One Stone, Two Birds: A New Life for Industrial Relations and a Saved One for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

ABSTRACT

During the first 100 days of the Trump II Administration, DEI took a body blow. Moreover, in August 2026, former professor Jason Arday's unravelling (and now tragic death) has put conjecture about DEI at the epicentre of community discourse and emboldened critics. Setting aside political theatre as well as preoccupation with matters of jurisdiction, there remains the practical and generic concern of whether DEI has a place in corporate life and, if so, where that place should be. To address this conundrum, a corpus of scholarship commencing with Fox (1974) and extending to the 1990s is used to shed light on the conceptual origins of IR and HRM. This lineage is laid out in detail to prosecute the case that HRM is built on (and incorporates) a unitarist view of the employment relationship and IR on a pluralist one. As such, DEI, as essentially a set of pluralist commitments, is ideally viewed as a subfunction within a re‐launched or new IR‐type corporate structure.