ABSTRACT
As other chapters in this thematic unit illustrate, the field of employment relations touches on a number of different intellectual traditions, but arguably economics is the largest and most imperialistic discipline to influence the field; indeed, the founding father of personnel economics claims as much (Lazear, 2000). The interchange between discipline and field 1 has a long history, which must be summarised here in the broadest terms, and with a bias towards the most fruitful forms of interchange. This bias leads to a sampling of the discipline in favour of economists who are interested in institutions and specifically those who would accept the proposition that there is a difference between employment contracts and other forms of contract. The second bias is geographical: economics has tended to be more influential for US ER academics than for those elsewhere; one author has even suggested institutional economics is ‘home turf’ for the US ER tradition (Kaufman, 2010, p. 75).
The structure of this chapter is as follows. Section 2 uses a broad historical summary of the discipline’s encounter with the field to try to explain the nature of the emerging relationship. The next three sections use arguably the three most influential concepts imported from economics to ER to illustrate the most fruitful elements of dialogue; these are, in order: incomplete contracts, collective action and voice. I will argue that all have been important to the ER field and have in turn been influential in developing economic ideas about what goes on within firms. The conclusion examines where the relationship might be going, and looks at the most proximate parts of the huge discipline of economics – personnel and organisational economics – to assess the possibility of further dialogue.
