Researching the World of Work: Strategies and Methods in Studying Industrial Relations

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.

Keith Whitfield, Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff Business School, University of Wales, is the author, most recently, of The Market for Training. George Strauss, Emeritus Professor at the School of Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director Emeritus of its Institute of Industrial Relations, is former president of the Industrial Relations Research Association.