THE HISTORY AND THEORY of industrial relations are confronted by surprising demands in the last decades of the 20th century. Students of industrial relations, having become practitioners of disciplines with specialized audiences, occupied with practical concerns of labour-management relations or with the broader but largely intramural issues centred on Marxist perspectives, are drawn back into debates about fundamental problems of modern political theory. As in the early generations after 1870,

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... when political theories of syndicalism and pluralism generalized from emerging industrial relations practices and reflections, certain contemporary theorists of the state are turning to the discipline-bound industrial relations literatures in hope of finding models and propositions relevant to new theoretical perplexities. The prevailing categories of the political, socio-economic, and cultural domains, whose interrelationships are disputed by established theories but which commonly were understood as settled configurations, have been scrambled by recent social developments and thought 1 In consequence, new attention is being paid to studies of social processes which cut across conventional categories, and which never have been accommodated comfortably within standard lines of demarcation. Although studies of gender and the family are well recognized as important here, the expectations addressed to industrial relations literatures have been noted less commonly.