Introduction

The field of industrial relations does not have a unified grand theory, and attempts to build it have never had a lasting success. As a social science field of study, it draws on theoretical paradigms from different disciplines to frame theoretical statements on the meanings, causes and effects of the processes it studies. The frequent statement that it suffers from atheoretical empiricism is unwarranted: theoretical articles and books are among the most cited in industrial relations journals, yet theory in industrial relations often remains implicit.

This reflection takes the form of a journey through the main theoretical contributions that have appeared on the idea of crisis as the focal point of the ‘labour problem’ notion at the centre of the field of industrial relations. The raison d’être of industrial relations comes from the indeterminacy and antagonism inherent to the employment relationship, which make existing disciplines (economics, psychology, law and so on) unable to fully conceptualize it. The ‘labour problem’ has emerged most sharply in the phenomenon of ‘crisis’, not only as a social crisis of order and inequality but also as a political and economic crisis. Not all industrial relations theorizing is directly about crisis, but even that about order exists in the shadow of the possibility or memory of crisis, as in the idea that a functioning industrial relations system should regulate industrial conflict in a well-ordered way. This journey will therefore follow the various crises of capitalism as the milestones of theoretical reflection about work.

Economic crisis and industrial relations theory

The history of capitalism has been a history of crises, even if some extended periods of growth, such as the Fordist/Keynesian postwar decades, had given the impression that the risk of crisis had been forever removed. From the beginning, as can be seen in Marx's works between the 1850s and 1860s, it has been difficult to distinguish between (cyclical) ‘capitalist crises’ and ‘the capitalist crisis’. Following, approximately, the Kondratieff waves, the most remarkable financial crises in the capitalist era have been those of 1847, 1893, 1929, 1973 and 2008 – followed by the ‘exogenous’ crisis of 2020. All of these moments have marked social thought about work, at the same time as they led to deep political change.