Industrial Relations and the Tragic Flaw

Abstract

Anyone familiar with Shakespeare and his tragedies would have heard about the ‘tragic flaw’ of his heroes. All his tragic heroes—Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet and Othello—catapulted towards their tragic end because of a tragic flaw: vaulting ambition in Macbeth, misplaced trust in King Lear, indecisiveness in Hamlet and green-eyed jealousy in Othello…. This article is an attempt to respond to the question of whether industrial relations practice is also characterized by a tragic flaw which significantly undermines its potency. The data for the article comes from published newspaper reports related to industrial relations incidents some of which involved avoidable workplace violence and tragic fatalities. The article analyses these industrial relations incidents in relation to previous studies and draws insights related to the root causes constituting a tragic flaw conceptualized as the ‘morphology of volatility’.