Corporatism in Comparative Perspective: The Impact of the First World War on American and British Labor Relations

Historians and social scientists have often described modern America as a uniquely pluralist society in which a collective bargaining model of industrial relations won an early triumph over other conceptions of labor relations. Professor Gerber challenges this traditional view. Comparing American and British thinking and policies relating to labor relations during and just after the First World War, Professor Gerber concludes that, in large part because of the war's impact, corporatist conceptions of political economy had by 1920 achieved a wide appeal in both Britain and America. Though a pluralist conception of collective bargaining may later have become dominant in the United States, at least as of 1920 many parallels existed between the emerging “corporatist bias†of British thinking about labor relations and American thinking about this issue.