1. For Britain, see Price, Richard, “The Future of British Labour History,” International Review of Social History (hereafter IRSH) 36 (1991): 249–60;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the report of the Spring 1990 Conference of the Society for the Study of Labour History, entitled “The Future of Labour History?” Labour History Review 55, pt. 3 (1990):5–16. This debate started earlier in the United States. See Brody, David, “The Old Labor History and the New: In Search of an American Working Class,” Labor History 20 (Winter 1979):111–26Google Scholar, and the reply by Ozanne, Robert, “Trends in American Labor History,” Labor History 21 (Fall 1980):513–21.Google Scholar

2. As Morris, James O. asked in a letter to the editor, “What is old and what is new?” Labor History 20 (Fall 1979):625.Google Scholar

3. Kimeldorf, Howard, “Bringing Unions Back In (Or Why We Need a New Old Labor History),” Labor History 32 (Winter 1991):91–92.Google Scholar

4. Nelson, Daniel, “The Limits of Union-Centered History: Responses to Howard Kimeldorf,” Labor History 32 (Winter 1991):126.Google Scholar

5. Montgomery, David, “The Limits of Union-Centered History: Responses to Howard Kimeldorf,” Labor History 32 (Winter 1991):116.Google Scholar

6. Brody, David, “Labor History, Industrial Relations, and the Crisis of American Labor,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 43 (10 1989):11, 12–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Ibid., 17.

8. Zeitlin, Jonathan, “From Labour History to the History of Industrial Relations,” Economic History Review 2d ser., 60 (1987):178.Google Scholar

9. Zeitlin, Jonathan, “‘Rank and Filism’ in British Labour History: A Critique,” IRSH 34 (1989):42–61;Google Scholar Richard Price, “‘What's in a Name?’ Workplace History and ‘Rank and Filism,’” ibid. 62–77; James Cronin, “The ‘Rank and File’ and the Social History of the Working Class,” ibid., 78–88; Jonathan Zeitlin, “‘Rank and Filism’ and Labour History: A Rejoinder to Price and Cronin,” ibid., 89–102; Richard Hyman, “The Sound of One Hand Clapping: A Comment on the ‘Rank and Filism’ Debate,” ibid., 309–26.

10. Zeitlin, “Rejoinder,” 101–02.

11. Price, “‘What's in a Name?,’” 76.

12. Ibid., 65.

13. Cronin, “‘Rank and File,’” 84, 88.

14. Hyman, “Sound of One Hand Clapping,” 310, 321.

15. Ibid., 319.

16. Hyman, Richard, The Workers' Union (Oxford, 1971), 173.Google Scholar

17. For a more extensive critique of Zeitlin's “reconceptualization of labor history,” see Dave Lyddon, “Beyond Trade Union History,” in a forthcoming volume of essays on various aspects of historical revisionism, edited by John Saville and Marcel van der Linden.

18. Hobsbawm, has admitted that “when I became a labor historian you couldn't really be an orthodox Communist and write publicly about, say, the period when the Communist Party was active because there was an orthodox belief that everything had changed in 1920 with the founding of the CP,” in MARHO: The Radical Historians Organization, Visions of History (New York, 1983), 34.Google Scholar

19. Jefferys, James B., The Story of the Engineers (London, 1945).Google Scholar The quote on Jefferys is from Hobsbawm, E.J., “Trade Union Historiography,” Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History (hereafter BLSSH) 8 (1964):33.Google Scholar

20. Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963);Google ScholarHobsbawm, E.J., Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964).Google Scholar

21. Hobsbawm, Eric, Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1984), 171.Google Scholar

22. Hyman, Richard, The Political Economy of Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice in a Cold Climate (London, 1989), 136.Google Scholar

23. Allen, V.L., The Sociology of Industrial Relations: Studies in Method (London, 1971), 28.Google Scholar

24. Webb, Sidney and Webb, Beatrice, History of Trade Unionism (London, 1894), vii–viii.Google Scholar

25. Webb, Sidney and Webb, Beatrice, Industrial Democracy (London, 1897), v.Google Scholar

26. Diary entry October 11, 1894, quoted in Webb, Beatrice, Our Partnership, ed. Drake, B. and Cole, M. (London, 1948), 46–47.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., 44.

28. Webbs, Industrial Democracy, esp. 559–62, 595.

29. Bain, George Sayers and Clegg, H.A., “A Strategy for Industrial Relations Research in Great Britain,” British Journal of Industrial Relations (hereafter BJIR) 12 (1974):98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour, 2–5.

31. Hobsbawm, “Trade Union Historiography,” 31.

32. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour, 5.

33. Hobsbawm, “Trade Union Historiography,” 33–34.

34. Turner, H.A., Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy: A Comparative Study of the Cotton Unions (London, 1962).Google Scholar

35. Hughes, John, “Trade Union Structure and Government”, Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations, Research Paper 5, pt. 1 (London, 1967), 4 n. 2.Google Scholar

36. This problem was not confined to Britain. John Dunlop much earlier had indicted “the all too frequent approach to the development of the labor movement, in which ‘history’ and ‘theory’ are separable and non-permeable compartments.” He was particularly scathing of “the failure of theoretical apparatus” arguing in an essay first published in 1948 that “despite all the epoch-making developments in the field of labor organization in the past fifteen years, there has been virtually no contribution to the ‘theory.’” Dunlop, John T., “The Development of Labor Organization: A Theoretical Framework,” in Readings in Labor Economics and Labor Relations, 3rd ed., ed. Rowan, Richard L. (Homewood, Ill., 1976), 63.Google Scholar

37. Hobsbawm, “Trade Union Historiography,” 31–32.

38. Recent histories include Carpenter, Mick, Working for Health: The History of the Confederation of Health Service Employees (London, 1988);Google ScholarMarsh, Arthur and Ryan, Victoria, The Seamen: A History of the National Union of Seamen, 1887–1987 (Oxford, 1989);Google ScholarSlinn, Judy, Engineers in Power: 75 Years of the EPEA (London, 1989);Google ScholarGennard, John, A History of the National Graphical Association (London, 1990);Google ScholarLloyd, John, Light and Liberty: A History of the EETPU (London, 1990);Google ScholarCoates, Ken and Topham, Tony, The History of the Transport and General Workers' Union, Vol. 1: The Making of the Transport and General Workers' Union, The Emergence of the Labour Movement 1870–1922 (Oxford, 1991).Google Scholar

39. Fyrth, Jim, Labour History Review 56, pt. 1 (1991):71 (reviewing Slinn's book on the EPEA).Google Scholar

40. Samuel, Raphael, ed., Village Life and Labour (London, 1975), xv.Google Scholar

41. Clegg, H.A., Alan, Fox, and Thompson, A. F., A History of British Trade Unions since 1889: Vol. I, 1889–1910 (Oxford, 1964);Google ScholarClegg, Hugh Armstrong, A History of British Trade Unions since 1889: Vol. II, 1911–1933 (Oxford, 1984).Google Scholar

42. Briggs, Asa, “Trade-Union History and Labour History”, Business History 8 (1966):42–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. Zeitlin, Jonathan, “Trade Union History or the History of Industrial Relations?” BSSLH 51, pt. 3 (1986):36.Google Scholar

44. Flanders, Allan and Clegg, H.A., eds., The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain (Oxford, 1954), v–vi.Google Scholar

45. Allen, Sociology of Industrial Relations, 23, in an essay first published in 1959.

46. Clegg, H. A., The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain (Oxford, 1970).Google Scholar

47. Dunlop, John T., Industrial Relations Systems (New York, 1958), 13.Google Scholar

48. Flanders, Allan, Management and Unions: The Theory and Reform of Industrial Relations (London, 1975), 86.Google Scholar

49. Bain and Clegg, “Strategy for Industrial Relations Research,” 95.

50. Hyman, Richard, Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction (London, 1975), 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Hyman, Political Economy of Industrial Relations, 140 n. 20.

52. Hyman, Industrial Relations, 17.

53. Flanders, Management and Unions, 90. As Flanders notes, “shop stewards straddle both systems.”

54. Clegg, System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain, 1, 4.

55. For example, see Mathewson, Stanley B., Restriction of Output Among Unorganized Workers (New York, 1931);Google ScholarLupton, Tom, On the Shop Floor: Two Studies of Workshop Organization and Output (Oxford, 1963).Google Scholar

56. Brown, William, “A Consideration of ‘Custom and Practice,’” BJIR 10 (1972):42–61.Google Scholar The “Procedure for the Avoidance of Disputes, Manual Workers, Agreement between the Engineering Employers' Federation and the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions” of March 1, 1976, specifies “Whatever practice or agreement existed prior to the difference shall continue to operate pending a settlement or until the agreed procedure has been exhausted” (clause 5).

57. Flanders, Management and Unions, 216; Blain, A.N.J. and Gennard, John, “Industrial Relations Theory—a Critical Review,” BJIR 8 (1970):404;Google ScholarFox, Alan, “Collective Bargaining, Flanders, and the Webbs,” BJIR 13 (1975):155.Google Scholar

58. Marsh, Arthur, Industrial Relations in Engineering (Oxford, 1965), 168–69;Google Scholar also see Brown, William, Piecework Bargaining (London, 1973).Google Scholar

59. Slichter noted that “payment by time leaves an important item of the labor contract undetermined, namely, how much the worker is expected to do in a given time.” Slichter, Sumner H., Union Policies and Industrial Management (Washington, D.C., 1941), 282.Google Scholar There often is individual bargaining between time-rated employees and their supervisors about work load. The union or the work group may also seek to control the individual work load, but where the work force is scattered, or workers isolated from each other, this may be difficult.

60. See, for example, Smith, Paul and Morton, Gary, “A Change of Heart: Union Exclusion in the Provincial Newspaper Sector,” Work, Employment and Society 4 (03 1990):119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61. Blain and Gennard, “Industrial Relations Theory,” 404.

62. Flanders, Management and Unions, 94; Price, Richard, Masters, Unions and Men: Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1980), 89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63. Commons, John R., The Economics of Collective Action (New York, 1951).Google Scholar

64. Flanders, Management and Unions, 94. By renaming this “trilateral regulation,” we could arguably include voluntary incomes policy.

65. Ibid.

66. Flanders suggests that arbitration, along with other forms of third-party assistance— conciliation, mediation, and public inquiry—serves the parties “only as an auxiliary aid to their own agreements.” Ibid.; Wedderburn, Lord, The Worker and the Law, 3rd ed. (Harmondsworth, 1986), 344–47.Google Scholar

67. Hinton, James, The First Shop Stewards' Movement (London, 1973), 78.Google Scholar

68. Webbs, History of Trade Unionism, Introduction to 1911 ed., xxiii–xxiv.

69. Webbs, Industrial Democracy, 161–62, 797, 167, 169–72.

70. Bell, J.D.M., “Trade Unions,” in Flanders and Clegg, System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain, 192.Google Scholar

71. Flanders called it variously “union regulation” and “autonomous trade union regulation” in the same 1954 volume as Bell. Flanders, Allan, “Collective Bargaining,” in Flanders and Clegg, System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain, 265, 268.Google Scholar By the early 1960s the word “unilateral” was being used in British literature: thus “unilateral regulation” in Clegg, Fox, and Thompson, History of British Trade Unions, 12, and in McCarthy, W.E.J., The Closed Shop in Britain (Oxford, 1964), 95.Google Scholar

72. Chamberlain, Neil W., Collective Bargaining (New York, 1951), 35–36.Google Scholar

73. Webbs, Industrial Democracy, 804–806.

74. Turner, Trade Union Growth, 204.

75. Price, Masters, Unions and Men, 58.

76. Webbs, Industrial Democracy, 220.

77. Ibid., 178.

78. Webbs, History of Trade Unionism, 39.

79. Webbs, Industrial Democracy, 220 n. 2.

80. Cole, G.D.H., Workshop Organization (London, 1923), 23.Google Scholar In the early 1850s in the US, “some … unions allowed their members to organise a shop union for the purpose of settling minor details, stipulating, however, that the general rules of the trade union must be adhered to. … it was believed that some of the employers would be more willing to deal with their employees … than they would be to deal with the union.”Hoagland, Henry E., in Commons, John R. and associates, History of Labour in the United States, vol. 1 (New York, 1918), 585.Google Scholar

81. Hinton, Shop Stewards, 78.

82. Price, Masters, Unions and Men, 76–77, 89.

83. Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations (London, 1968), paras. 104–05Google Scholar, cited in Clegg, H. A., “The Donovan Report and Trade Union History,” BLSSH 18 (1969):13.Google Scholar

84. Clegg, System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain, 37–39.

85. Clegg, “Donovan Report,” 13.

86. Clegg, System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain, 4; Rowe, J. W. F., Wages in Practice and Theory (London, 1928), 111, 156.Google Scholar

87. Jefferys, M. and Jefferys, J. B., “The Wages, Hours and Trade Customs of the Skilled Engineer in 1861,” Economic History Review, 1st ser., 17 (1947):35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

88. Cole, G. D. H., An Introduction to Trade Unionism (London, 1953), 17–18.Google Scholar

89. Turner, Trade Union Growth, 85–89.

90. Zeitlin, “From Labour History to the History of Industrial Relations,”171.

91. Ibid., 172.

92. Webbs, Industrial Democracy, 321.

93. Ibid., 95–100.

94. Flanders, “Collective Bargaining,” 260–72; Turner, Trade Union Growth, 202–07; Rowe, Wages in Practice and Theory, 120–49.

95. Jefferys and Jefferys, “Wages, Hours and Trade Customs of the Skilled Engineer,” 33.

96. Rowe, Wages in Practice and Theory, 130.

97. Clegg, Fox, and Thompson, History of British Trade Unions, 11–12, 140; Jefferys, Story of the Engineers, 98–99.

98. But “this did not imply any strict obligation to pay that rate as a minimum.” Rowe, Wages in Practice and Theory, 130–31.

99. Clegg, Fox, and Thompson, History of British Trade Unions, 140.

100. Rowe, Wages in Practice and Theory, 135.

101. From 1867 Royal Commission evidence cited in Frow, Edmund and Katanka, Michael, eds., 1868 Year of the Unions: A Documentary Survey (London, 1969), 112–13.Google Scholar

102. Jefferys, Story of the Engineers, 100.

103. Webbs, Industrial Democracy, 291.

104. Jefferys, Story of the Engineers, 100, 137, 139; Clegg, Fox, and Thompson, History of British Trade Unions, 139–40.

105. Webbs, History of Trade Unionism, 1920 ed., 486–87.

106. Jefferys, Story of the Engineers, 156–57.

107. Cole, G. D. H., Trade Unionism and Munitions (Oxford, 1923), 46.Google Scholar

108. Sisson, Keith, The Management of Collective Bargaining: An International Comparison (Oxford, 1987), 166.Google Scholar

109. “The shop stewards' organization lost… very greatly in power immediately on the termination of the war, when the shortage of labour which had been the basis of its strength ceased to exist.… But… recognition was … a solid gain; and …collective workshop bargaining …will undoubtedly be called again into play when a favourable occasion presents itself.” Cole, Workshop Organization, 225.

110. Hinton, Shop Stewards, 225.

111. Hobsbawm, “Trade Union Historiography,” 33.

112. For example, see Hill, Stephen, “Norms, Groups and Power: The Sociology of Workplace Industrial Relations,” BJIR 12 (1974):213–35 for an important, but neglected, analytical study of work groups and rules.Google Scholar

113. Dunlop, Industrial Relations Systems, 28–32; Kerr, Clark, Dunlop, John T., Harbison, Frederick H., and Myers, Charles A., Industrialism and Industrial Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).Google Scholar

114. Dunlop, Industrial Relations Systems, 129–30.

115. For a discussion of unitarism and pluralism as management ideologies in industrial relations, see Fox, Alan, “Industrial Sociology and Industrial Relations,” Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations, Research Paper 3 (London, 1966).Google Scholar For a discussion of pluralism as “enlightened managerialism,” see Fox, Alan, “Industrial Relations: A Social Critique of Pluralist Ideology,” in Man and Organization: The Search for Explanation and Social Relevance, ed. Child, John (London, 1973), 185–223.Google Scholar

116. Brody, “Labor History, Industrial Relations, and the Crisis of American Labor,” 16.