Lise Lotte Hansen

Rethinking the industrial relations tradition from a gender perspective

The industrial relations tradition values empirical analysis and research usable for policy making. Considerations about epistemology and ontology and their consequences for the research are not integrated in the tradition. Just as daily research only very seldom relates to higher‐level theorising, a case in point being the development of a common theoretical framework, theoretical discussions are mostly separated from daily research into special rooms where discussion and development takes places among a few specialists. The industrial relations tradition also keeps women and research in gender in the periphery. This has consequences not only for the visibility of women’s labour market participation and for the status of the research in gender, but also for the industrial relations tradition, as it will become less able to see new tendencies and developments at the labour market and in industrial relations. The first part of the article discusses how the tradition – in spite of a growing acceptance of gender research – is still influenced by a male norm. In the second part the article endeavours to relate the under‐theorising of the IR tradition and the marginalisation of a gender perspective. The last part of the article introduces an integrated gender perspective as one – although incomplete – way to overcome these problems.

Andersen, Nina Trige (2013) Profession Filippiner. Kvinder på arbejde i Danmark gennem fire årtier, København: Tiderne Skifter. 274 pp.

Harold Merskey [1] in 1992, somewhat famously, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, ‘The manufacture of personalities. The production of multiple personality disorder’. This paper exemplified the divergence of opinion between what seemed to be most of British psychiatry and a substantial grouping of North American psychiatrists and associated mental health professionals who were researching and treating patients with dissociative disorders, a spectrum of conditions that had been included in the DSM-III of 1980. Valerie Sinason is a child and adult psychotherapist. The volume that she edits includes an introduction by herself and 16 chapters by separate authors which focus on the development of dissociative disorders, attachment theory perspectives, treatment, the practicalities of recognition and treatment within the British health system, and some miscellaneous topics such as ‘dissociation and spirit possession in non-Western countries’ and an interview with Flora Rheta Schreiber (the author of ‘Sybil’). With one exception, Jean Goodwin, all the authors are based in Britain and thus the volume represents the most substantive multi-authored volume on dissociative identity disorder (DID) yet published in that country, coming a decade after Merskey’s pre-emptive obituary. Sinason’s book is one of substantive historical significance in the dissociation field, yet embedded in the contributions is clear evidence of most of the faultlines that have proved elsewhere to be major challenges. The volume is patchy, ranging from anecdotal and somewhat emotive pieces through to scholarly and objective expositions – a particularly fine example being Peter Fonagy’s chapter, ‘Multiple voices verses mega-cognition: an attachment theory perspective.’ Many of the contributors have substantial links with the British psychoanalytic movement and/or attachment theorists. Not unexpectedly there is collectively a heavy emphasis on the work of Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bowlby, Ainsworth, Main and Fonagy among others. It is historically interesting to learn that toward the end of his life, John Bowlby, as a clinical supervisor was actively proffering a suggested diagnosis of MPD. John Southgate recounts a consultation from 1988.