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4TH Hand Out-Brief Notes - On Theories of Ir
4TH Hand Out-Brief Notes - On Theories of Ir
4TH Hand Out-Brief Notes - On Theories of Ir
INTERNAL MEMORANDUM
1.0 INTRODUCTION
It has been noted that IR in organizational management is a term that denotes a
specialist area of organizational management and study concerned with a
particular set of phenomena associated with regulating the human activity of
employment.
Therefore, approaches or theories to analyze IR require the understanding of two
points.
i) The first point is that theories/approaches are primarily analytical
categorizations rather than causative theories or predictive models.
ii) The second point is that there is no “one right” approach or theory.
Each approach emphasizes a particular aspect of IR that can be taken together to
provide a framework for analyzing and understanding the diversity and
complexity of IR.
Each perspective has a variation in the form of management behavior within it.
The unitary perspective can vary from authoritarian to paternalistic approach to
the role of management. The pluralist can emphasize cooperation or conflict and
the Marxist may advocate evolutionary or revolutionary approach to the desired
social change.
Let us now examine these perspectives in much more detail and contrast the
essence of each approach to IR.
Conflict between management and workers is the total range of behavior and
attitudes that express opposition and divergent orientation between workers and
managers on the one hand and working people and their union on the other.
Thus conflict is seen to be both rational and inevitable. It results from industrial
organizational factors rather than from individuals.
The primary source of conflict is from the different managerial and worker
groups’ aspirations. The managerial group is responsible for efficiency,
productivity of the organization, and coordinating activities to achieve
organizational objectives whereas workers are only required ‘to do’ and their
main concerns are perceived in a personal terms of high pay, better working
conditions etc.
For example, the closure of high cost operations are aimed at increased
profitability conflicts with the workers objective of greater job security, new
technology is in conflict with feelings of job insecurity, deskilling, management’s
desire to maximize power/authority in order to control gives rise to workers’
safeguards against arbitrary management actions and decisions.
The role of law in this perspective is primarily one of defining the limits of
socially acceptable collective actions and use of power. The role of trade union is
seen as legitimate and positive in safeguarding workers’ interests.
The trade union legitimacy is based on social values, which recognize the right of
interest groups to continue and have an effective voice in their own destiny.
Furthermore, they cover not only pay and conditions but also disciplinary matters,
methods of working, the rights and duties of employers and employees and so on.
It is the rules of IR which have to be explained by the independent variables of an
IR system.
a) Managerial hierarchies
Dunlop argues that managerial hierarchies need not own the capital assets of
production and may be located in either private or public enterprises.
b) Hierarchy of employees
- Dunlop also suggests that although employees may not necessarily be
formally organized, they often are. Indeed, they may be organized into a
number of competing or complementary employee organizations.
- In his view, however, totalitarian societies normally have governmental
agencies which are so powerful that they override managers and
employees on almost all matters.
2. The context
Dunlop also describes three environmental contexts that play a decisive
part in shaping the rules of an IR system and with which these actors
interact. These are:
i) The technological characteristics of the work place and work community
ii) The market or budgetary constraints which impinge on the actors
iii) The locus and distribution of power in the larger society.
a) Technology, work place and work community
- He regards particular technologies as having far-reaching consequences in
determining IR rule making. Technologies, for example, affects the size of
the workforce, its concentration or dispersion, its location and proximity to
the employees’ places of residences, and the duration of employment.
- It also influences the proportions of skills in the workforce, the ratio of
male to female workers.
b) Markets/budgetary constraints
- An IR system also has to adapt to the product markets or to the budgetary
constraints of the enterprise. Although these impinge on management
initially, they ultimately concern all the actors in a particular system.
- Such constraints may be local, national or international.
c) The locus and distribution of power
- By the locus and distribution of power in the larger society, Dunlop means
the distribution of power outside the IR system which is given to that
system
- This is important because the relative distribution of power in society
tends to be reflected within the IR system itself. Yet it need not necessarily
determine the behavior of the actors in IR. It is, rather, a context which
helps to structure the IR system itself.
- The distribution of power within the larger society is particularly likely to
influence the state’s specialist IR agencies
3. The Ideology
- The final element in the Dunlopian systems theory is the ideology or set of
ideas and beliefs held by the actors which binds the system together. More
precisely, in Dunlop’s words:
- The ideology of the IR system is a body of common ideas that defines the
role and place of each actor and that defines the ideas which each actor
holds towards the place and function of the others in the system.
- The ideology of an IR system, he says, must be distinguished from that of
the wider society. Nevertheless, they would be expected to be similar or at
least compatible with each other.
- Each of the main sets of actors in an IR system might even have its own
ideology. But the hallmark of a mature IR system is that its constituent
ideologies are sufficiently congruent to allow the emergence of a common
set of ideas which recognize an acceptable role for each in the system.
However, critics say that Systems theory lacks analytical rigor and its static view
of IR. They have suggested that the model requires refinement and development.
The general theory of radical perspective argues that class/group conflict is the
source of societal change – without conflict, society as a whole would stagnate.
The second argument is that class conflict arises from the disparity in the
distribution, and access to economic power within the society – those who own
the capital and those who supply this labor.
The third argument is that the nature of society’s social and political institutions is
derived from the economic disparity and reinforces the position of the dominant
establishment group, for example, through differential access to education and
medical care, the media, and employment in government etc. The fourth argument
states that social and economic conflict in whatever form is merely an expression
of the underlying economic conflict within the society.
The role of law is that it is supportive of management’s interests rather than being
an independent referee. The obligations of the employers are precise and specific
whereas those of the worker are imprecise. In sum, the radical perspective views
and analyses IR in social, political and economic terms and not in organizational
and job regulations.
END