Solution:Dunlop's (1958) seminal work, Industrial Relations Systems, is a useful heuristic model for classifying, analysing and comparing the parties, processes, contexts and outcomes of contemporary employment relations. His study has clarity of purpose and provides a robust focus of the field.
Despite its critics, Dunlop's systems perspective, or systems theory, is rooted in a rigorous and longestablished framework and point of departure for studying what he calls 'industrial relations' but what.in this text are described as employment relationships and employment relations, in their many faces and complexities.
In essence, systems theory is a cross-sectional model of employment relations which has high utility as a framework of analysis and critical evaluation in this interdisciplinary field of study. Dunlop begins by arguing that any industrial state, regardless of its politics, has managers and workers.
These societies, whether capitalist or socialist, create industrial relations, defined as the 'complex of interrelations among managers, workers, and agencies of government'. The central purposes of his work are to present a general theory of the subject, use the tools introduced to illuminate specific industrial relations experiences, and propose the collection of new facts and studies in the field.
For Dunloр, an industrial relations system is not part of the economic or political systems but a separate and distinctive sub-system of its own, partially overlapping the economic and political domains or the political economy, with which it interacts. Industrial relations then becomes a specialist field of study in its own right.
For him, the essence of an industrial relations system is that it comprises certain actors, contexts, an ideology, 'and a body of rules created to govern the actors at the work place and work community'. Industrial relations systems may be analysed at workplace, enterprise, sector or countrywide levels.
In Dunlop's analysis, an industrial relations system has three sets of inputs or independent variables: the actors, its contexts and an ideology. There are, in turn, three sets of actors and three environmental contexts.
The three sets of actors are a hierarchy of managers and their representatives, a hierarchy of workers and their organisations and government or private agencies dealing with employment relations issues.
The three environmental contexts of an industrial relations system are the technological characteristics of the workplace, the market or budgetary constraints impinging on the actors, and the locus or distribution of power in the wider society.
The latter is important because the relative distribution of power in society tends to be reflected within the employment relations system. The distribution of power is likely to influence the state's specialist industrial relations agencies and helps explain differences between national systems in various countries.
The third input to the system, its ideology, is the set of common ideas and beliefs held by the actors which binds the system together. For Dunlop, the outputs or dependent variables of an industrial relations system are the network or web of rules created within it.
These rules govern relations among the actors and their conduct at the workplace. Establishing this web of rules 'is the center of attention' in industrial relations. These rules take a variety of forms in different systems and include 'agreements, statutes, orders, decrees, regulations, awards, policies, and practices and customs'.
For him, the central task of a theory of industrial relations is to explain why particular rules are established in specific systems 'and bow and why they change in response to changes affecting the system'.
The network of industrial relations rules consists of the procedures for establishing the rules, the substantive rules of employer-émployee engagement and the procedures for deciding their application to particular situations. These rules may be custom and practice, oral or written.
The processes or procedures used to make the rules, in turn, may be determined unilaterally by any of the actors, jointly between them, by law and by arbitrators or conciliators.
