Navigating the nexus of academic IR, policy and practice: the centrality of decent work

Abstract

This article argues that the intellectual heritage of academic industrial relations favours evidence-based engagement with contemporary employment and societal problems. These extend beyond the workplace and enterprise to include major policy challenges relating to the environmental crisis, poverty and inequality and the effects of technological change to which tired neoliberal orthodoxies offer few useful prescriptions. Effective engagement with policy makers and practitioners needs to centre around the concept of Decent Work, which can provide benefits to employers and the state as well as workers' wellbeing.