Book Review of "The Changing Faces of Employment Relations: global, comparative and theoretical perspectives" by David Farnham. London, UK, Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-1-137-02712-2

[Extract] Studies of employment relations and its antecedent industrial relations have depended on metaphor for their explanatory models, although not without contention — as to whether or not their seductiveness detracts from the strength of the idea (Dunn 1990). David Farnham's The Changing Faces of Employment Relations: Global, Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives offers the reader changing 'faces' for the intrinsic and extrinsic dynamics of employment relations and 'players' for the tripartite participants in those dynamics, once, to the irritation of trade union leaders, who did not believe they were acting, 'actors' in a 'system' by Dunlop (1960). It is unlikely that today's trade union leaders would regard themselves as 'players' in a 'game' of industrial relations. Changing 'faces', in Farnham's book replaces the morphological 'transformation' used to explain the emergence of new forms of industrial relations by the 1980s by Kochan et al. (1986) and the mutational 'global evolution' of industrial relations by Kaufman (2004). Your reviewer notes that The Changing Face [singular] of Employment Relations was the title and theme of a UK Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) conference in 2013