Bruce Kaufman provides a detailed exploration of the historical development of the field of industrial relations. He identifies two distinct schools of thought evident since the field's origins in the 1920s, one centered in the study of personnel management and the other in the study of institutional labor economics. The two schools advocate contrasting approaches to the resolution of labor problems. Kaufman traces their development from a golden age in the 1950s through a period of gradual decline that accelerated in the 1980s. He contends that, in the process, the field narrowed from a broad-based consideration of the employment relationship to a more limited focus on collective bargaining.

This book, the first on industrial relations research methods, comes at a time when the field of industrial relations is in flux and research strategy has become more complex and varied. Research that once focused on the relationship between labor and management now involves a wider range of issues. This change has raised a number of key questions about how research should be done.The contributors represent four countries and a range of fields, including economics, sociology, psychology, law, history, and industrial relations. They identify distinctive research strategies and suggest approaches that might be appropriate in the future. Among their concerns are the relative value of qualitative and quantitative methods, of using primary and secondary data, and of single versus multimethod techniques.

The first all-primary source reader in labor history published in nearly one hundred years, The Voice of the People presents excerpts from fifty-four primary sources to blend labor history’s traditional focus on the growth of a union movement with windows into all aspects of workers lives—their workplaces, their unions, their home lives and their culture—the engaging selections mirroring the great diversity of the American workforce from the colonial era to the present. Arranged into four parts, each of which begins with an original overview of the corresponding period in American history, this unique compilation of edited documents—each of which is preceded by a contextual introduction—offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves how specific events as well as general trends in American labor history affected real people, whether farm laborers, slaves, servants, mill hands, prostitutes, assembly-line workers, office temps, fast-food employees, or union leaders. While its organization and diverse range make it an excellent companion to Harlan Davidson’s popular Labor in America,* The Voice of the People can also stand alone or be used as an engaging supplement for any course in labor or United States history.

This book owes its inception and much of its organization to the writer's experience in teaching a course on "Industrial Sociology" for several years at The Pennsylvania State College. In bringing together materials for that course it became evident that modern industry has rarely been viewed as a complex social organization and pattern of relations; and in the few outstanding cases that such a view has been taken the "internal" structure of industry has not been set within the society with which it is in constant interaction. Despite numerous guides and handbooks for selecting employees or conducting industrial relations, as well as numerous texts on the formal structure of industrial management and the history of labor organizations, the functioning of the structure as a whole has received scant attention. It is this latter point of view that is emphasized in the present treatment. It is intended less to supplant than to supplement the various "standard" treatments of industrial organization and industrial relations. The view that prompts this work is that the social aspects of modern industrial organization are of the most practical sort. They are as real, and their effects as crucial, as the engineer's equations and the accountant's ledgers. The presentation has been made as compact as clarity and the range of subject-matter seemed to allow. This has been done in the interests of busy industrial and union executives and informed laymen who may find the book useful, as well as of students who must encompass many specialties and hope for a useful integration. Social scientists may find the book a suggestive summary of scattered materials. An unusually extensive list of references is appended to each chapter, in which as in the text an attempt is made to bridge fields too rarely brought together.