The complex interplay between workers and their organizations, employers and their representatives or associations, and government agencies concerned with relationships between the two has become a subject of great concern and of inquiry over the last several decades. Scholars have researched into and elaborated on various themes of this important subject. However, the facts have remained scattered and a series of empirical findings disjointed in the absence of a cohesive conceptual framework. The realization of this state of the art has led some scholars to attempt to develop some conceptual frameworks for the analysis of the phenomena of industrial relations.

A conceptual framework is necessary in order to develop a systematic body of knowledge in a field. It provides tools of analysis which help to select relevant information from “mountains of facts” and to analysis them in a meaningful way. But a researcher's values and convictions play a major role in his or her search for relevant information, or selection of variables for analysis, and thereby the development of a conceptual framework. Naturally, such has been the case with the conceptual frameworks developed by researchers of the “Western culture” realm to analysis and to understand industrial relations systems of the Western, more developed countries.

However, these frameworks have serious limitations in so far as their applicability to the analysiss and characterization of industrial relations systems evolving in many non-Western industrializing countries is concerned. This means that there is a need to reformulate or to reconstruct the prevalent views on the matter. To do so in a modest way for the purpose of analysing the evolution of industrial relations systems of the ASEAN countries is the objective of this chapter.

The chapter is organized into two parts. The first part presents a brief review of the literature on the evolution of patterns of labour movement and industrial relations. The second part reconstructs the history of thought on the matter in the light of the structural transformation taking place in the industrializing countries. From this exercise will follow a set of propositions, or hypotheses.