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Fredrik Pontussons översättningar och språkgranskningar |
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Översättningssamarbete med professor emiritus Nils Elvander, referensperson för arbetet professor/chefredaktör Eskil Ekstedt (eskil.ekstedt@ekhist.uu.se)
Nils Elvander
Industrial Relations -A Short History of Ideas and Learning
Arbetsliv i omvandling 2002:3 ISBN 91-7045-631-3 | ISSN 1404-8426
Introduction
Industrial relations (or labour market relations) emerged as a multi-disciplinary field of research in Great Britain and the USA about one hundred years ago. However, it took nearly half a century for research and teaching within this broad field to really gain momentum. As a distinct academic discipline, industrial relations (IR) is primarily an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. It is only since World War II that a corresponding multi-disciplinary treatment of the complex of problems pertaining to the employment relationship, albeit under different labels and in other organizational forms, has emerged in continental Europe as well as Scandinavia and Japan. It is useful to put the development of ideas in the IR field into a larger context than the purely academic one. The key figures in this development have themselves often regarded research and teaching in IR as part of a comprehensive project of reform dealing with the labour market of industrial society, and their theoretical thinking has been inspired by their own practi-cal experiences of such projects of reform and work as mediators in labour disputes. We discover the main characteristics of the development of ideas and analyse the interaction between theory and practice by studying how some key figures – as, for example, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and their successors in Great Britain, as well as the pioneers John R. Commons and John T. Dunlop in the USA - perceived the relationship between labour and management, the structure and functions of unions, the labour market organizations’ relationship to the government, etc. This ought to be supplemented by studying the institutional development of the IR field, primarily in Great Britain and the USA, but also, to some extent, in other countries and inter-nationally. How did the field of study evolve? How did the relationship to the disciplines in which the IR scholars were initially trained and other adjacent disciplines evolve? How did the professional organization of associations and journals, nationally and internationally, come about? What about theory formation in IR research? The first part of this book deals with the emergence and development of the IR field in Great Britain - from the pioneering Webbs in the 1890s right up to the present day, with an emphasis on the diversified activities at the leading British IR Department at the University of Warwick in Coventry. In the second part, the corresponding development in the USA will be described. Finally, I wish to round off the survey with an outline of the conditions in some other countries, including Sweden, focusing on the contemporary situation and an account of professional activities at the international level. A discussion of the problems of theory building within the large multi-disciplinary IR domain will also be included.
I. From the Webbs to Warwick
The Webbs
The 1880s in Great Britain was a period of economic depression and political unrest. In spite of mass unemployment, the labour market was disturbed by big strikes, which were protests against poverty, low wages, and miserable working conditions. In connection with a couple of spectacular and successful strikes in London in 1889, newly created, large unions for unskilled workers challenged the old trade-union movement, which ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth-century had been based exclusively on the principle of craft unionism with some connection with the guild system. Socialist and anarchist groups provided more or less utopian solutions to the problems in society, at the same time as the introduction of equal voting rights for men in 1885 made a democratic and reformist strategy for the growing working class movement possible. Formed in London in 1884 by a group of intellectuals of middle-class background1, the Fabian Society became the principal proponent of demo-cratic reformism. Belonging to the first generation of Fabians were brilliant personalities, such as the dramatist Georg Bernard Shaw - alongside the Webbs the most diligent writer of pamphlets furthering adult education and lectures on socialism and many other things - the historian Graham Wallas, the agitator Annie Bessant, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb (McBriar 1962). Beatrice Potter was born in 1858 as the ninth daughter of a well-to-do, liberally-minded businessman. In the 1880s, she started on her own to study economics and sociology, a brand-new field of study, at the same time as her charity work in the slum districts of London’s East End developed into a form of sociological field work. Among other things, her work resulted in a book about the British co-operative movement (Potter 1891) - the first one of its kind - and a major study of the history of British the trade-union movement, which she initiated and subsequently carried out together with the man who became her colleague and husband in the early 1890s. Coming from plain conditions, Sidney Webb (1859-1947) worked his way up to the rank of a civil servant at the Ministry of Colonial Affairs by way of private studies and degrees in social science and law at the University of London. He resigned from this position so as to devote himself full time to research, political reform work at the municipal level, and socialist agitation. Even though the partnership of Sidney and Beatrice Webb lasted for half a century, it was only in the 1890s that it directly concerned industrial relations (B. Webb 1946). The result was two major pieces of pioneering work: The History of Trade Unionism (1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897). It is especially the latter book that is the basis for Sidney and Beatrice Webbs reputation as “the father and mother of Industrial Relations” (Kaufman 1993, p 213). The book on the history of the British trade-union movement is based on enormously extensive research of primary source materials, collected mainly from the unions in the bigger industrial cities. It is not only a question of written sources, but also information obtained by means of such modern methods as participatory observations of union meetings at various levels and interviews with representatives of unions as well as employers. Questions of methodology are discussed in detail in the preface to Industrial Democracy. With her experience of sociological field work, Beatrice appears to have been the one chiefly responsible for collecting the source materials, while Sidney usually did the writing. The prose style in this their first collectively written book is intelligible, dry and immensely rich in concrete facts, as is the text of Industrial Democracy. Many pages were written on the British trade-union movement up to the turn of the century, a total of nearly 1, 400. At times, Beatrice herself felt that both books were “unreadable”. If it it were not for Bernard Shaw stepping in, with his usual energy, at an early stage in the editing, she would probably have been even more concerned (Seymour-Jones 1990, p 229-232; B. Webb 1946, p 36). In The History of Trade Unionism, the development of the trade-union movement is described, in a well-balanced way, as resulting from the interaction of economic forces, political and judicial decisions and changing union strategies - from the period of its establishment and the subsequent period of proclamation of its illegality, the political repression of 1799-1825, up to the full emergence of “the new trade unionism” around 1890. Having provided this descriptive account of the “natural history” of the British unions, Sidney and Beatrice Webb took on the task of systematically and theoretically analysing that same material, resulting in a book truly deserving the label of a classic: Industrial Democracy is both a document of that time and in its central parts a surprisingly modern text of contemporary relevance. |
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Fredrik Pontussons översättningar och språkgranskningar |
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,Det är inte bara idiomatiska översättningar till modersmålet svenska som kan levereras, utan även till engelska.
Detta tack vare samarbete med engelskspråkiga samhällsvetare. |
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