In many ways Australian industrial relations appear to have stabilised during the 2000s. Apart from legislative change in a couple of states, the dramatic pace of legal reform has slowed and the intensity of public debate that was so evident in the 1980s and 1990s has eased, while strike activity continues to reach new lows. Industrial relations are not front-page news.

This apparent stability, however, masks profound changes that are evolving under the surface. Any comparison of the practice of industrial relations in 2004 with that just 10 or 15 years ago reveals the transformation. Apart from the significant changes to the legal framework, the decline in union membership and union power has paralleled the rise of employer hostility towards unionism and new managerial activism. The dominance of traditional regulatory instruments has eroded to be replaced by the new—awards have narrowed in scope and their importance is diminished, collective agreements between unions and employers at an enterprise level have acquired a new prominence, non-union collective agreements have emerged for the first time, individual contracts in their various guises have blossomed and managerial prerogative has been reasserted. The results are frequently higher productivity and efficiency, but also greater wage disparity, job insecurity and work intensification.

Reflecting the new reality of industrial relations, the academic field has also changed and this third edition of Industrial Relations: A Contemporary Approach clearly demonstrates these changes. Indeed, the earlier editions of this book and its predecessor, which was first published in 1980 as Australian Industrial Relations, provide a fine record of a field of study in transition. Apart from a thorough updating of all remaining chapters, a new format and far more extensive student support materials, this new edition boasts several features that reflect the times in which it was written:

The new Chapter 1 seeks to more clearly articulate the values and concepts that underlie the contemporary analysis contained in the book. It also compares this approach, which we call ‘pluralist neo-institutionalism’, with alternative analyses of the employment relationship.

New Chapters 6 and 7 explore union and non-union forms of employee representation respectively. In line with the approach we advocate in Chapter 1, the aim of these chapters is to analyse the ways that employees participate in the process of regulating the employment relationship, whether they involve conventional mechanisms like trade unions or non-union channels that have gained greater purchase in recent years.

The new Chapter 8 seeks to locate the current ‘enterprise bargaining’ system in a broader theoretical and historical framework of ‘bargaining structures and processes’. This means that we discuss in some depth managerial prerogative, individual contracting and award making as well as collective bargaining, as well as the changing combinations of these regulatory processes.

The heavily revised Chapters 9 and 10 continue the trend towards studying the patterns of cooperation as well as conflict and the efficiency and equity outcomes of industrial relations processes.

We hope that these innovations serve to capture the changing character of our field, while we have endeavoured to retain and build upon the strengths of earlier editions that have been well received by teachers and students alike.

Mark Bray
Stephen Deery
Janet Walsh
Peter Waring