REFLECTIONSONTHEHIGHPERFORMANCEPARADIGMSIMPLICATIONSFORINDUSTRIALRELATIONSASAFIELD教程.docVIP

REFLECTIONS ON THE HIGH PERFORMANCE PARADIGMS IMPLICATIONS FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS AS A FIELD JOHN GODARD and JOHN T. DELANEY* Over the past decade, several leading U.S. scholars have advanced a new industrial relations paradigm, according to which high performance work and human resource management (HRM) practices have replaced unions and collective bargaining as the innovative force in industrial relations. Although this model fundamentally challenges the traditional focus of the field of industrial relations in the United States, research on it has centered on the diffusion and performance effects of HRM innovations, with surprisingly little systematic reflection on either the underlying tenets of the new paradigm or its implications for the future of the field. Drawing on work of British and U.S. scholars, the authors identify critical aspects of the literature on this subject that deserve careful scrutiny, and suggest several criteria (such as industrial democracy) that need to be used in addition to measures of firm performance in evaluating the new paradigm. The field of industrial relations (IR) in the United States is at a crossroads. The decline of unions and collapse of the New Deal system of IR have blurred the fields focus. Over the past decade, however, one new paradigm has received considerable attention. According to this paradigm, new work and human resource management (HRM) practices have replaced unions and collective bargaining as the core innovative force in IR. Such practices have been promoted as the wave of the future on the grounds that, in combination, they have positive effects on performance (Kochan and Osterman 1994; Pfeffer 1994, 1998; Levine 1995; Ichniowski et al. 1996). Positive performance effects arise in part from the creation of more cooperative labor-management relations, which induce employees to work harder and share ideas in the pursuit of mutual gains with employers. As the new paradigm has gained acceptance, it has stimula