This issue brings together papers from the 15th World Congress of the International Industrial Relations Association held in Sydney, Australia in August 2009. As the conference readily demonstrated, with over a thousand attendees from around the world, industrial relations remains a vital area of political and organisational interest and practice. A large number of politicians and business and union leaders contributed to the opening session, plenary addresses and many of the Congress’s symposia. The fact that industrial relations remains a vital academic discipline – wherever it is housed and however it is badged – was equally obvious through the breadth of nationalities present, and the equally diverse papers which were presented. The theme of the World Congress was ‘The New World of Work, Organisations and Employment’, with five tracks focusing on: management, work and organisation; voice and representation; work, family and community; institutions, processes and outcomes; and new forms of work and employment. The Congress set out to examine how nation states and a variety of institutions are responding to, and, in many instances, driving changes in the organisation, regulation and location of work. The Congress also considered the many ways in which scholars seek to define and explain these developments. As has been well documented, these changes in work have posed fundamental challenges to many individual workers, managers and institutions, as well as to those of us researching and writing in the field of industrial relations. In opening the Congress, the Association’s 2009 President, Professor Russell Lansbury, suggested that amid all these changes ‘the means by which work and employment relations are regulated remain a central issue for people around the world’.