Indian Journal of Industrial Relations
The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, subtitled A Review of Economic and Social Development, is a quarterly refereed journal published in New Delhi by the Shri Ram Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources. Founded in 1965 — its first volume opened in July of that year — it is one of India's longest-running journals in its field, devoted to the dissemination of knowledge for effective management of human resources and harmonious industrial relations. With ISSN 0019-5286, an archive preserved on JSTOR, listing in major international databases and an ABDC rating, the journal occupies a central place in the study of labour relations, personnel management and related social and economic questions in India. Its readership spans academic scholars, policymakers, practising managers and students.
Founding in 1965 and the Shri Ram Centre
The journal is the publication of the Shri Ram Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, an autonomous non-profit society founded in 1963 and registered under the Societies Act, based at Safdar Hashmi Marg, Mandi House, in New Delhi. The Centre describes itself as a premier organisation in research, training, consultancy, publications and seminars in industrial relations and human resource management, and it is recognised by the Government of India as a Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. The journal followed two years after the Centre itself, making it a founding-era publication: the first issue, Volume 1, Number 1, appeared in July 1965, and included work on the sources and evolution of Indian labour relations policy that is still cited as a record of the field's formative debates. Ahead of the launch, the Centre had convened a national seminar on industrial relations in a developing economy in February–March 1965, setting the intellectual agenda the journal would pursue.
Six Decades of Uninterrupted Publication
Longevity is the journal's defining credential. JSTOR's journal information recorded it entering its 46th year of uninterrupted publication, and library records show the run continuing well beyond that milestone — Volume 56, Number 2, for example, appeared in October 2020 with a full table of contents of contemporary research. In a field where Indian journals frequently lapse or change publishers, an unbroken quarterly run from 1965 gives the Indian Journal of Industrial Relations an unusual archival value: researchers can trace, within a single title, how Indian scholarship responded to the growth of the organised industrial workforce, the era of national labour commissions, economic liberalisation, the expansion of informal and unorganised work, and more recent shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on employees, all of which appear as subjects in its pages.
Scope: Industrial Relations, Human Resources and Social Development
The journal's subtitle, A Review of Economic and Social Development, signals that its remit is wider than workplace bargaining alone. Its stated coverage includes industrial relations and human resources, labour relations, personnel management and related social and economic issues. The contents of a representative recent issue show how that breadth works in practice: studies of theory and reality in human resource and industrial relations research sit alongside work on home-country determinants of outward foreign direct investment, the effect of women directors and board independence on family firm performance, prediction of foreign exchange market crashes, employee challenges during COVID-19, organisational justice and employee voice behaviour, mothers at work, work-life benefits and well-being, and a diversity scorecard case study of Larsen and Toubro. The journal thus treats the employment relationship as its centre of gravity while welcoming the economic and organisational research that surrounds it.
A Bridge Between Practitioners and Social Scientists
The Shri Ram Centre's own account of its mission is that its work over more than four decades has helped bridge the gap between practitioners and social scientists, and the journal is the principal print instrument of that bridging. Its declared readership makes the intention explicit: academic scholars, policymakers, practising managers and the student community are all named as audiences, and its subscription base is described as extending across government institutions, universities and private sector organisations in India and elsewhere. A journal read simultaneously in university departments and in personnel departments must publish research that is methodologically serious but legible to non-specialists, and the Indian Journal of Industrial Relations has built its academic reputation in India and abroad on sustaining that balance across hundreds of issues.
The Centre Behind the Journal: Research and Training
The journal cannot be separated from the research institution that publishes it. By the Centre's published figures, it has completed over 175 research projects, conducted over 3,000 training programmes and published over 65 titles based on its own research studies — figures later accounts round to 172 projects and 69 books, reflecting different counting dates. Its projects have been sponsored by government departments, public sector undertakings, industrial companies and international organisations, with funders including ministries of the central and state governments, the Planning Commission, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the World Bank, UNDP, the Ford Foundation, the International Labour Organisation and other international agencies. Research and workshops have addressed grassroots democracy's contribution to health and education, and women and labour in both the organised and unorganised sectors. That project base feeds the journal with an applied research pipeline few university-published titles can match.
Indexing, Abstracting and Digital Archive
The journal is listed in the EBSCO, Gale/Cengage Learning and ProQuest/CSA databases, according to its JSTOR journal information, and it holds an ABDC (Australian Business Deans Council) journal quality rating of C. Its full archive is digitised in collaboration with JSTOR, which preserves and extends access to back volumes; individual articles carry stable JSTOR URLs and are routinely cited in that form. Among the notable contents preserved there is Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom: An India Perspective, published in Volume 42, Number 2, in October 2006 — an indication of the journal's practice of carrying contributions from eminent persons alongside empirical studies, as well as theme-based special issues with eminent guest editors and reviews of the latest titles from India and elsewhere.
Special Issues and Editorial Features
Three features distinguish the journal's editorial programme in its own description: research-based articles and communications from eminent persons, reviews of the latest books from India and elsewhere, and a theme-based special issue programme with eminent guest editors. Special issues let the journal concentrate attention on subjects too large for a single article; a documented example is the January 2013 special issue on unorganised workers (Volume 48, Number 3), which included an empirical study of the determinants of wages in India drawing on National Sample Survey data and examining how wages relate not only to economic factors but to identities such as sex and caste. In a country where the overwhelming majority of workers are in unorganised employment, that editorial choice reflects the journal's longstanding attention to labour beyond the factory gate.
Readership and Institutional Reach
The journal describes itself as widely subscribed by government institutions, universities and private sector organisations, and library catalogues across India confirm holdings in university collections, where it is classified as a quarterly English-language refereed journal with ISSN 0019-5286. Its reputation is characterised in those catalogues as high, in India and elsewhere. For human resource and industrial relations teaching in India, the journal functions as a standard reference: its six-decade archive is a primary source for the history of Indian labour policy, collective bargaining, trade unionism and personnel practice, while its current issues carry the peer-reviewed studies — on voice behaviour, well-being, diversity and family firms — through which Indian management scholarship discusses the contemporary workplace.
Peer Review and Scholarly Standards
The journal is a refereed, peer-reviewed title: directory records describe a rigorous peer-review process for original research, review articles and scholarly contributions, intended to ensure the quality and validity of published work. Its ABDC C rating places it within the internationally recognised tier of business and management journals used in academic assessment, a notable standing for a journal published by an independent Indian research society rather than a commercial multinational publisher. Combined with its presence in EBSCO, Gale and ProQuest databases and the JSTOR archive, the rating means work published in the journal is discoverable and citable within the systems through which management scholarship worldwide is organised.
Standing in Indian Labour Studies
The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations holds a position in Indian scholarship that combines institutional history, archival depth and continuing relevance. Founded in 1965 by a research centre established two years earlier, published without interruption into its sixth decade, and anchored in an organisation that has run thousands of training programmes and hundreds of sponsored research projects, it documents — and helps to shape — how India understands work, workers and the management of people. For scholars of industrial relations and human resource management, for policymakers concerned with labour in the organised and unorganised sectors, and for managers seeking research grounded in Indian conditions, it remains one of the essential New Delhi journals in its field.
