Joe Isaac Industrial Relations Symposium Series
The Joe Isaac Symposium was developed jointly by the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne, and Monash Business School, Monash University, to recognise and highlight the outstanding contribution to industrial relations by Professor Emeritus Joe Isaac AO, FASSA. He was one of Australia’s most distinguished scholars and practitioners in the broad field of workplace relations.
Recent Symposiums
Stratification By Design: Meritocracy and the Reproduction of Inequality
Meritocracy is often celebrated as a fair system for allocating social rewards, promising that education, employment, and prestige are distributed according to individual ability rather than inherited privilege. Yet across societies, evidence shows that meritocratic systems routinely reproduce and legitimize inequality. In this talk, I argue that such outcomes are not flaws of meritocracy but constitutive features of how it operates.
Lauren Rivera, Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics and Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
The ties that (don’t) bind: Complementary institutions within Germany’s ‘dual system’ of Industrial relations
In this presentation, Dr. Martin Behrens investigates two seemingly contradictory trends in German IR. On the one hand, coverage by major institutions such as collective bargaining and works councils has declined since the early 1990s. On the other hand, employers have relied heavily on these representative institutions at times of severe crisis, including the Global Financial Crisis (2008) and the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020-22).
Dr Martin Behrens is a senior researcher at the Institute for Economic and Social Research (WSI) of the Hans-Boeckler Foundation, Germany. He also teaches Sociology at the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf and currently serves as the deputy president of the Works Council at the Hans-Böckler-Foundation.