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Industrial relations in the private sector of the American economy has been changing in a number of important ways in recent years, most visibly in collective bargaining where we have seen important wage, benefit, work practice, and employment security concessions and tradeoffs negotiated in a number of major industries (Cappelli and McKersie, 1983). However, other important changes have been occuring more quietly and more incrementally over a longer period of time at the workplace level, where new forms of employee participation and alternative forms of work organization have evolved, and at the highest levels of managerial decision-making where corporate business decisions are made and basic policies regarding human resources, technology and the status of unions are formulated (Kochan and Cappelli, 1983). Unfortunately, our theories for explaining and understanding these changes are not yet well developed.Indeed, these changes appear to be important enough to warrant examining the basic paradigm that has governed industrial relations research in recent years, a conclusion echoed in recent commentaries by Derber, Strauss, Kerr, and Cummings (1982). The common theme linking these arguments is that most of the currently popular theories of industrial relations and the empirical evidence supporting them were generated during periods of relative stability in U.S. collective bargaining and industrial relations and consequently are too static in nature. Thus, they have difficulty explaining the behavior of the system when its basic parameters appear to be changing. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to add a more dynamic component to industrial relations theory by developing the concept of strategy, or strategic choice, in a way that we believe can help explain some of the changes in industrial relations that have occurred or are currently unfolding. The Prevailing ParadigmThe debate over the appropriate theory for industrial relations In contrast to these efforts to build global theories, research since the 1960's shifted toward middle range models designed to explain variations in the process and outcomes of collective -2-III bargaining. In addition, the theories being used to explain these concerns have shifted back toward the basic social science disciplines (Kochan, Mitchell, and Dyer 1982). There are a number of anomalies in current industrial relations, however, that cannot be explained with these middle-level theories. Nor can they be easily reconciled with the systems approach. A brief outline of some of these unexpected developments will help illustrate the inadequacy of the current theoretical approaches. Further, only one of the plants opened by this firm since the mid-1960s' has been organized by a union. While it is difficult to generalize from a single firm, our case studies of other organizations reveal that this pattern is the norm.-3- IIIVarious efforts have been made to explain this development, and they typically look to characteristics of the parties and the environment for the cause of decl...

This is a case study of the 2005 national contract negotiations between Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions. Given the scale and complexity of these negotiations, their successful completion provides an exemplar for collective bargaining in this country. In 1997 Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions formed a labor management partnership, and negotiations were structured around the principles of interestbased negotiation (IBN). Drawing on direct observation of all parts of the bargaining process, interviews with individuals from Kaiser and the Coalition of Unions, and surveys we conducted after bargaining was completed, we conclude that the parties employed a mix of interest-based and traditional negotiation processes across an array of integrative and distributive issues. We find that IBN techniques were used extensively and successfully to reach mutually satisfying agreements when the parties shared interests. When interests were in greater conflict, the parties resorted to more traditional, positional tactics to reach resolution. Strong intraorganizational conflicts limited the use of IBN and favored the use of more traditional positional bargaining. While a high level of trust enabled and supported the use of IBN, tensions that developed limited the use of IBN and required surfacing and release before either IBN or more traditional positional processes could proceed effectively. The use * The authors' affiliations are, respectively, Management Trust Fund has provided funds for this research. The views expressed are solely those of the authors.Bargaining Theory / 67 of IBN tools helped the parties apply the principles underlying the partnership in which these negotiations were embedded. We conclude that IBN served as a way of applying or operationalizing integrative bargaining and affected the process dynamics in ways the Walton and McKersie theory predicted. As such we see IBN as techniques that neither displace nor render obsolete other aspects of bargaining theory or practice but that show considerable promise for helping collective bargaining to address the complex issues and challenges found in contemporary employment relationships.

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