The uses, abuses and non-uses of Rethinking Industrial Relations in understanding industrial relations and organised labour

Abstract

Kelly published what should, it is argued, have become a seminal work with Rethinking Industrial Relations. The influence of Rethinking Industrial Relations, it was to be hoped, would be a field of study that was intellectually not only more capable of dealing with the challenge of HRM and neoliberalism but also capable of being of utility to organised labour in understanding its current plight and future path to renewal and re-assertion. Instead, Rethinking Industrial Relations has been largely incorporated into the existing state of academic-cum-intellectual consciousness whereby it has been primarily used to support an already extant trajectory of limited depth and breadth of enquiry and analysis. Therefore, this article examines what it terms the uses, abuses and non-uses of Rethinking Industrial Relations, especially in regard of mobilisation theory, in understanding organised labour. It first examines the citations of Rethinking Industrial Relations as a primary guide to its usage before proceeding to quantify and qualify its usage in journals. From here, it then seeks to explain these findings by discussing the temporal environment into which Rethinking Industrial Relations was published.