Collective Bargaining as Industrial Democracy: Hugh Clegg and the Political Foundations of British Industrial Relations Pluralism

INTRODUCTION Sometime during the summer of 1949 Hugh Clegg first met Allan Flanders, who had arrived at Oxford to take up the post of Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations (IR) from the start of the Michaelmas term. For the next twenty years, their partnership shaped the development of a peculiarly English IR paradigm. Flanders and Clegg were the nucleus of the early postwar 'Oxford School' of IR, the authors of the 1954 foundation text that defined the modern field and the intellectual architects of the 1968 Donovan Commission that shaped future policy debate. Arguably, British IR has only just begun to shake-off this theoretical legacy, as voluntary joint regulation or collective bargaining has palpably ceased to be the focus of the employment relationship and the policy emphasis has shifted to legal regulations and Human Resource Management (see Edwards 2003). As IR struggles to redefine itself for a very different society, it is worth revisiting the intellectual founders of the old dispensation, to understand better what factors shaped their conception of the new discipline. Flanders tends to be feted as the 'theorist' within this joint project, much as Beatrice appeared to drove the intellectual project of the Webbs (see Harrison 2000). John Kelly (2004) has described Flanders as a 'much more powerful intellectual figure'. Clegg is positioned, in contrast, as the empirical cart-horse, who manned the public enquires and built the academic institutions through which Flanders' ideas could flow. This is how Clegg, in his modesty, often presented the partnership. 'He was more of a theorist, and he was a slow worker, and a bit of a perfectionist, whereas I'm a fast 3 workers and more slapdash'. i Indeed, Clegg's own academic output was prodigious, compared to Flanders' relatively slight oeuvre, and it began before Flanders entered the scene, continued long after his death, while much of it was written and researched with only slight reference to his partner. Moreover, by 1949 Clegg was already established as a Fellow in IR at Nuffield College, with almost three decades of learning and experience behind him. Within a year he had published two monographs, which established his broad approach to industrial relations. This essay questions three central and interlinked assumptions that surround the IR legacy of Hugh Clegg: The first is that Clegg, throughout his academic career, was primarily an empiricist who left theoretical work to others and largely drew on concepts that …