Jump to content
Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia

Hugh Clegg (academic)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Hugh Armstrong Clegg)
British academic (1920–1995)

Hugh Armstrong Clegg (22 May 1920 – 9 December 1995) was a British academic who was a founder of the "National Board for Prices and Incomes" (1965–71) and later presided over the "Standing Commission on Pay Comparability" set up by James Callaghan in 1979.

Clegg was born in Truro. Educated at the Methodist Kingswood School, he rebelled by becoming a Communist for a period in his youth, but gained a scholarship to study Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford University; he then served for five years in the army during the Second World War. After returning to Oxford, where he gained a first class degree in PPE in 1947,[1] he was persuaded by G. D. H. Cole to take up the study of industrial relations. He became a fellow of Nuffield College in 1949.[2]

In 1965 he was appointed to the "Royal commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations" (also known as the "Donovan Commission") set up by the Labour government under Harold Wilson to seek solutions to the problem of strikes which plagued the British economy of the period. Clegg successfully argued in the Commission that strikes were caused by poor industrial management, not by unions, effectively derailing Barbara Castle's white paper, In Place of Strife , which sought to establish legislative intervention in major disputes, and which the Commission had originally supported.[3] [4] He also became a member of the "National Board for Prices and Incomes" set up in 1965 to regulate a prices and incomes policy,[5] but the intractable circumstances of labour relations in Britain meant that this initiative remained a "damp squib".[6] The Board was wound down in 1971 and Clegg wrote a book on his experience entitled How to Run an Incomes Policy, and Why We Made Such a Mess of the Last One.[7]

From 1967 to 1979 Clegg was Professor of Industrial Relations at Warwick University (the first to hold this appointment), and took part in the launch of Warwick Business School, where he founded the Industrial Relations Research Unit[8] in 1970. In 1979 James Callaghan requested Clegg to chair the "Standing Commission on Pay Comparability" with which it was hoped to tackle the public service disputes of the sort which had led to the 'Winter of Discontent' of 1978–9.[9] The Commission was disbanded by the incoming government of Margaret Thatcher,[10] [11] who blamed it for over-inflating the government wage bill.[12]

Clegg wrote numerous studies, including a three-volume History of British Trade Unions (published between 1964 and 1994). His book The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain (1953, revised 1970 and 1979) was regarded as a major text on the topic. He died in Warwick in 1995 of a stroke.[13]

Footnotes

[edit ]
  1. ^ Thompson (n.d.)
  2. ^ Brown (1995).
  3. ^ Rogers (1996).
  4. ^ Thompson (n.d.)
  5. ^ Brown (1995)
  6. ^ Fishman (n.d.)
  7. ^ Brown (1995).
  8. ^ Thompson (n.d.)
  9. ^ Brown (1995).
  10. ^ Moore (2014), pp. 475–6.
  11. ^ Thompson (n.d.)
  12. ^ Rogers (1996).
  13. ^ Thompson (n.d.)

References

[edit ]

Further reading

[edit ]
  • Ackers, Peter. Trade Unions and the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg (Routledge, 2024) online review of this book.
  • Ackers, Peter. "Saving social democracy? Hugh Clegg and the post-war programme to reform British workplace industrial relations: too little, too late?." in Social Movements and the Change of Economic Elites in Europe after 1945 (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018) pp. 257-277.
  • Ackers, Peter, and Ruth Hartley. "A Social Science Apprenticeship? Hugh Clegg at Mass-Observation, 1939." Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 25-26 (2008): 197-218.
  • Ackers, Peter. "Hugh Clegg (1920-95), the New ‘Warwick School’ of Industrial Relations and the Creation of the Modern Records Centre." Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 11.4 (2024): 14-20. online
  • Ackers, Peter. "Free collective bargaining and incomes policy: learning from Barbara Wootton and Hugh Clegg on post‐war British Industrial Relations and wage inequality." Industrial Relations Journal 47.5-6 (2016): 434-453.
  • Ackers, Peter. "Reading Hugh Clegg’s ‘The Bullock Report and European Experience’(1977) in Historical Context." Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 41.1 (2020): 189-196.
  • Ackers, Peter. "Neo-pluralism as a research approach in contemporary employment relations and HRM: Complexity and dialogue." in Elgar introduction to theories of human resources and employment relations (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) pp. 34-52.
  • Ackers, Peter. "Collective bargaining as industrial democracy: Hugh Clegg and the political foundations of British industrial relations pluralism." British Journal of Industrial Relations 45.1 (2007): 77-101.
  • Ackers, Peter, and Ruth Hartley. "A Social Science Apprenticeship? Hugh Clegg at Mass-Observation, 1939." Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 25-26 (2008): 197-218.
  • Bowers, Chris. Nick Clegg: the biography (Biteback Publishing, 2012), she was the wife of Hugh Clegg. .
  • Clegg, Hugh Armstrong. "Pluralism in industrial relations." British journal of industrial relations 13.3 (1975): 309-316.
  • Clegg, Hugh Armstrong, Anthony J. Killick, and Rex Adams. Trade union officers: A study of full-time officers, branch secretaries, and shop stewards in British trade unions (Harvard University Press, 1961) online.
  • Edwards, Paul. "The Evolution of British Industrial Relations Pluralism: Hugh Clegg and His Legacy." Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 46 (2025): 233-241.
[edit ]

AltStyle によって変換されたページ (->オリジナル) /