Developing a strong theoretical base for research and practice in industrial relations and human resource management has to date remained a largely unfulfilled challenge. This pioneering volume helps close the theory gap by presenting contributions from fifteen leading scholars that develop and extend theoretical perspectives on work and the employment relationship. Subject areas covered include theories of employment relations systems, varieties of capitalism, the labor process, new institutional economics, individual work motivation, strategic human resource management, a theory of transaction costs and employment contracts, efficiency versus equity, and comparative industrial relations.

About the Author
Bruce E. Kaufman is Professor of Economics and Senior Associate of the W.T. Beebe Institute of Personnel and Employment Relations at Georgia State University and Research Fellow at the Center for Work, Organization and Wellbeing at Griffith University. His most recent book, also published with Cornell, is Managing the Human Factor: The Early Years of Human Resource Management in American Industry; other books include The Global Evolution of Industrial Relations; What Do Unions Do: A Twenty Year Perspective; and Theoretical Perspectives on Work and the Employment Relationship (a LERA Research volume).

Reviews

"The book's eleven chapters fully live up to the title's promise of 'perspectives': the authors are from Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, with academic backgrounds that include management departments, business schools, industrial relations departments, economics departments, and law schools. Ranging from the micro or individual level to the macro or national level, the chapter topics draw on fields such as organizational behaviour, human resource management, economics, sociology, comparative politics, and history.... Readers with a research interest in industrial relations are unlikely to be disappointed by this book-especially if their interest extends to the micro-level workings that underpin collective employment relationships. But the book is also strongly recommended for readers from other disciplines and policy-research backgrounds: it is a truly outstanding investigation of the (changing) nature of work and employment."

-- Mark Lansky, International Labour Review



Book Information
ISBN 9780913447888
Author Bruce E. Kaufman
Format Paperback
Page Count 350
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 340g