# David Marsden's Comparative and Theoretical Craft: Signposts to a Better World of Work

Sarah Ashwin, Rafael Gomez, Patrice Laroche

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Sarah Ashwin, Rafael Gomez, Patrice Laroche. David Marsden's Comparative and Theoretical Craft: Signposts to a Better World of Work. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2025, pp.1-10. 10.1111/bjir.70014. hal-05294904

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SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

OPEN ACCESS

# David Marsden's Comparative and Theoretical Craft: Signposts to a Better World of Work

Sarah Ashwin<fnref n="1" /> | Rafael Gomez² | Patrice Laroche³

**Correspondence:** Sarah Ashwin (S.Ashwin@lse.ac.uk)

**Keywords:** comparative employment relations | embeddedness | employment systems | interdisciplinarity | varieties of capitalism | well-being

## ABSTRACT

David Marsden enriched and extended the field of employment relations with his interdisciplinary and comparative practice. This introduction to the special issue honouring his work examines the nature of David's contribution and analyses his influence on employment relations and adjacent fields. The article highlights David's original engagement with the social science questions of his day, and his comparative craft, which entailed sensitivity to difference and a commitment to grounded, institutionally embedded analysis. Previewing the articles that make up this special issue, this introduction shows how David's work provides signposts to a better world of work.

## 1 | Introduction

Like many employment relations (ER) scholars, we were shocked and saddened to learn of David Marsden's death on 10 August 2021. To honour his memory and his work, in the summer of 2023, the London School of Economics and the *British Journal of Industrial Relations* hosted a 2-day conference to take forward the cross-cutting themes that David spent his life exploring. In his long and distinguished career, David shaped and contributed to debates across the ER field from youth employment, through performance management and pay, to comparative institutional analysis. A central thread in David's body of work was the dynamic interplay between economic forces, institutions and the well-being of workers – a foundational concern in his worldview and a unifying concept for the contributions in this issue.

Eight peer-reviewed papers, all of which were presented at the 2023 conference, now appear in this special issue. In keeping with David's wide-ranging interests, the articles span diverse themes. Collectively, they highlight the continuing relevance of David's work, demonstrating its theoretical adaptability and empirical richness. The contributions engage with and extend

David's foundational ideas – particularly concerning employment systems, organizational governance, institutional variation and contractual incompleteness – while also applying his theoretical insights to novel domains such as digital platform work, recruitment and workers with disabilities. Across various contexts, from national employment systems and governance types to platform work and inclusive practices, the contributions reaffirm the enduring relevance of David's work for understanding the structure and evolution of work and employment.

David was a boundary-spanner, intellectually and culturally – an ideal combination for an ER scholar. ER emerged as a multidisciplinary field with diverse features in different countries, reflecting cross-national variation in ER practices and institutions (Kaufman 2004). As we will show, David was dedicated to grappling with the implications of different disciplinary traditions within ER – he had a genuine and rare interdisciplinary practice. He was also a committed comparativist, constantly contrasting different ER arrangements to understand their evolution and function.

Indeed, David's comparative attitude was inseparable from his interdisciplinary formation. Trained as an economist, he drew

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© 2025 The Author(s). *British Journal of Industrial Relations* published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

<footnote n="1">¹Department of Management, London School of Economics, London, UK | ²Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada | ³IAE Nancy School of Management, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France</footnote>
on industrial sociology, labour law and public administration. This breadth allowed him to navigate institutional terrains without flattening their complexity. His studies incorporated legal, cultural, economic and organizational aspects; David was equally comfortable with statistical models and legal codes. His comparative studies integrated national systems through a multi-dimensional lens. For David, interdisciplinarity was not optional but essential. Equally, comparison was not about benchmarking, but understanding how systems responded to shared challenges. He valued institutional specificity, contradiction and evolution.

This orientation towards engaged, context-sensitive comparison was not only a scholarly choice but reflected something deeper in David's intellectual identity. His method mirrored his own movement across institutional settings and academic cultures. The breadth of his comparative vision was inseparable from a personal and professional openness to other ways of organizing, reasoning and relating to work. His interdisciplinary method was normative as well as analytical: it helped diagnose problems and imagine better arrangements. This orientation is reflected in several of the contributions to this issue, which showcase how David's theories can be used to promote worker well-being, whether through institutional innovation to protect platform workers, understanding which inclusion arrangements are most beneficial for disabled workers, or analysing how organizational governance structures impact employee well-being. That is, the contents of this special issue carry forward David's commitment to the London School of Economics (LSE) mission of the 'betterment of society'.

We begin by examining the nature of David's influence and legacy, setting his work alongside major comparable, contemporaneous social science contributions. We then consider David's craft as a comparativist, before introducing the contents of this special issue, which underscore the continued generativity of David's research by developing it in new theoretical and empirical directions.

## 2 | David Marsden and the Zeitgeist

Likely reflecting his wide cross-disciplinary reading, David was in tune with the Zeitgeist in social science to an extent that bordered on uncanny. David's two major solo-authored monographs, marking the beginning and middle of his career, *The End of Economic Man* (1986) and *A Theory of Employment Systems* (1999), respectively, coincided with field-defining contributions by other authors on closely connected themes. The temporal coincidence of *A Theory of Employment Systems* and Peter Hall and David Soskice's (2001) *Varieties of Capitalism* is frequently noted, including in this Special Issue by Gahan and Turnbull (2026) and Salesina (2026). Yet rarely, if ever (to our knowledge) mentioned is the chronological proximity of *The End of Economic Man* with Mark Granovetter's (1985) classic statement on 'The Problem of Embeddedness', which was published in the *American Journal of Sociology* in November 1985, just months before the appearance of *The End of Economic Man*.

Since *A Theory of Employment Systems* is examined elsewhere in this special issue, we focus here on contrasting *The End of Economic Man* with 'The Problem of Embeddedness', using

the comparison to explore the nature of David's approach and influence. Although David (Marsden 1986) and Granovetter (1985) focused their attention on different theories, both were dissatisfied with the apparent choice between the atomistic model of individual behaviour within markets assumed by economists (whether neoclassical or new institutional) and the oversocialized conception of sociology; Sonder (1987, 553), for example, noted that David perceived industrial relations scholars' embrace of sociological explanations as 'going too far'.

Setting out his argument for the need to navigate a middle way between the assumptions of economists and sociologists, Granovetter (1985, 487) argued:

> A fruitful analysis of human action requires us to avoid the atomization implicit in the theoretical extremes of under- and oversocialized conceptions. Actors do not behave or decide as atoms outside a social context, nor do they adhere slavishly to a script written for them by the particular intersection of social categories that they happen to occupy. Their attempts at purposive action are instead embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations.

David, as the title of his book suggests, was similarly critical of economists' narrow understanding of the 'individualistic utility maximizer' (1986, 20). Yet, like Granovetter, he was also suspicious of an 'oversocialized' perspective, noting in his discussion of the influence of custom on wages that (Marsden 1986, 119) 'the idea that custom was just obeyed because it had become imprinted on people's minds seems unsatisfactory. It is important to look at the social mechanisms of enforcement, and the processes of adaptation to custom'. Both David and Granovetter argued that the way beyond what they portrayed as under- and over-socialized explanations of action lay in embedded social relations or what, reflecting his focus on the workplace, David referred to as 'social mechanisms of enforcement'.

Our contention that David had reached a similar intuition to that which motivated Granovetter's (1985) embeddedness intervention is highlighted by the similarity of their critique of economists' treatment of social norms. Granovetter (1985, 485) noted 'an irony of great theoretical importance' that the under- and oversocialized perspectives depended on a 'conception of action and decision carried out by atomized actors'.

> In the undersocialized account, atomization results from narrow utilitarian pursuit of self-interest; in the oversocialized one, from the fact that behavioral patterns have been internalized and ongoing social relations thus have only peripheral effects on behavior. That the internalized rules of behavior are social in origin does not differentiate this argument decisively from a utilitarian one, in which the source of utility functions is left open, leaving room for behavior guided entirely by consensually determined norms and values – as in the oversocialized view. Under- and oversocialized resolutions of the problem of order thus merge
in their atomization of actors from immediate social context.

In his critique of Gary Becker's (1957) work on discrimination, David (Marsden 1986, 102) perceived a similar difficulty with Becker's move from individual to collective motivation:

> The view of social norms implied by this approach is that one can say all that is important about social norms in the labour market by treating them as tastes in a utility function, and there is no need to invoke the group except as collections of individuals with some interests and preferences in common.

Granovetter (1985, 487) characterized the problem as economists' conception of individuals who were implausibly outside 'ongoing systems of social relations'. Marsden shared this perception, detailing (1986, 102-3) the particular social relations neglected by economists in his area of interest, namely group processes among workers, including 'material and moral sanctions ... such as displays of disapproval and exclusion'.

David and Granovetter employed their common insight in different ways. Granovetter (1985, 507) urged sociologists to enter economic terrain, arguing 'not only that there is a place for sociologists in the study of economic life but that their perspective is urgently required there'. The flourishing sub-field of economic sociology stands as a testament to the impact of this ringing call. David (Marsden 1986, 262), by contrast, argued for a 'labour economics which is more sensitive to industrial relations and industrial sociology, and an industrial sociology and industrial relations more aware of the pressures of labour markets on the behaviour of workers, unions and management'. It is at first sight difficult to argue that this call achieved the same resonance, although David arguably set a harder task. Rather than promising the conquest of inviting new territory, David, as perhaps befits an ER scholar, asked his readers to engage in the arduous exercise of communicating across entrenched boundaries. This contrast recalls the work of another late lamented LSE colleague, Stephen Dunn (1990), who noted the attraction of appeals to an academic pioneering spirit over traditional ER metaphors of trench warfare.

The second pair of contributions, David's (Marsden 1999) *A Theory of Employment Systems* and Hall and Soskice's (2001) *Varieties of Capitalism*, are analysed elsewhere in this special issue. To summarize, while Hall and Soskice (2001) took a macro political economy approach of defining and comparing ideal types, David (Marsden 1999) took a micro-institutional approach. David eschewed the classificatory ambitions of typologies or ideal types like *Varieties of Capitalism*. Instead, he proposed that employment systems vary systematically across countries because of the different ways in which managerial authority is delimited. David identified four main types of employment rules that govern the coordination of effort and expectations at work. These rules reflect not only economic imperatives but also legal frameworks, collective bargaining institutions and broader societal values. David thus provided a micro-institutional complement to macro typologies. In terms of reception, *A Theory of Employment Systems* was well cited, but did not animate the

field of comparative capitalism in the manner of *Varieties of Capitalism*.

What does this say about David as a scholar? First, perhaps, that he was somewhat unlucky: he picked up and adroitly wrestled with the intellectual dilemmas of the moment, but without spawning a cottage industry of exegesis, critique, extension and, thereby, citation sensation. Second, that he was intellectually inquisitive, worked across disciplinary boundaries and was thus alert to changing scholarly preoccupations in different disciplines. Third, that he was very much his own man. He perceived the problems perplexing other scholars and dealt with them in original and sometimes surprising ways. For example, David's institutionally grounded take on embeddedness challenged economics' abstraction and sociology's cultural focus by analysing how formal rules, social norms and strategic behaviour intersect. Issues like authority or motivation were not just incentive problems or cultural constructs; they involved law, contracts, discretion and workplace routines. By working across disciplinary languages, David aimed to make institutional theory legible to economists, labour economics accessible to sociologists and policy analysis sensitive to organizational nuance.

We argue that for these reasons David had a diffusive influence entirely appropriate for a boundary-spanner. In George Eliot's great novel *Middlemarch* ([1871-2] 1986, 896), the positive social impact of the novel's heroine Dorothea is described as 'incalculably diffusive'. Here, by contrast, we aim to calculate David's diffusive reach through a bibliometric analysis of *A Theory of Employment Systems* (1999).

Our analysis of David's 1999 book confirms its central place in the intellectual landscape of ER (see Table 1).¹ An analysis of the top 10 most cited publications referencing David's *A Theory of Employment Systems* reveals the disciplinary range of his influence, spanning corporate governance, industrial relations, labour law and organizational theory. The high frequency of co-citation with Aguilera and Jackson's (2003) *Academy of Management Review* article on corporate governance and Hall and Soskice's broader *Varieties of Capitalism* agenda (via Hancké et al. 2007) underscores David's embeddedness in comparative institutional scholarship. Notably, several entries, such as Hyman (2001), Marginson and Sisson (2004) and Ebbinghaus (2006), signal David's influence on European industrial relations and labour market governance, reinforcing his central role in shaping comparative analyses of employment systems. The appearance of works rooted in empirical workplace research (e.g., Kersley et al. 2013; Blyton and Turnbull 2004) demonstrates the practical applicability of David's framework. Contributions in labour law (Hepple 2005) and labour market sociology (Brzinsky-Fay 2007) further attest to its reach beyond theoretical discourse and into applied research and policy domains. That David is cited alongside both organizational theorists (e.g., Cappelli and Keller 2013) and sociologists reflects the cross-disciplinary uptake of his approach to ER as institutionally embedded, nationally specific and dynamically evolving.

A co-citation network of David's *A Theory of Employment Systems* (see Figure 1) confirms its integrative position across multiple theoretical traditions. His work is frequently cited alongside *Varieties of Capitalism* (Hall and Soskice 2001), Maurice et al.'s (1986) study
<table><caption>**TABLE 1** | Top 10 most cited contributions referencing David's book "A Theory of Employment Systems: micro-foundations of Societal Diversity" (Marsden 1999).</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Authors</th><th>Title</th><th>Journal/outlet</th><th>Citations (WoS)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>Aguilera and Jackson (2003)</td><td>The cross-national diversity of corporate governance: Dimensions and determinants</td><td>Academy of Management Review</td><td>2743 (986)</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>Hyman (2001)</td><td>Understanding European trade unionism: between market, class and society</td><td>Book</td><td>1307</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>Hancké, Rhodes, and Thatcher (2007)</td><td>Beyond varieties of capitalism: Conflict, contradictions, and complementarities in the European economy</td><td>Book</td><td>923</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>Kersley et al. (2013)</td><td>Inside the workplace: findings from the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey</td><td>Book</td><td>849</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>Blyton and Turnbull (2004)</td><td>The dynamics of employee relations</td><td>Book</td><td>804</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>Capelli and Keller (2013)</td><td>Classifying work in the new economy</td><td>Academy of Management Review</td><td>613 (219)</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>Ebbinghaus (2006)</td><td>Reforming early retirement in Europe, Japan and the USA</td><td>Book</td><td>570</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>Marginson and Sisson (2004)</td><td>European integration and industrial relations: Multi-level governance in the making</td><td>Book</td><td>541</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>Brzinsky-Fay (2007)</td><td>Lost in transition? Labour market entry sequences of school leavers in Europe</td><td>European Sociological Review</td><td>507 (163)</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>Hepple (2005)</td><td>Labour laws and global trade</td><td>Book</td><td>484</td></tr></tbody></table>

Source: Web of Science and Google Scholar, January 2025.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 1** | Co-citations among the top 25 most cited authors referencing David's book. Source: Web of Science, January 2025. [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]</figcaption></figure>

of national production systems, Whitley's (1999) *Divergent Capitalisms: The Social Structuring and Change of Business Systems* and Hofstede's (1997) contribution, signalling his central place in comparative institutional analysis. Yet *A Theory of Employment Systems* also connects to the work of neo-institutional theorists such as DiMaggio and Powell (1983) and Scott (2008) and to

economic governance scholars like Jensen and Meckling (1976). This rich co-citation environment reflects the cross-disciplinary resonance of David's micro-institutional theory of employment, which uniquely links firm-level authority structures with national institutional arrangements. David's approach offers a valuable complement to transaction cost economics, especially
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 2** | Most important keywords associated with David's contribution. Source: Web of Science, January 2025. [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]</figcaption></figure>

Oliver Williamson's theory of governance structures. While Williamson (2000) emphasizes efficiency and the minimization of opportunism, David adds a normative and institutional dimension. For David, rules governing employment are not just tools of coordination but expressions of broader societal values about fairness, authority and voice. His theory thus bridges rational choice economics and institutional sociology, providing a richer and more realistic account of workplace dynamics.

David's findings resonate with the insights of Maurice et al. (1986), whose landmark study of French and German production systems demonstrated how national education systems and cultural norms shape the cognitive styles and authority structures within firms. Their concept of *société éducative* highlighted the formative role of schooling, vocational training and socialization processes in structuring workplace behaviour and expectations. David extends this insight to the governance of employment, showing how national institutional arrangements, particularly legal and representational frameworks, mediate the organization of voice, control and pay. As in Maurice and Sellier's work, there is a rejection of the functionalist premise that firms will naturally converge on optimal practices. Instead, David emphasizes that institutional forms are historically embedded, politically contested and shaped by distinct national logics of social coordination.

A bibliometric co-word analysis (see Figure 2) of publications citing *A Theory of Employment Systems* further underscores the breadth and depth of David's intellectual influence. The resulting network places 'labour markets', 'performance' and 'governance' at its core, highlighting the centrality of his work to debates on how institutions shape both ER and organizational outcomes. David's framework also acts as a conceptual bridge across domains: connecting employment practices (e.g., compensation, contingent work, voice) with broader institutional themes (e.g., embeddedness, business systems, politics/policy) and even reaching into adjacent fields such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and multinational management. The proximity of keywords such as 'embeddedness', 'business systems' and 'contract' in the co-citation network confirms the resonance of his theory with major comparative and organizational approaches,

while reinforcing the originality of his focus on the workplace as the micro-foundation of institutional diversity.

Together, these findings affirm that David's legacy is not limited to theoretical innovation: it also constitutes a methodological and empirical touchstone for scholars working across economics, sociology, law and management. His approach continues to provide a common language and analytical lens for researchers navigating the complex interplay between institutional structures and organizational practices. This broad and integrative legacy is most distinctively expressed in what might be called David's micro-institutional turn. Rather than treating institutions as large-scale typologies or national systems to be categorized from above, he approached them from within through the lens of the employment relationship itself. It is here, in the fine-grained analysis of contracts, rules and practices, that his originality as a comparativist was most fully realized.

### 3 | David Marsden as Comparativist

To call David Marsden a comparativist is not simply to acknowledge his cross-national focus. It is to describe a way of thinking, a sensibility towards difference and a commitment to grounded, institutionally embedded analysis. For David, comparison was an intellectual stance: a way of resisting predominant theories that claimed too much and recognizing regularities without flattening contextual diversity. At a time of metrics and rankings, David Marsden reminds us that comparison is a craft: a habit of thought grounded in care, clarity and close attention to difference. He was a comparativist not only by method but by disposition – committed to understanding how institutions work in practice, how they evolve and how they might be made more just.

David's method was problem-driven and focused on how institutions operate in practice, how they are understood, enacted and contested by those who inhabit them. He combined theorizing with analysis of the vast array of comparative cases with which he was familiar. For him, the comparative lens was not about what countries are, but about what organizations do within diverse
institutional constraints. It is this combination that Gahan and Turnbull (2026) argue qualifies him as a practitioner of abductive analysis before the term gained its current prominence.

In terms of the empirical orientation of his comparison, David's foundational insight was that the employment relationship is inherently incomplete. It cannot be reduced to a fully specifiable contract but relies on ongoing interaction, negotiation and trust between employers and employees. This ongoing negotiation, he argued, is not shaped solely by organizational dynamics, but is deeply embedded in national legal norms, workplace rules and institutional frameworks that delimit authority, voice and risk. It is precisely this embeddedness that makes employment systems an ideal entry point for comparative analysis, revealing how broader institutional differences manifest in the concrete governance of work.

## 3.1 | The Micro-Institutional Turn: From Classifying Systems to Analysing Rules

Where many comparative scholars operated at the level of macro-institutional regimes – corporate governance, welfare systems, vocational training structures – David brought the analysis back to the workplace. In his hands, the employment relationship became not just an empirical focus but the core analytical unit. This reflected a theoretical orientation, allowing David to recast comparative questions about coordination, authority and legitimacy, not as system-level complementarities but as dynamic, negotiated processes shaped by national legacies and enacted in day-to-day interactions.

In *A Theory of Employment Systems* (1999), David proposed a typology not of countries or models, but of employment rules – the mechanisms that govern how work is organized, monitored, evaluated and rewarded. These included rules defining managerial authority, coordinating tasks, structuring performance appraisal systems and determining how effort is compensated. Rather than assuming these rules flow from macro-institutional arrangements, David showed that they are constructed and contested at the workplace level, though always within the bounds of national frameworks.

David offered a truly middle-range theory, one that neither dissolved structure into agency nor treated institutions as immovable constraints. Employment rules were living arrangements: open to revision, shaped by legal anchors and organizational practice, and subject to strategic use by both employers and workers. What mattered was not just what the rules were but how they were implemented, enforced or circumvented. For instance, performance appraisal rules may exist on paper but how they are applied depends on managerial discretion, trust, workplace culture and representation structures (Marsden 2004; Marsden and Sezer 2026).

A main insight of David's work lay in showing that similar employment rules take different institutional forms and meanings across national contexts. Thus, a performance-related pay system in the United Kingdom embedded in individualized incentives, differed fundamentally from one in France, where performance evaluations were formalized, codified and linked to

negotiated classifications. These were not surface-level variations but reflections of deeper understandings of fairness, authority and the employment relationship.

David's attention to rules also helped him avoid reifying national models. Rather than treating countries as coherent 'types' of capitalism, he foregrounded institutional contradiction, hybridity and adaptation. A single national context could contain multiple employment logics: public versus private, multinational versus small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), unionized versus non-unionized. This complexity was especially evident in cross-country sectoral comparisons such as those involving telecoms, public services or manufacturing (e.g., Doellgast and Marsden 2019).

Moreover, David's focus on rule negotiation and enforcement anticipated later developments in institutional theory, particularly the turn towards institutions as enacted practices. His work prefigured concerns central to the study of institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006), while retaining attention to structural foundations. For David, rules mattered precisely because they were not infinitely malleable: they had histories, legal anchors and normative force. This orientation bridged a long-standing divide in comparative research between institutionalist analysis and organizational behaviour (see Salesina 2026). By showing how national institutions shape, but do not wholly determine, how firms manage work, David developed an approach that was both comparative and organizationally grounded. His work remains cited across disciplinary boundaries – from industrial relations to human resource management (HRM), economic sociology to labour law – because it provides a framework that is both abstract enough for comparison and concrete enough to explain variation in real workplaces.

Nowhere is this dual commitment to abstraction and institutional concreteness more evident than in his comparative studies of France and the United Kingdom. These cases became, for David, not simply illustrative contrasts, but laboratories for testing how similar economic pressures could yield different organizational outcomes when filtered through distinct legal and representational frameworks.

## 3.2 | Comparison Without Typology: France, the United Kingdom and the Space between

Much of David's comparative scholarship gravitated towards the United Kingdom and France – two countries that, in many comparative capitalism frameworks, are often placed within the same broad liberal category. In Hall and Soskice's *Varieties of Capitalism* (2001), for example, the United Kingdom is treated as a liberal market economy, while France is either ambiguously placed or bundled into a residual category of 'mixed' or ' Mediterranean' capitalism. But for David, these categories obscured more than they revealed. His empirical work demonstrated how employment institutions and normative expectations diverged in subtle but significant ways.

David was fluent in French and deeply attuned to both French and British institutional cultures. His cosmopolitanism was grounded: he read original texts, collaborated with local scholars
and approached institutions not as foreign curiosities but as coherent, interpretable systems. This sensibility helped him avoid ethnocentric comparisons. He resisted binaries like rigid/flexible or centralized/decentralized, showing instead how institutional meaning arises through practice. British flexibility, for example, was reframed as managerial discretion; French rigidity as procedural fairness.

This was evident in his analysis of voice and representation in the workplace. In a comparative study of individual voice mechanisms, David (Marsden 2013) explored how frameworks for employee expression reflected distinct logics of participation and legitimacy. Both countries experienced deindustrialization, union decline and the rise of performance management. Yet the ways in which employees could express dissatisfaction or assert preferences were embedded in national traditions of law, industrial relations and administrative culture.

In the United Kingdom, voice mechanisms were voluntary and decentralized, often negotiated informally or through unions. Union presence was uneven and, where strong, could substitute for individual voice. Consultation depended heavily on managerial goodwill. In contrast, France relied on statutory representation. Personnel delegates were legally mandated in firms above a certain size, with rights to information and challenge. This dual-channel model allowed individual and collective voices to coexist, often complementarily. These mechanisms were part of the firm's legal infrastructure, lending stability and enforceability absent in the UK context.

What made David's comparison powerful was not just institutional contrast but attention to lived experience. He examined how workers understood rights, how managers interpreted obligations and how interactions played out in evaluation, grievance and authority relations. His analysis moved between legal design, organizational process and normative consequence.

David's work unsettled both convergence theses and stylized dichotomies. Managerial practices such as performance-related pay or quality management led to divergent outcomes in different contexts, mediated by institutions. Categories like 'coordinated' and 'liberal' capitalism failed to capture the diversity of arrangements within each country. Institutional difference often resided not in macro structures but in the fine print: representation, appraisal and managerial discretion.

His approach allowed for institutional complexity and hybridity. Both the United Kingdom and France exhibited tensions between formal rules and informal practices, legal mandates and improvisation. David showed that no system is fully consistent internally, let alone with ideal types. His comparisons illuminated the 'spaces in between' – where actors navigated ambiguities and invented practices that defied classification.

Thus, David's comparative method was non-typological. He did not categorize systems but traced how institutions shape and are shaped by strategic interaction. His focus was on dynamic divergence, mediated by the frameworks and infrastructures that give rules their meaning. His comparisons were also normatively engaged: exploring how institutions empower or marginalize, include or exclude.

This sensitivity to institutional meaning and normative consequence also informed David's response to one of the most dominant tropes in organizational theory: the idea that globalization or managerial diffusion would lead to convergence across systems. Rather than treating institutional diversity as a temporary deviation from a global norm, he demonstrated its persistence and explanatory power even under shared external pressures.

## 3.3 | Embedded Diversity and the Limits of Isomorphism

David's comparative work stood as a sustained challenge to institutional isomorphism. Where DiMaggio and Powell (1983) emphasized convergence under pressure, David showed that similar reforms produced different outcomes. Institutions are not neutral containers; they shape how practices are interpreted and experienced.

His studies of performance-related pay in the British public sector are illustrative. Although introduced to boost motivation and accountability, performance-related pay often reinforced managerial authority and individualized assessment, undermining collective norms. Lacking trust, transparency or shared criteria, performance-related pay became contested terrain (Marsden 2004). By contrast, in France, similar tools were embedded in frameworks that emphasized procedural fairness. Appraisals were standardized and linked to negotiated grading systems. The same reform yielded different meanings and effects depending on the institutional 'grammar of rules'. David recognized that diffusion does not entail convergence. Practices are translated and locally adapted. He anticipated critiques of isomorphism, emphasizing institutional bricolage and actor-driven adaptation. His work also highlighted political economy: reforms imported from elsewhere may misfire or generate unintended effects if unsupported by institutional infrastructure.

Where isomorphism suggests growing uniformity, David found enduring diversity, not just in structures but in expectations and governance modes. His methodological critique cautioned against assuming that formal similarity meant functional equivalence. Instead, David maintained that institutions must be studied in practice. This insistence on studying institutions in context – on understanding how they operate not only on paper but in practice – required more than methodological care. It demanded an ability to cross intellectual boundaries; as we have noted above, David used a variety of disciplinary tools in his contextualized comparisons.

David's contribution endures not only in what he wrote but in how he wrote: empirically rich, conceptually nuanced and ethically attentive. Comparison, for David, was not a tool of abstraction but a vehicle for understanding and improving the institutions that shape our working lives – themes that are developed further in the contributions to this special issue, which are summarized below.

## 4 | The Special Issue: Individual Insights and Cross-Cutting Themes

The special issue begins with two theoretical contributions. In the opening article, Marc Salesina (2026) repositions David
not only as a foundational figure in ER and human resource
management but also as a significant and underappreciated orga-
nizational theorist. Salesina interprets David's work through the
lens of organizational dialectics, arguing that his account of the
interaction between individual agency, institutional frameworks
and organizational architecture constitutes a unified theoretical
foundation for analysing core organizational tensions. This rein-
terpretation draws attention to the ways in which ER-specific
practices shape organizational forms and illuminates how David's
work continues to offer valuable insights for understanding the
institutional and structural dynamics of modern organizations.

A second theory contribution by Gahan and Turnbull (2026) examines what the authors contend is David's most important contribution: his theory of employment systems (ToES). The authors quite rightly note that by the time ToES appeared in print, labour markets in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere) were beginning to alter in fundamental ways the standard form of the employment relationship – especially in terms of the proliferation of non-standard employment arrangements. This, however, should not be taken as a fundamental critique of David's core insights in ToES. According to Gahan and Turnbull, ToES offers theoretical insights that remain fundamental to understanding the nature of contemporary employment relationships and which can explain how and why employment rules now deviate from the predominant systems of the previous century. Gahan and Turnbull persuasively argue that the same mix of rigour and detailed historical appreciation of industries and national employment systems demonstrated in ToES offers a clear path for addressing new employment arrangements and building a ToES fit for the twenty-first century. David was right, according to the authors, when he insisted that any general ToES needs to account for important economic realities such as transaction costs, the limits to rational decision-making and the potential for opportunism and malfeasance in labour markets. In short, the article concludes that David's core insights remain fundamental to understanding the nature of contemporary employment relationships.

The third article, a comparative analysis by Thomas Amossé, Alex Bryson, John Forth and Héloïse Petit (2026), addresses the micro-foundations of national employment systems in Britain and France, offering a detailed examination of the organizational and institutional underpinnings of inter- and intra-country variation. While affirming the enduring significance of national models, their study also uncovers substantial within-country heterogeneity, particularly in the British context. Their findings shed light on how differences in employer-employee networks, financial structures and institutional linkages shape employment practices and outcomes. The authors extend David's comparative tradition by employing harmonized, linked employer-employee data (data that David himself worked on in the past) to explore how national and organizational systems of employment co-evolve.

Building on David's ToES, Sara Maric, Elke Schuessler and Laura
Thäter (2026) explore the contested domain of platform-mediated
work. Their article reveals how digital labour platforms construct
work relationships that exist in a grey zone between employ-
ment and self-employment, challenging traditional regulatory
distinctions. The authors argue that David's framework (Marsden
1999) helps illuminate the psychological, economic and legal
underpinnings of these hybrid systems. In so doing, they move

beyond binary worker classification debates to develop a more
nuanced, systems-level account of the constraints and possibil-
ities of platform work. Their analysis highlights the need for
institutional innovation to safeguard against opportunism and
to ensure functional alignment between organizational control,
worker autonomy and societal value.

In their article on organizational governance and employee
well-being, John W. Budd and J. Ryan Lamare (2026) further
develop David's theory of employment contracts and governance
(Marsden 2021). Drawing on data from the European Working
Conditions Survey across 35 countries and nine governance
archetypes, they examine how organizational forms affect the
trade-off between extrinsic (e.g., pay) and intrinsic (e.g., recogni-
tion, meaningfulness) rewards. The authors argue, in a manner
consistent with David's expectations, that governance structures
serve as observable signals of contract reliability, shaping employ-
ees' trust in employers' implicit commitments. Their findings
reinforce the centrality of organizational governance in mediating
subjective well-being and extend David's theorizing across diverse
political and economic settings.

Jonathan Booth and Daniela Lup (2026) tackle the issue of inclusion in employment systems, focusing on employees with disabilities. Their analysis probes the effects of five discretionary work arrangements – including flexible scheduling, part-timing and pay-for-performance – on job satisfaction, fairness perceptions, work stress and work-life balance. Contrary to expectations that discretion is inherently empowering, their findings suggest that not all forms of workplace discretion enhance well-being for workers with disabilities; some may rather exacerbate exclusion or strain. This work provides a valuable extension of David’s interest in the design and functionality of employment systems by highlighting how different forms of discretionary arrangements intersect with diverse employee needs and capabilities.

Lynn Shore, James Dulebohn, Chenwei Liao and Karen Ehrhart (2026) examine how the ER system influences recruitment by focusing on the employee-organization relationship (EOR) and its effect on job seeker behaviour. Their study draws from survey data on job seekers and recruiters to show how employer image and perceived organizational support – mediated by the recruiter’s own relationship with the organization – influence application intentions. The recruiter’s EOR amplifies the effect of positive employer images, enhancing the perceived fit and support potential of a job offer. This article highlights how David’s ideas on psychological and employment contracts can yield insights even in the pre-employment phase of the employment relationship, offering a micro-foundational view of how employment systems shape workforce attraction.

Finally, as a fitting tribute to his legacy, David co-authored his
final peer-reviewed paper with Lisa Sezer (Marsden and Sezer
2026), who completed work they began together before David's
death, revisiting the effectiveness of PRP systems in the education
sector. Using longitudinal survey data from schoolteachers in
England and Wales, they show that perceptions of procedural
fairness in appraisal processes are critical to whether merit pay is
seen as motivating or divisive. Their findings underscore the con-
tingent nature of performance-related incentives: when embed-
ded within well-designed and trusted appraisal procedures,
these systems can support motivation and performance; when appraisal quality is weak or perceived as arbitrary, they foster division and undermine objective attainment. This work speaks directly to David's long-standing interest in the linkages between pay systems, organizational practices and employee motivation (see, e.g., Marsden and Richardson 1994).

Though clearly diverse, the eight contributions highlight two unifying themes observable in David's academic career. One is the institutional diversity and contextual embeddedness of employment systems. Whether in analysing cross-national data on worker well-being, comparing institutional foundations in France and the United Kingdom or assessing how recruitment processes unfold under different organizational conditions, the articles demonstrate how David's work remains highly attuned to differences in rules, norms and expectations across settings. In this way, the special issue underscores the adaptability of his theoretical framework to emerging organizational forms and different country contexts.

A second major insight concerns the governance of work through formal (economic) and informal (psychological/cultural) mechanisms, including appraisal systems, discretionary arrangements, psychological contracts and legal-institutional hybrids. Several contributions engage with David's interest in incomplete contracts and organizational coordination, extending his applications to address pressing contemporary challenges – from ensuring fairness and recognition, to regulating novel work forms and promoting inclusive practices amongst workers with disabilities.

## 5 | Conclusion

David Marsden's work fundamentally transformed how industrial relations scholars view the employment relationship, emphasizing the importance of understanding (and utilizing) economic theory and models, while at the same time recognizing the contractually incomplete and socially embedded nature of employment systems. The contributions in this special issue – spanning topics from national employment systems and digital platform work to employee voice and PRP – demonstrate the enduring relevance and adaptability of David's body of work across diverse institutional and organizational contexts. One of David's key insights was that employment contracts, regardless of their attachment to economic constraints, cannot be fully specified ex ante; rather, they are shaped and continually renegotiated through national legal norms, workplace rules and organizational practices, making the employment relationship a powerful lens for comparative economic and institutional analysis.

Collectively, the contributions that form part of this special issue reaffirm David's commitment to studying employment systems not as static economic models but as dynamic, evolving arrangements shaped by ongoing negotiation, trust and adaptation within distinct institutional constraints. His rigorous comparative method challenged simplistic convergence theories by foregrounding the resilience and practical significance of institutional diversity. David's ability to capture the Zeitgeist by selecting topics that would eventually become booming areas of academic and popular interest is of both conceptual and practical significance: his frameworks continue to provide

an integrative, cross-disciplinary foundation for analysing how work, governance and organizational authority are experienced and contested in everyday life. In bridging abstraction and institutional concreteness, David Marsden's scholarship remains an essential guide for understanding – and shaping – a better world of work.

## Acknowledgements

This article introduces a special issue based on a 2-day conference in honour of David Marsden on 26-27 June 2023 at the London School of Economics. We are grateful for support for the conference and special issue from the LSE Department of Management and the *BJIR*. Emma Ward, John Heywood and Ryan Lamare deserve special thanks for their help. We dedicate this article to David's beloved family, Alice Lam and Antony Lam-Marsden.

## Conflicts of Interest

All three authors acknowledge that they were close colleagues and friends of David Marsden.

## Endnotes

¹The bibliometric analysis draws on citation data from Web of Science and Google Scholar, accessed in January 2025. The co-citation network was constructed by identifying the 25 most frequently co-cited works alongside Marsden's *A Theory of Employment Systems*, and visualized using *VosViewer*. The co-word analysis was based on keyword co-occurrence across 150 peer-reviewed publications citing Marsden's book, filtered for relevance and disciplinary diversity. This approach captures both intellectual proximity (co-citation) and semantic resonance (key-word clustering) to map Marsden's embeddedness in institutional and organizational research.

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