ILPC 2027

This paper addresses cross-national comparative research in employment relations and related fields.  Its purpose is to argue the case for research which makes a long-term, in-depth engagement with the local and national social contexts under study, in order to gain deeper and more reliable insights into the nature of, and reasons for, cross-national similiarities and differences. We call this form of engagement “slow comparativism”.

Our argument comes from a concern that, partly because of the increasingly neo-liberal political economy of academic research,  the ecology of comparative research has, in recent years, altered in ways which are not favourable to in-depth comparisons. While there has, overall, been an increase in the volume of research which covers different national contexts, much of this research, we argue, is based on rather ‘fast’, or ‘thin’, forms of comparison: in other words, it is characterised by limited sociological engagement with the dynamics of the societies under study.

We do not intend to argue that forms of international comparative research that we would characterise as ‘fast’ lack value in our attempts to understand the global and local dynamics of industrial and employment relations. However, we do think that comparative employment and labour research as a whole needs a better balance between faster and slower technologies of research.

We attempt to contribute towards this rebalancing by establishing a number of basic precepts of ‘slow comparativism’ as a practical methodological approach. In presenting these, we will raise a number of questions which we think are important to all attempts at in-depth comparison, and which, we argue, need to be considered at all stages of the research process (research design, execution, and the presentation of findings). These questions include:

(i) challenges in accessing the local  ‘common sense’ of actors, through research processes which should be seen as much more encompassing than what happens in formal research processes such as interviews;

(ii) challenges, both literal and figurative, of acquiring local ‘languages’;

(iii) challenges of avoiding ethnocentrism through creating and maintaining a critical distance from the assumptions of research subjects through part-alienation and ensuring reflexivity;

(iv) challenges of comparability between fieldwork conducted in different countries, and the need to think of comparative research as constituting ‘federal’ projects, thinking of fieldwork in different countries as constituting linked, but to some extent separate projects.

Our analysis is developed through an examination of comparative literature in industrial relations, as well as through reflection on the challenges the two authors have faced in executing in-depth comparative research on labour management, industrial relations, and trade union organisation.

Our presentation of these challenges, and the difficulties that comparative scholars of work and employment face in resolving them, can, we hope, be used to provoke a discussion among those conducting comparative research on work and employment about how truth claims are generated in general. We also seek to provide a basis by which those conducting slower forms of comparativism, through what we term ‘implicit ethnographies’, can find better ways of developing and defending their modes of research within a broader academic political economy which is not always favourable to such approaches.