Walton and McKersie'sbehavioral theory of labor negotiations: An industrial relations perspective

Abstract

It is a rare social science event when the Silver Anniversary of any publication is noted. It is even rarer, when a book's twenty-fifth anniversary is celebrated by reviewing its contributions to multiple disciplines and diverse branches of social science. In this paper, I will attempt to trace the impacts on the field of industrial relations of A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations by first placing the work in the historical perspective of the intellectual history of our field. Then I will comment on several more specific conceptual breakthroughs and opportunities that Walton and McKersie's book provided to those of us who inherited the work. Third, I want to describe how the authors have put the theory into practice. First things first. A summary assessment may help put the comment to follow in perspective. Let there be no mistake about it. Walton and McKersie's A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations is the most important book published in industrial relations in the 1960s and one of the handful of major classics of all time in our field. It, more than any other book of its era, produced what Thomas Kuhn (1962) called a 'scientific revolution' or a paradigm shift. It moved industrial relations and collective bargaining from its institutional-historical school and opened up the field to the work of social science. And in turn, it introduced countless social and behavioral scientists from other disciplines and fields of study to the world of labor negotiation.