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Book Review
| Diana Kelly (ed.), Researching Industrial Relations, 2nd edition, Federation Press, Leichhardt, NSW, 1999. pp. xii + 201. $27.50 paper.
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| The second edition of this text, published in 1999, was clearly targeted at students and new-ish researchers attempting to develop and manage research studies within the world of work. The collection successfully achieves its aims and objectives, providing an accessible source of material for guiding and informing the development and operation of industrial relations research. |
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The extremely popular first edition of this text was published by ACIRRT in 1991 in an attempt to address a gap in existing research methodology literature discovered in a national review of research courses and programs offered in the disciplines of management, politics, economics, and business schools. Both the first and the second editions, edited by Di Kelly, addressed this lack of literature on the range of research methods utilised by those studying and researching the world of work, specifically in the discipline of industrial relations. |
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This edition was published in 1999, again as an edited collection, with improvements on the original edition. The contributors were all senior industrial relations and labour law academics from a range of institutions including University of Wollongong, Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, NSW, and Western Australia, and the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training (ACIRRT), the independent multi-disciplinary workplace research group based at the University of Sydney. |
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The contents of the second edition essentially fall into three categories. The first is a brief introduction to the scholarship and debate of methods and methodology in industrial relations research, within the broader context of social science research. The focus is primarily on the inductive qualitative approach so often favoured by researchers in industrial relations, however, there is an interesting inclusion of a chapter which discusses the benefits and challenges of research using multi-method approaches. |
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The second category, and the main focus of the body of the text, is a pragmatic approach to tackling a research project and/or thesis. The organisation of this is based around individual chapters on developing and implementing research strategy and design. This collection includes a series of 'how to' and/or specific research method chapters including: conducting a literature review, analysing documents, developing and utilising a case study approach, interviewing, observation and ethnography. The third and final category in the text includes a limited number of chapters on writing up the thesis and some guidelines for commissioned report writing. |
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The main strength of the edited collection is its strong focus on the 'how to' and guidelines for walking early stage researchers through the development of research strategy and design, research methods, and writing up research theses or reports. The authors of each of the individual chapters strike a balance between simplified and accessible explanation of the complexities of industrial relations research and integrity and rigorous explanation of research methodology |
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The two main weaknesses of the collection and perhaps the case with the majority of research conducted using an inductive qualitative framework, as is the case with industrial relations research, is the lack of discussion with respect to data analysis and the limited discussion of the debates of research methodology generally. On the latter issue there is an existing body of references which address these debates in more detail, for instance, Whitfield and Strauss (eds), 1998 edition of Researching the World of Work (ILR Press, Ithaca, 1998). On the former, while the collection includes a chapter on document analysis, there is little discussion of the various data analysis techniques which may be utilised in research studies using the case study approach, or of the various software programs which may assist the researcher in analysing the myriad of data accessed and collected when engaged in case study research. Irrespective of these minor weaknesses, the text is an excellent guide for the novice researcher in industrial relations, as well as a useful tool for more experienced researchers who can use it as a supplementary reference to maintain the rigour of their research. I would recommend this book as a welcome addition and minimum standard for all industrial relations researchers. |
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| Australian National University |
NADINE WHITE | |
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