Call for Papers
BJIR Conference 2009 in honour of Richard Hyman
New Submission deadline: 16th January 2009
BJIR [British Journal of Industrial Relations] is planning a conference and special issue in honour of Professor Richard Hyman who is retiring in 2009 after a long and distinguished career at the University of Warwick and, more recently, at the London School of Economics.
Richard has been one of the most prominent figures in British and European employment relations research for most of the past four decades. He has written extensively on trade unions, industrial conflict, and comparative industrial relations with his path-breaking Understanding European Trade Unionism: Between Market, Class, and Society (2001) bringing these career-long interests together to great effect. Yet Richard is, perhaps, best known for his theoretical contributions with much of his early writing coming from a distinctive Marxist perspective. Books such as Industrial Relations: a Marxist Introduction (1975), Social Values and Industrial Relations (1975) and The Political Economy of Industrial Relations (1989) encouraged generations of students, researchers, and activists to view the employment relationship in its wider social and political context. More recently, Richard's work has moved in new directions with greater emphasis on a more comparative and historically oriented approach to trade unions, the state and employment relations. A tireless advocate of the need for theory in an empirically driven field of study, Richard has shown how the subject of employment relations can speak directly to wider questions in the social sciences concerning power, efficiency, and social inequality.
The BJIR is calling for papers which either engage with Richard Hyman's own work or would add new value in his areas of interest. The main themes include:
(i) Labour and employment relations theory;
(ii) Comparative European and international employment relations;
(iii) Trade union organization and strategy;
(iv) Strikes and industrial conflict;
(v) The relevance of history to employment relations research;
(vi) Richard Hyman's contributions to employment relations and related fields.
A selection of papers will be chosen for presentation at a special conference to be held at the London School of Economics, in May 2009.
The papers presented at the conference will be included, subject to BJIR's refereeing process, in a special issue of the journal which will be published in 2010.
Those interested are invited to submit a one page abstract via Editorial Express [url]http://editorialexpress.com/bjir[/url] by 16th January 2009. If you wish to discuss a proposed paper then please contact Carola Frege([mailto]c.m.frege@lse.ac.uk[/mailto]) or Pat McGovern ([mailto]p.mcgovern@lse.ac.uk[/mailto]).