| The Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission has played a central role in the regulation of wages and working conditions in Australia since early this century. The purpose of the dissertation is to determine which of several competing explanatory models can best account for the Commission's handling of wage determination issues in the period 1904-70. The study evaluates these models by analyzing the content of Commission decisions, the circumstances under which they were taken, and the impact of Commission actions on the growth and distribution of wages in Australia.The dissertation concludes that the role strain model provides the best overall explanatory fit. This conclusion is based not simply on the inadequacy of alternative models, but, more positively, on the capacity of the model to account for significant shifts and continuities in the Commission's approach to wage determination.The models analyzed are: (1) the market following model, which asserts that the Commission has basically reacted passively to "market forces" in fixing and adjusting wage rates (2) the industrial peace model, which sees the Commission as an independent body whose main concern in regulating wages has been to maintain a stable industrial relations environment (3) the economic manager model, which holds that the Commission, although formally independent from government, has in practice consistently sought to further the macro-economic policy objectives of government (4) the institutional imperialism model, which assumes that the Commission's primary concern has been to maintain and extend its own influence in the wage determination process (5) the role strain model, which holds that Commission priorities have varied in coherence and direction over time, depending primarily on the nature of the problems at hand and, to a lesser extent, on internal politics and (6) the life-cycle model, which asserts that Commission priorities have altered in line with institutional age. |
