美國 勞使關係硏究의 衰退와 展望 -Kaufman의 空洞化 假說을 中心으로-

Abstract

The discipline of industrial relations appeared in the 1910s in the USA From the beginning, it had two major fields; personnel management and labor economics, Personnel management was born along with the development of scientific management and human relations movement. The main purposes of the two fields were problem-solving for the personnel officers rather than science-building for academic researchers, Accordingly, scholars in personnel management have focused on policies and manuals of personnel and human resource management Institutional labor economists were also interested in problem-solving, mainly focusing on the operation of labor market and the intervention of government. This tradition of policy-orientation was heavily criticized in the 1960s by the new generation of labor economists, neoclassical economists. They have tried to build the IR field as a science. To accomplish the purpose, they borrowed many theories and methodologies from neoclassical economics and mathematics which were not comfortable to traditional scholars in IR. Due to both the severe criticism and the new birth of organizational behavior, personnel management school departed from the IR field. Even worse. institutional labor economists could not recruit new generation of economists to the field. This phenomenon was called the "hollowing-out" of the IR field by Bruce Kaufman. Kaufman's argument gives us an important implication. In Korea. we also have experienced a kind of "hollowing-out"· in the IR field. Many scholars in personnel/HR management do not participate in the conferences and publications led by the KIRRA. There are a few young labor economists who are active. Kaufman' s prescription will be very helpful for rebuilding the KIRRA.