Date and Time: Wednesday 06 November 2024, 12:30 – 14:00 (light buffet lunch from 12:00)
Speaker: Peter Ackers, Emeritus Professor in the History of Industrial Relations, Loughborough University
Title: Trade Unions & the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg.
Abstract: Hugh Clegg introduced academic Industrial Relations to the new Warwick University from the late 1960s, leading to the formation of an SSRC-funded Industrial Relations Research Unit (IRRU). He was also a founding Professor of what became Warwick Business School. Clegg was a central figure of post-war British Industrial Relations, the forerunner of Employment Relations and Human Resource Management, as taught in most Business Schools today. He defined ‘industrial democracy’ as collective bargaining with trade unions, laid the foundations for the pluralist approach to Industrial Relations, was a key figure in the post-war social sciences and a major public policy player. More widely, he was an important figure in the Cold War social democratic academic left, who broke with his earlier Communism to champion free trade unions in a liberal democratic society. He also produced the major Oxford University Press trade union history. This book aims to understand the politics and industrial relations of the post-war period in Britain (in which trade unions were central) through the life of a key public intellectual. It will help readers understand the political and social science roots of contemporary Employment Relations and Human Resource Management through a deep historical study of Clegg’s life and times, in the context of his post-war social democratic generation. It illustrates how the failures of post-war industrial relations led to Thatcherism.
Biography: Peter Ackers is Emeritus Professor in the History of Industrial Relations, Loughborough University. His research bridges contemporary social science and historical approaches to work and employment relations. On the contemporary HRM side, he has published widely on Employee Involvement, Voice and union-management Partnership, leading to the co-edited collection: Johnstone & Ackers, Finding a Voice at Work? New Perspectives on Employment Relations, Oxford University Press, 2015. He is also a Labour Historian, with an interest in Christian Nonconformity, who co-edited, Ackers & Reid, Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave, 2016. Combining these two strands is Peter’s research on the history of British Industrial Relations, as both a practical public arena and an academic social science field. A particular interest is the development of pluralist and social democratic ideas, culminating in his Trade Unions & the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg, Routledge 2024.
The seminar title is that of my new book (link below). If readers click this link and PREVIEW BOOK they can read the Introduction & an early chapter.
Trade Unions & the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg, Routledge 2024
https://www.routledge.com/
Location: The seminar will be hybrid (In-person at WBS and Online via Zoom). Please email Louise Cullen (irruoffice@wbs.ac.uk) if you are attending in-person (for security purposes and entry in the WBS building).