Allan Flanders (27 July 1910 – 29 September 1973) was a British academic, author, and founding member of the Oxford School of Industrial Relations, along with Hugh Clegg, Alan Fox, Lord William McCarthy, Sir George Bain and Otto Kahn-Freund. The school was a developer of the idea of collective bargaining and overall proponents of bargaining power, legal contracts, normative regulation and institutionalized conflict resolutions as issues of significance and focus in the field of industrial relations.
Biography
Flanders was born 27 July 1910 in Watford, Hertfordshire to William Flanders and Emily Shaw. Flanders, rather than studying at university, opted to take up a position with the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK) or International Socialist League, a socialist non-Marxist, Leninist group in Germany. From 1929 to 1933, Flanders attended the ISK cadre school in Kassel where he learned to speak German and wrote for the organization. After the rise of the Nazis, Flanders left Germany to take over the operations of the ISK British division which was renamed the Socialist Vanguard Group (SVG). Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Flanders wrote on substantive and philosophical matters relating to socialism, workers rights and labour reform, and editorials on contemporary politics in the SVG's publication Socialist Commentary as well as in other reviews.
After his return from Germany in 1932, Flanders continued to write for the SVG as well as writing for the German newspaper Der Funke. He also worked as a travelling salesman until the Second World War when he found work as a draughtsman, which he did throughout the war, working in a factory. From 1943, Flanders also began working for the Trades Union Congress and Allied Control Commission for Germany, moving back to Germany from 1946 to 1948. After working for the Control Commission, he accepted a Whitney Foundation fellowship to study industrial relations in the United States.
In 1949, after returning from the US, Flanders was offered a Senior Lecturer position at Oxford University in the field of industrial relations. At the time, he was not in possession of a university degree. At Oxford, Flanders met and worked with Hugh Clegg, considered another founding member of the Oxford School of Industrial Relations with whom he wrote and worked throughout his career. After working with multiple Nuffield College fellows during his academic career (including Clegg), Flanders was made fellow at Nuffield College, the graduate college for the social sciences at Oxford, in 1964.
Flanders remained at Nuffield until 1969, when he took a position as a commissioner for the Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR). In 1969, Flanders was also given the title of visiting professor in industrial relations at Manchester University. Flanders left the CIR citing ill health after contracting a debilitating disease which left him reliant on a wheelchair. After leaving the commission, Flanders was appointed reader of industrial relations at Warwick University in 1971, where he worked until his death on 29 September 1973.
Personal life
Flanders was married three times during his life. His first wife was Mary Saran, a fellow member of the ISK who helped set up the British Division. In 1950, he married Edith Moore, who died within the year. His third wife was Annemarie Klara Laura Tracinski, a former labour court judge in Germany, whom he married in 1951 and remained married to until his death. He had no children.
Early works
Flanders' early works include an extensive amount of editorial publications for magazines such as The Vanguard, known later as the Socialist Vanguard, and Socialist Commentary. Flanders supplied copious amounts of articles for particularly the Vanguard or Socialist Vanguard, writing a total of thirty-six from 1934 to 1939. Pre-World War II, Flanders advocated revolutionary socialist thought. His writings during this time focused primarily on international politics rather than what dominated his later works, industrial relations. Themes of class struggle, the exploitative nature of capitalism, union militancy, anti-clericalism, opposition to communism and social democracy, and imperialism permeate his work in the 1930s. Following the onset of World War II, Flanders' shifted from revolutionary socialism towards social democracy and began delving into the central issues of industrial relations.