in the field of industrial relations-in pulling together the current volume on the comparative political economy of industrial relations.