Introduction

To read Law, Society, and Industrial Justice today is to step back into a world of apparently limitless optimism: the world of New Deal America, Wagner Act collectivism, and corporations with a conscience. Selznick's main theme is law and social progress, observed in the particular context of organizations that are in the process, we are told, of becoming civilized. In both the public and the private sectors, organizations are tending of themselves toward bureaucratic, rule-bound forms of management that will leave them ripe for development into sites of industrial democracy and industrial citizenship, provided only that trade unions give them a final push in the right direction. While there are strong echoes of structural functionalism in the mode of analysis, there is consideration, too, of questions of agency and of politics. This is postwar American sociology at its best.

Viewed in the light of what has happened since— the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s and the subsequent fissuring and fracturing of postwar systems of labor law and industrial relations— Selznick's optimism may appear not only limitless but also misplaced. Working relations today are increasingly casualized and precarious; trade unions have been side-lined; new methods of production can obviate the need for employers to treat their workforces well in order to ensure their loyalty and committed engagement with the tasks assigned to them. Especially in the wake of Covid-19 and the mass move to working from home that it has occasioned, there are, for a growing number of workers, no employing organizations in the physical sense assumed by Selznick: places where workers meet with coworkers and managers on a daily basis. In such circumstances, the prospects for a reconstruction of industrial justice, of dignity for workers and postindustrial democracy, appear bleak indeed. Can anything be learned or retained from Selznick's study, or is it by now a work of historical curiosity only?

In the first part of this chapter, we offer an extended discussion of Law, Society, and Industrial Justice, focusing on Selznick's vision of industrial justice and industrial citizenship and on his discussion of social and legal change.