John Thomas Dunlop - Legacy

Legacy

Dunlop produced a considerable body of articles, books, reports, and scholarship, with his work Industrial Relations Systems (1958) regarded as his crowning achievement. Thomas Kochan, the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, commented that this “seminal book…. set the framework for scholarly analysis of our field for decades and became the focal point for debates over how relationships among labor, management, and government were structured and evolved over time.”

The historian Ronald Schatz of Wesleyan University reflects on Dunlop and his generation of Industrial Relations (IR) specialists:

"…. the IR professors…. were not only academics but public figures as well. Many arbitrated disputes for the biggest firms and unions in the country and chaired government boards, and as time passed the leading figures in the field were appointed to be the presidents and deans of the nation’s most prestigious universities – Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Wisconsin, Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern, Princeton. One became the leading liberal in the U.S. Senate (Paul Douglas), another the Watergate Special Prosecutor (Archibald Cox), another the Secretary of State (George Shultz)."

Throughout his career in academics and the applied world, Dunlop attempted to apply lessons learned in his early experience in settling disputes at the NWLB to other venues. Drawing on his training in economics and his own industrial relations system framework and his insistence on having the parties agree on a common set of facts, he helped establish both a theoretical and a practical method of resolving problems and creating institutions for their ongoing evolution. In his introduction to a reissuing of his book Industrial Relations Systems in 1993, Dunlop wrote:

"In response to inquiries as to why I have not chosen previously to comment on the substantial literature still in currency on Industrial Relations Systems, I have often responded that the analytical system was to be viewed as a tool to be used in analysis and problem solving. I find it useful and use it regularly in my practitioner’s role. If someone else does not find it helpful, so be it; I am interested in any analytical framework that helps to resolve real problems. So tell me yours."

He continued that work until late in his life. Dunlop died at the age of 89 in 2003 in Boston.