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The past two years have seen considerable changes in the organisation of the Industrial Relations Research Unit (IRRU) at the University of Warwick as well as its personnel. It is now a Designated Research Centre (DRC) for which the university is responsible, as opposed to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The unit now comprises members of the DRC and of the industrial relations teaching staff of the school. An overview of the main research projects being undertaken during the first phase of the eight‐year term of the DRC is given. These can be divided into three broad areas: those concerned with managing industrial relations; trade unions and collective bargaining; and the law and industrial relations. Some of the thinking behind these projects is given. It is argued that continuity is as important as change in the work of the unit, in particular in the value placed on theoretical developments and interdisciplinary research. There is no reason why new areas of investigation cannot be accommodated within additional definitions of industrial relations

Based on the 1991 Shirley Lerner Memorial Lecture, a discussion is conducted of the challenges and opportunities facing teachers and researchers arising from the rapidly changing practice of industrial relations. A widening of the scope of the subject, to include its individual as well as collective aspects, it is argued, is fully compatible with seeing the main focus as the employment relationship. The challenge to the subject′s research tradition of empirical enquiry, multi‐disciplinarity and above all, its integrity, is much more fundamental. Maintaining this tradition is not only vital for industrial relations, but also for the future direction of the business schools in which most industrial relations teachers and researchers find themselves.

There appears to be some doubt about the future direction of both the theory and the practice of employment relations. This article therefore speculates about the prospects of the “new” European social model becoming the orthodoxy in the field. This model, which has strong similarities with the UK’s “partnership” agreements, stands up very well to many of the criticisms levelled at the “HRM” paradigm that was the most recent contender. The plausibility of the “new” model is in doubt, however, given the prevailing economic and political context in the UK and other EU countries. Even so, if people are looking for a dominant focus for analysis and policy, this “new” model has much to recommend. In particular, it is especially relevant to handling the implications of the restructuring likely to be the main concern for the foreseeable future.

After a degree of retrenchment in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the late 1980s has brought a burst of enthusiasm and almost frenzied activity on the management education and development front. Consultants specialising in management development activities appear to be flourishing. The private sector management colleges offering “executive programmes” are enjoying a boom period. The MBA, having survived a period of intense scrutiny and criticisms earlier in the decade, appears to be going from strength to strength; scarcely a day goes by without an announcement by a university or polytechnic that it is launching a new MBA or a variant of an existing programme.

Industrial relations have attracted massive attention during the 1980s. Major pieces of legislation have changed the law on the conduct of disputes, the use of the closed shop, and the internal operation of trade unions. Employers have been making efforts to change working practices, and hardly a day goes by without the advocacy of some new policy, be it quality circles, profit‐related pay, or use of multi skilled craft workers. In addition to reacting to legal and employer‐led changes, trade unions have had to respond to declining membership and to conduct internal debates on such novel topics as single‐ union and no‐strike deals.

Interest in management development is mushrooming. The number of articles which address different aspects of it are likewise increasing apace. This has heightened the need for a broad‐based review which will pull the material together, give shape to it, evaluate it and draw out its implications. In this, the first of a two‐part article, this task is commenced.

Surveys based on standard questionnaires have long been a major research tool of the social scientist. The great majority have focused on one type of respondent — the workers of a given firm, the voters in a particular constituency, or whatever. For one sort of survey, namely, those that seek to know about the individuals in question, this is plainly sensible. But another sort of survey uses a respondent to provide information about the organisation for which he/she can be taken to be an authoritative informant. Questionnaires sent to the head offices of companies or unions and asking about the organisation's policy are a good example. How do we know whether the replies are in some sense representative of the organisation or are just the views of the respondent chosen?

Over the last decade, writings on the personnel profession have been pervaded by a sense of exclusion from the major management decisions. For example, Hunt and Lees report that human assets are rarely considered in decisions on company acquisition policy and that personnel managers are only involved in relatively peripheral aspects, such as the transfer of pension rights. Daniel found that personnel managers are normally excluded from decisions on re‐organisation which follow the introduction of new technology, although they are sometimes involved in other forms of organisational change. In fact even this latter involvement may be of a fairly passive character in view of Evans and Cowling's finding that personnel managers do not usually take an executive role in company re‐organisation.

There are few social phenomena which have as significant effects on our lives in industrial societies as the management of firms. Despite this the empirical study of management is still an underdeveloped area of social scientific research. Though very much has been written about management it can still be argued that very little is known about it as a social practice in concrete historically specified contexts. Such a state of the art is mainly due to the fact that there has been a tendency to take the individual manager as the unit of analysis and abstract away from the historical, organisational and wider institutional context of managers and managing (Willmott 1984; 1987). By emphasising abstract‐general and universalistic determinations of managers and managing, most traditions of management research have missed crucial aspects of the nature of these phenomena. The problems to be solved by managers in firms and in the wide societal environment are, however, both varied and historically specific. The types of knowledge and skills required of managers are highly specific and related to particularistic objects of work (cf. Whitley 1988). In addition, success on the part of management is very much dependent on the right timing of their interventions.