Post-Industrial Justice? Normativity and Empiricism in a Changing World of Work

In our contribution to the volume we revisit the theme of industrial justice developed by Phillip Selznick in his 1969 study of Law, Society and Industrial Justice. What can we learn or retain from Selznick’s work in an effort to reconstruct industrial justice at a time when several of the pillars of industrial citizenship have crumbled; when working relations are increasingly casualized and precarious; when there are, for a growing number of workers, no organisations in the physical sense that Selznick envisaged, spaces where workers meet with co-workers and managers on a daily basis? For many, an important feature of the current Corona virus crisis has been a move to working from home; a move that for some may not be reversed or wholly reversed when the crisis comes to an end. Viewed through a wide lens, the move may be understood as an acceleration, stimulated by the crisis, of already apparent trends towards home working and, more generally, the fissuring, outsourcing or even disappearance of workplaces. With an eye to these trends, and to the changing spaces and organisational forms of work today, we identify as particularly instructive Selznick’s characteristic combination of normativity and empiricism, grounding everyday conceptions of justice in affective personal ties among socialized human actors