From industrial relations research to Global Labour Studies: moving labour research beyond Eurocentrism

Abstract

ABSTRACT The traditional industrial relations approach – focused on the state, employers and unions as main actors – faces severe limits in its capacity to analyse labour conflict in the face of the specific forms of labour regulation in the Global South. This contribution argues that a solid theoretical framework for Global Labour Studies requires a critique of its forerunner, the industrial relations approach. A globally relevant understanding of labour conflict in the twenty-first century requires to abandon the main assumptions of this forerunner. A new theoretical framework for the analysis of labour conflict can build on the debates around social movement unionism and the research agenda of labour geography that include other places and spaces of labour mobilization than the workplace and the trade union into their epistemological perspective. Such a conception allows to analyse labour conflict at the level of the social formation, and not just as something relegated to or emanating from the economic sphere.