Industrial Relations and Legitimacy

This assignment delves into the complexities of industrial relations theory, focusing on the work of Alan Fox. Students are tasked with critically evaluating Fox's framework, identifying its strengths and weaknesses, particularly its emphasis on legitimacy. The analysis extends to explore alternative perspectives from prominent scholars like Habermas, Parsons, and Luhmann, who offer contrasting views on the role of norms and values in shaping industrial relations.

Running head: INTRODUCTION TO HRM
Introduction to Human Resources
Alan Fox framework of employment relationship
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INTRODUCTION TO HRM
Table of Contents
Question 1: Alan Fox framework and its effectiveness:..................................................................2
Reference:........................................................................................................................................6

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Question 1: Alan Fox framework and its effectiveness:
Values in relations of employees perceived from the work of Alan Fox:
Category General assumptions on employment relationship
Unitarism Relationship of employment is basically
harmonious, with employers sharing common
interests with employees.
Pluralism The relationship employment having probability
for any sort of conflict between employers and
employees a times having difference of opinions
and interests. These conflicts though are stated to
be legitimate.
Radicalism The employment relationship subject to continuing
conflict in which the control implemented by the
employers over the employees is generally
illegitimate.
Alan Fox have been among those who work within the contemporary standard of industry
relations, though the argument has been unlike most of his generations, the pluralism of Fox was
at origin reliant instead of being elementary. In his illustrious background paper that is being
written for the government commission of inquiry of UK into the industrial relations, the
argument Fox provided is that it is always probable to conceive the relationship of employment
in either of the two ways. Either it would be an affiliation of the social membership that exists in

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satisfying the universal interests, or it has been a contractual relationship that subsist the interests
of separate but groups of interdependent nature (Ackers 2014).
In one of his later work Beyond Contract, Fox added on a third conceptual probability,
the perspective of radicalism from which the factor of employment appears to be an exclusively
and irredeemably unlawful relationship. This relationship is being exemplified through
domination that exists entirely in satisfying the interests of the dominant party. For Fox the main
problem of the industrial relation is the ways of ensuring that relationships of subordinates
characterizing the fact that associations are being legitimized by the workers. Social relations are
being demanded by the organizations where those who command and comply exist. Fox have
been suggesting the fact where there is legitimacy of subordination one can talk about the fact
authority relations. Where it is being not and where compliance is stated to be the outcome of
desire and pursuing an incentive or in that fact avoiding a sanction and nothing more it would be
more of power relations (Darlington and Dobson 2013).
The theoretical commitments of Fox do not put themselves to a point of endorsement of
any particular means of organizational understanding or as significance, to any meticulous
framework norms for the purpose of governing them. Fox on repeated basis identifies that no
reference frame has any sort of objective over others. Not even when an organization is mainly
run on the basis of the total unilateral, management action that is self-interested with workers
might accepting and legitimizing the same (Cullinane and Dundon 2014).
Fox was unable to focus on the ways structures of the organization in 1960s could be
legitimized by the workers. Inherited from the industrial past of Britain, they were being based
on the reference frame that unspecified the unity of interest at the extent of the stratified category

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society where majority of the individuals knew their place and accepted the same. The deference
existing along with the objective for poverty and powerlessness illustrate the working classes
within that society that has disappeared. The responsibilities that the employees needed in taking
on as an importance of the accessible modes of work association, practices and rules have
therefore been in conflict with the social reality. The dominance that has been there of the capital
owning classes along with their rights of claiming the fruits of combined labor was being
challenged openly and in conscious manner by the workers. Fox was unable to see any sort of
possibility where the managers could simply influence employees in tolerating their authority
with protest. This judgment of Fox was stated to be specific of both the place and time in which
it was made. Fox in all probabilities would not have claimed that the factor of Unitarism was
cognitively insufficient in all the potential circumstances (Anteby and Bechky 2016).
Despite his empirical based view that the approaches of Unitarism were a mere dead end,
he ultimately rejected the pluralist view to industry relations as he did not have belief on the fact
that they offered an efficient alternative for the attainment of legtimizable structure of industrial
corporation. As an effect of a commitment with the influence of the radical left, his concern was
much about the values that were being built into the pluralist industrial associations and serving
of the political purposes.
The failure of Fox’s theoretical structure in pointing to any feasible solutions of policy is
of two intrinsic issues. Firstly, Fox conflates the two different systems of structural constraints
and incentives that are the internal social organization and the market, assuming on the fact that
managers had little choice in designing the social organization in work. Secondly, it was Fox’s
failure in identifying that from the standpoint of the certain reference frames, the structural

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situations needs to be understood in a way that their normative legality makes little or no
difference at all to the outcomes (Seifert 2015).
As put by Fox, organizations need to be seen as plural society surrounding certain related
interests along with objectives that needs to be maintained in some kind of equilibrium, though
Kerr argued that within the changing context industrial relations would take in reciprocal
anticipation and behavior of employees and employers. The belief of Fox that the absence or
presence of the legitimization makes important difference to the results in contrast to the
arguments of some other sociologists like Habermas, Parsons and Luhmann (Cullinane and
Dundon 2014). Their belief has been in case of employment relationship and industrial relations,
the workplace structure can be efficiently free of norms. For these sort of scholars, there are
definite action contexts in which the value judgments are generally of no significance in the
ultimate analysis because of purely experimental motivation. For instance, Habermans has been
arguing that behavior within the context of the organization and economy is generally been
determined by what he terms ‘steering imperatives’. The term steering is being taken from
system theory of Parsons’.
The suggestion here is that neither Fox nor Luhmann or Parsons are entirely accurate.
The argument here would be it is possible in evaluating the normative condition of the social
system as either being positive (legtimizable), negative (non-legtimizable) or in that case
effectively meaningless. It is stated to be one of the insusceptible in practice to legitimacy
evaluation.

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Reference:
Ackers, P., 2014. Rethinking the employment relationship: a neo-pluralist critique of British
industrial relations orthodoxy. The International Journal of Human Resource
Management, 25(18), pp.2608-2625.
Anteby, M. and Bechky, B.A., 2016. Book Review: Editorial Essay: How Workplace
Ethnographies Can Inform the Study of Work and Employment Relations. ILR Review, 69(2),
pp.501-505.
Cullinane, N. and Dundon, T., 2014. Unitarism and employer resistance to trade unionism. The
International Journal of Human Resource Management, 25(18), pp.2573-2590.
Darlington, R. and Dobson, J., 2013. Objective but not detached: Partisanship in industrial
relations research. Capital & Class, 37(2), pp.285-297.
Johnstone, S. and Ackers, P., 2015. Introduction: employee voice. Finding a Voice at Work,
pp.1-17.
Seifert, R., 2015. Big Bangs and Cold Wars: the British industrial relations tradition after
Donovan (1965-2015). Employee Relations, 37(6), pp.746-760.