Introduction

In the UK, the scholarly disciplines of industrial relations (IR) and labour law have common roots, above all, in the pioneering work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Since the 1980s, the field, or fields, of study have been transformed, in part, by complex and partially intertwined processes of ‘juridification’ and human resource (HR) managerialization. Notwithstanding the shared heritage of labour law and IR, deepening disciplinary silos have meant that these processes have been studied, for the most part, in isolation from one another. Today, the ‘fissuring’ and precarization of work suggests the need for a sociology, or economic sociology, of labour law that would bring together empirical study and normative legal reasoning to identify the kind of law that might help to create more secure and equitable working relations in a wide variety of work settings.

Intertwined roots, forking branches

Sidney and Beatrice Webb are often cited as the founders of the field of IR (Kaufman, 2014). As part of IR's ‘pre-history’ (Voskiterian, 2010: 9), the Webbs provided a detailed account of the emergence and development of trade unionism, in which they identified a very significant role in the struggle for working-class emancipation for the ‘method of legal enactment’ – in combination with the methods of mutual insurance and collective bargaining (Webb and Webb, 1897). They also proposed a sophisticated understanding of collective bargaining as creating a kind of ‘Magna Carta’ for industry, performing an analogous function to political constitutions, namely, limiting the otherwise absolute power of the sovereign, or employer, and establishing democratic decision-making procedures instead. From the Webbs, scholars of IR and labour law alike inherited a shared conception of IR institutions, including law, as ‘context specific’, changing over time and assuming different forms in different locations (Flanders and Clegg, 1954a). Institutions were understood to be shaped, above all, by class conflict and power disparities, and by other features of the wider political economy. The dominant tradition in IR, as represented by the Oxford School, was oriented towards policy making and placed particular emphasis on the discovery of practically useful knowledge through the application of empirical and comparative methods, in preference to abstract, grand theory (Ackers and Wilkinson, 2005).