Using abductive reasoning to develop an IR theoretical framework for China’s context is not easy, not only because Chinese society is now highly complex and heterogenous, but also scholars’ varied foci across disciplines have created isolated paradigms. Such splintered voices, whilst they sometimes are in agreement, by failing to work in a collaborative way have been unable to reach a consensus on the changing reality regarding labour management as a result of the social-political transformation of the state. Even in relation to the state sector, the Party-state’s economic stronghold, understanding the social and political meaning the hybrid status resulting SOEs’ managerial fusion of the communist legacy and western ways has been neglected. When political scientists have attempted to explore the underlying pattern of the CCP led governance and its meaning for China’ modernisation, labour management researchers have failed to borrow this kind of wisdom into their own analytical framework, thus leaving a tremendous gap between the understandings of how the Party-state works and knowledge
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about specific firm-level managing approaches adopted by Party-state led enterprises.Since the very essence of abductive reasoning is to create “good” assumptions or a priori constructs in order to guide inquiry with paradigmatic integration, the conceptual framework, in which the inquiring foci are to be rooted, needs to be built on the grounds that: 1) it will be ontologically integrated with the aim of the study and 2) the framework will have a high degree of flexibility in explaining potential variants and conflicts observed from the inquiry. As has been discussed in the literature review, most existing theories about China’s PA/IR/ER/LM or HRM have either simply provided a snapshot of social reality during certain reforming stages of the nation’s contemporary history, thus failing to account for chronical changes, or were constrained by empirical limitations owing to the search for unattainable generalisability in the Chinese. It could be argued that both of these limitations are as a result of the imbalanced development over three decades, which has created, according to Sun Liping’s insight (2004), a “fractured society”17, in which phenomena might not be necessarily support an “all China” generalisation. In order to avoid such an over-generalising trap, the conceptual framework needed in this study should support the presumption of the importance of dynamic relationships between various actors in forming the current IR of the state sector, especially in relation to the Party-state’s role, which was either totally neglected or merely accepted as a fact, but never clearly explained In addition, this framework should be used as a guide to direct the focus rather than being an actual pre-existing theory prepared for testing; otherwise this method design would lose its reflexive dynamic and become one that resembles a hypothesis-based study from the very beginning. However, the conceptual framework does serve as a “mould” of an actual preliminary theory with an accepted paradigm after empirical investigation. The intention is that this will subsequently be used as a guide for further empirical focusing as well as the setting of hypotheses.
17 Sun cautions that whilst a number of parallel realities have emerged from social-political
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Dunlop’s model (1958) of industrial relations systems
Dunlop’s publication in 1958, “Industrial Relations Systems”, was a major development in IR research, which helped to make industrial relations a discipline in its own right. Divested from other disciplines, such as politics, economy, sociology and psychology, industrial relations it was argued, pertained to the study of the establishment and administration of rules. Beyond the original horizon of collective bargaining, Dunlop offered a “system” model illustrating industrial relations facts that enable researchers to bring theoretical and analytical methods beyond the original historical and descriptive methods (Blain and Gennard, 1970). Influenced by structural functionalist sociologists, such as Parsons and Smelser, Dunlop argued that industrial relations could be seen as a type of social system, equivalent to the sub-system of the economy. Together with the sub-system of politics, industrial relations and the economy are viewed as distinctive sub-systems that comprise the total social system.
Dunlop’s classic modeling attracts me for two reasons. First, the focus of this perspective is on illuminating the nature of industrial relations as systematic rule- making processes. Explained as an independent social system, the conceptual framework entails a pluralist system consisting of three independent actors: the state, management and workforces. It holds that representatives of actors and patterns of rule-making diversify in different ways across countries, such that different IR models are comparable through examining the differences in labour- management relations. When undertaking this, there are three major factors to be considered:
1) Economic, technological or social-political environment; 2) Characteristics and interactions of the actors;
3) Rules generated from these interactions that govern the employment relationship.
Dunlop’s theory has a long history of being misunderstood as the ultimate conceptual model for interpreting all kinds of IR in the capitalist world, by both his followers and critics. It should be acknowledged that its most significant contributions are epistemological and methodological. Despite it appearing to be
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increasingly difficult to explain emerging phenomena within this framework, it is still widely accepted that IR in an industrial nation is formed in a pluralistic manner. During the decades after it was proposed, this framework served as backbone of many theories in explaining the social-political process of IR forming in various industrial nations. Only after the rise of neo-liberalism since 1980s, along with shrinking power of trade unions in western countries and their shifting political agenda, did the predictability of Dunlop’s model become questionable. However, right back to the very beginning, the theory was proposed as a framework of research focus, rather than an explanatory one for covering all possible IR patterns in market economies.Back to the start point of abduction in China’s context, even though the real face of SOEs’ labour management is still veiled under the realities of hybrid institutions, there is still the basic knowledge that the governance of the Party-regime is at the core of forming IR in the state sector as well as the country’s urban labour market. China’s changing nature of a market economy, not only contrasts with pre-existing knowledge regarding a Leninist state, for it also makes it difficult to make comparisons with IR systems in any other industrial countries. However, at least regarding two aspects, Dunlop’s model can be set as the entry point for the current research: 1) a perspective that includes the state and its relations with other parties; and 2) concerns about the rule-making process. Empirically, this framework leads to the interest in identifying who is involved in decision making and how rules are made in shaping the current workplaces of local SOEs in Shanghai.
A modified framework
Next, the analytical framework of this study requires a scope that enables investigation of the dynamic of interactions between those actors. Dunlop’s system approach does consider the fact that actors in IR relations are agents influenced by the external environment, and that the process of rule creation is also governed by economical, technological and institutional factors. However, such a system approach has been criticised for omitting behavioural variables, such as motivations, perceptions and attitudes (Bain and Clegg, 1974). Dunlop’s
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notion of “system”, which was closely linked to the Parsonian analysis of the social system in 1950s America, was also questioned, because he suggested that a stable industrial relations system is integrated by the common ideology held by actors, such that it can be engineered to avoid conflicts and instability.In China’s context, it is obvious that the CCP’s ideological influence is predominant regarding various aspects of industrial relations, but it is inappropriate to perceive a uniform pattern of the party-state’s control (Lüthje, Luo and Zhang, 2013). In doing so, this would mean falling into the trap of repeating the CCP’s official rhetoric it governs through an all embracing uniform system. Instead, an analytical framework is required that allows for the illumination of the dynamics of the complex relationship between the state, management and labour, one which will also help generate meaningful theories about the party-state’s path of industrial relations. In light of these matters, it is necessary to look beyond the system approach in terms of analysing collisions and cooperation in labour-management relations. In addition, the framework should be open to the possibility that there is a trend towards a pluralistic relationship in workplaces. In terms of providing a non-all-embracing, but critical theory, Alan Fox’s unitary/pluralistic frames of reference (Fox, 1973, cited by Ackers, 2014, p. 8) can help to de-mystify power relations in the workplace. Since split interests have seemingly emerged in the wake of vibrant changes in China’s state sector, it is necessary to scrutinise what kinds of goals the state-owned organisations are pursuing. Is there a common competitive goal that management and labour are jointly pursuing? Are there certain forms of formal or informal voices representation shaping and are collisions accepted? Or if management prerogative turns out to dominate the IR system without addressing any issues regarding’s labour voice, then how is such a form of unitarism possible? As Fox18 (1974, cited by Hill and Thurley, 1974, p.149) argued,
“sociology as a discipline confers its greatest strength when it helps us, at least to some limited degree, to reduce our dependence on the
18 Quoted by Hill, S. and Thurley, K., 1974. Sociology and industrial relations. British Journal of
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blinkers of our own social reconditioning and thereby to escape from the self-fulfilling prophecies of what is, must be.”With this principle, firm-level managing practices and the party-state’s policies should be reviewed “out of the box” by probing wider so as to shed more light on the complex nature of CCP-led corporate governance. Also, the case analysis should focus on the meanings of those managerial behaviours in the particular market and institutional settings. In light of these concerns, I contend that the analytical framework needs to include the following propositions. Based on the a priori constructs in the existing literature, these propositions that help to anchor the issues of interest in the empirical inquiry, are to be tested and the outcomes will then be discussed.
Proposition 1: Firm-level CCP organs or managing personnel with a party background,
avidly adjust their labour managing strategies in responding to the emerging market and technological environment. Hence, this necessitates including market and technological factors in the framework
Proposition 2: The underlying relationship regarding the roles at firm-level is far more
complex than in a conventional corporate bureaucratic system or traditional communist organisational hierarchy. That is, the CCP exerts its political influence on managers and union leaders through multiple means.
Proposition 3: The firms’ staffing strategies are determined outside the boundaries of
individual firms. At the same time, corporate governance arrangements have substantial influences on the CCP’s political agenda for labour management.