Robert B. McKersie, A Field in Flux: Sixty Years of Industrial Relations (review)

Labour / Le Travail
Issue 93 (2024)

Reviews / Comptes rendus

Robert B. McKersie, A Field in Flux: Sixty Years of Industrial Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)

A Field in Flux is Robert McKersie’s retrospective of his career as a professor of industrial relations. His memoire provides the reader with interesting background and context to his major research works. It spans the years 1954 to 2018 and recounts personal stories about his experiences and ideas as an academic in the field of industrial relations. While a book of this genre might not at first glance be significant to labour studies, it is an interesting read for people seeking to better grasp and historicize industrial relations theories from the second half of the 20th century. The chronological narrative, the author’s stature as a prestigious scholar at the center of the ir discipline in the United States, and his long career at four influential universities together give the reader insights into the nature and development of industrial relations theories.

Readers will be reminded of McKersie’s major works: A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations (with Richard Walton, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), The Transformation of American Industrial Relations (with Thomas Kochan and Harry Katz, Ithaca: ilr Press 1986), and Strategic Negotiations (with Richard Walton and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 1994). McKersie is associated with the post-war behavioral turn in labour relations theory, the concept of integrative bargaining which gave rise to the concept of interest-based bargaining, and the introduction of strategic choice theory in industrial relations. Other research projects are also described along with a number of appointments to public bodies and as a mediator of labour disputes. Alone these points make the book notable and interesting.

Chapter 1 and 2 explain his early life and education. The son of a schoolteacher and a postal worker, he served in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps and did three years active duty in the US Navy completing an undergrad degree in electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania then starting an mba and a doctorate at Harvard Business School. Benjamin Selekman influenced him to study labour with the concept of a balance of power. He opted for Bob Livernash as his dissertation advisor on a comparative study of wage payment systems. As the “West Point of Capitalism” hbs offered three intellectual currents to study trade unions, Selekman’s acceptance of unions, the human relations group, and John Dunlop’s systems theory.

The next three chapters discuss his major academic appointments. Chapter 3 is about his work at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business from 1959 to 1971. Chapter 4 is about his time at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell from 1971 to 1979. A long Chapter 5 (over one-third of the book) is about his work from 1980 to 2018 at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These chapters give particular insights into the intellectual history of postwar US industrial relations theory and how ir scholars reacted to the surge of employer anti-union animus from the 1980s onward.

It was at the University of Chicago that McKersie and Walton developed their behavioral theory of labour negotiations. George P. Schultz, Secretary of State in the Reagan administration, was a faculty member at the Graduate School of Business and served as dean. Schultz developed an influential model for the study of industrial relations that McKersie adopted at Chicago. As with earlier ir scholars at Wisconsin under John R. Commons, the faculty in ir were to identify as economists and approach ir as “problem-based” but “not a discipline in itself.” Very close relations with this the “mother discipline of industrial relations” were encouraged (38-40) and this meant deep connections to the Department of Economics and its emerging philosophy known as the Chicago School of Economics with Milton Friedman promoting the virtues of free-market economic principles. It was from this academic setting where the behavioral theory of labour negotiation emerged. The book thus documents early linkages between these two theories. The aim of the Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiation, McKersie explains, was “to describe behavior at the [negotiating] table” (53) versus the context. This was seen by some scholars as an “unwelcome departure” (54) from earlier ir traditions focused on the institutions shaping labour, particularly partisans of the Wisconsin School that prioritized a focus on historical knowledge.

McKersie, sold on the “Schultz model” (46) of industrial relations, brought these ideas to Cornell University in the 1970s. Like the earlier Wisconsin School graduates who made the New Deal happen in practice, the new model remained wedded to public engagement. But the postwar reorientation on a Chicago School foundation meant that public engagement was as labour and management “neutrals” and so there was a persistent concern about not “getting totally captured” by either management or labour unions. (105) This led to “a highly complicated relationship with the labor movement” (80) as unions critiqued faculty wage studies, research on productivity in the public sector, and the lack of support for the actwu boycott of the anti-union J.P. Stevens. This chapter gives a concrete accounting of the rough relationship between trade unions and ir research and service in the academy when based upon a Chicago School disciplinary positivism.

Arriving at mit at the start of the 1980s, McKersie launched a major research project on the transformation of US labour relations. Reagan’s firing of 11,345 air traffic controllers is discussed. The patco strike was “indefensible” and “suicidal” (111) and the response set the tone for labour relations for decades. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided “significant funds” (113) for five years for the Transformation of American Industrial Relations project. The project challenged John Dunlop’s ir systems theory and used a strategic choice framework to explain the changes taking place in labour relations. Complementing this view was a renewed interest in McKersie’s earlier 1965 behavioral theory with the rise of interest-based bargaining. These ideas, decoupled from Wisconsin ir historicism and Dunlop’s ir systems frameworks, allowed for the grounding of labour negotiations theory in a “generic” framework of negotiation and conflict management. This led to a number of projects including involvement in Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiations and involvement with labour-management partnerships.

One interesting account as “negotiation became a ‘discipline’” (140) is from 2007 at the height of the post 9-11 War on Terror. The George W. Bush administration became interested in how McKersie’s theories “could be a useful approach for understanding interrogation.” He writes “the reality is that every interrogation is fundamentally an interaction between parties with different interests, and that certainly meets the initial qualification to be a negotiation.” (141) The author and Dick Walton met with individuals who had worked for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Naval Criminal Investigation Service to study interrogation techniques. “No members of our group advocated abusive interrogation techniques” although Strategic Negotiations was used “as a way of thinking about the interview process and the techniques that might be used for building a relationship and eliciting actionable information.” (142) This short account encapsulates the ethical-theoretical pitfalls of Chicago School-based ir theory and the challenge with both its decontextualized universalism and its wonky fact-value configuration.

The book concludes with reflections on the labour problem and whether management opposition to unions is rational and serves the best interests of the firm. Readers will appreciate this book as a historical work on US industrial relations theory in the 20th century. Labour scholars will find it of interest on the development of behavioral theories of labour negotiation.

Jeffrey Hilgert

Université de Montréal

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2024v93.031.