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This chapter reviews the institutional development of employment research in the US, Britain, and Germany. It discusses symptoms of the current academic crisis in the study of work and employment and the written attempts to explain these developments. Most studies discuss the status of employment research in a single country (the US) and essentially describe but not further analyse indicators of the crisis and problems of the field. This book contributes to the evolving debate by enlarging the comparative perspective towards non-Anglophone countries such as those of continental Europe. More importantly, rather than focusing on the symptoms of this crisis, the book's historical approach allows us to go a step further and to examine the underlying path dependencies of research patterns across various countries.

This chapter investigates the existence of national research patterns on the basis of a comparative study of research outputs prominent employment journals in the US, Britain, and Germany. It poses the question as to how the problems that employment scholars consider to be important are determined in each country, and which techniques they employ to seek deeper understanding of their subject matter. How does research formulate questions, structure discourse, and evaluate arguments and evidence in each country? What are the main paradigms in each scientific community? Finally, to what extent do economic globalization and the internationalization of academic interactions have an impact on the various national research styles? Despite the increasing convergence of employment institutions and practices throughout the advanced industrialized world and despite the increasing international communication and interaction among the research communities, this survey finds that distinctive national research patterns remain in Employment Relations, which seem astonishingly resistant to the processes of universalization or modernization. These enduring cross-country variations suggest that the current crisis is mainly shaped by specific methodological and epistemological research characteristics, which are not necessarily universal or inevitable, but rather specific to the Anglophone, in particular US, context.

This chapter introduces the argument and structure of the book. Since its heyday of the 1950s/60s Employment Relations as an academic field has increasingly been facing a crisis (e.g., declining number of programmes and students), which in recent years has provoked a small, though rather eclectic discussion on its constitution and future, in particular in the US. The crisis has been related to the steady decline of trade unions and collective bargaining in most advanced industrialized countries during the last two decades. The book takes the current critical situation of Employment Relations as an opportunity to reflect upon knowledge creation in the area of work and employment from a comparative perspective. It compares employment research in the US, Britain, and Germany and traces its scholarly origins during the 19th century. The core thesis is that employment research is deeply embedded in longstanding country-specific institutional and intellectual traditions. The book explores why and how the field of study developed differently in different countries and what implications can be drawn from this for the future of the field of study.

This chapter summarises the book’s main empirical findings and theoretical implications. A core finding is that how research on work and employment was embedded in the political culture of a specific country during the 19th century is fundamental to the understanding of longstanding cross-national differences of employment research. The formation of social sciences during the 19th century coincided with transformations of the nation states, which in turn depended on the new discursive understanding of state and society. It makes sense therefore that scientific areas such as Employment Relations, which were closely connected to the advent of market economies and political democracies, became strongly embedded in country-specific state traditions. These different political legacies have major implications for the future of the academic field of Employment Relations. This book advocates that the de-politicization of employment research, in particular in Anglophone countries, may be disadvantageous in the long run. Reclaiming a political, thus policy-oriented, notion of the study of work and employment may be a risky but potentially necessary strategy for the future of the field.

This chapter provides a theoretical framework to analyse the ‘cultural embeddedness’ of national research patterns and its implications for the future of employment research. The underlying theoretical assumption is that employment research, as any other social science, is not just determined by its subject matter (e.g., employment institutions and practices) but is socially constructed. The book emphasizes that social science disciplines or fields of study are not universal or determined by an invisible scientific law but shaped by specific socio-historical contexts. Thus, this book perceives social sciences as being continuously re-invented by strategic (academic) actors and structural conditions which are influenced by cultural legacies. In particular, the longitudinal perspective of this book allows us to analyse how preexisting social, political, and intellectual conditions of the 19th century shaped the emergent national traditions of employment research and its academic organization. The trajectories or path dependencies of employment research, which arguably still have an impact on research today, will be discussed on the basis of three different dimensions, substantive, institutional, and ideational: the subject field of academic inquiry (labour movement histories); scientific knowledge institutions (social science traditions); and the underlying intellectual traditions (industrial democracy discourse).

This chapter examines the histories of the subject field, which originate in the beginnings of industrialization and democratization during the 19th century in each country. It argues that employment research has been shaped by the development of its subject, employment institutions and regulations, and in particular by the different histories of trade unions in each country and their relationship to the state.

This chapter explores the ideational embeddedness of employment research in country-specific intellectual traditions, which developed throughout the late 18th century and the 19th century. The focus here is placed on the national discourses on political and industrial democracy, thus on the ideational relationship between state, democracy and economy. It is particularly these discourses that shaped the developing paradigms of employment research.

This chapter explores the broader context of scientific knowledge institutions and social science traditions in the three countries, which originate in the 19th century and were shaped by different state policies on higher education and scientific research. These scientific traditions matter, in particular, when seeking explanations for cross-national methodological and epistemological differences in employment studies.