This article surveys recent development in Indian employment relations, broadly defined, from the perspective of a visiting British academic. The author finds traditional academic industrial relations, centred on trade unions and collective bargaining, in decline as globalisation, the new economy and the expansion of business schools and disciplines reshape the study of Indian work and employment. The article discusses the emergence of human resource management as a potentially managerial and individualist alternative to critical, labour-sympathetic intellectual traditions. The author discerns hope for the future in the strong Indian traditions of labour history and labour economics, while stressing the need for a strong critical, empirical sociology of work that can establish what the new Indian workplace(s) are really like.

PETER ACKERS