Learning from failure in a labour-management partnership

Abstract

Labour-management partnership is a topic that has long been of interest to employment relations and industrial relations scholars. We know from the literature on labour-management partnership that it is often fragile and prone to failing. However, despite such acknowledgement of partnership's precariousness, there is scant research on how actors understand failure and how that might shape future labour-management collaborative endeavours. The study was conducted on a labour-management partnership initiative in a New Zealand public sector organisation. Taking a qualitative, interpretive approach underpinned by a social constructionist epistemology, it examined failure in a labour-management partnership as a social phenomenon, constructed by the participants and groups of participants through social interactions and relationality. The research took the form of a longitudinal ethnographic single case study design. Data were collected through observations of partnership meetings (N = 86 hours) and semi-structured interviews with the partnership actors (N = 17). My thesis adds to scholarly conversations on labour-management partnership and failure therein. Research findings demonstrate that failings that happen in micro-moments in, around and between pivotal events can be detrimental to trust relations. They also show that union actor learnings from failings reveal the construction of an 'ideal' union actor in future partnership relations; the same capacity for learning from failure was not reflected in management learnings. In this way, asymmetries of power relations in partnership were reflected in asymmetries of learning from failings. Finally, they highlight how the lack of sedimentation of partnership capabilities in union and management actors is indicative of a lack of union and management organisational learning from partnership failure.