Paternalism Under Attack:Changing Industrial Relations in Universities Available to Purchase

A few years ago, at an SSRC‐sponsored conference on the management function in industrial relations, a contributor analysing the industrial relations of six separate establishments, one of which was a merchant bank, was asked, “Do Merchant Banks have industrial relations?” The same question could be asked of universities, and the answer given today would be fundamentally different than if the question had been posed 20 or even ten years ago. Following the extrapolation of the Robbins principle, universities in the late 1960s and 1970s went through an un‐paralleled explosion with jobs, promotions and salaries (the latter subject to moral pressure) all in the ascendancy. The renunciation of Robbins has reversed these trends and, as all students of German industrial relations know, growth equates with good and recession with bad industrial relations (taking for the moment the superficial media definitions). In the case of universities it has been not so much the change to bad industrial relations as the emergence of industrial relations itself.