Conclusion
Whether any of this was ever achievable, we will never know. Such potential experiments became irrelevant after Thatcher won the second miners' dispute of 1984 and the country embarked on a very different type of structural reform and the union movement lost members and power year by year.
This perhaps was one of the reasons why, in his later years, Robinson concentrated so much of his effort on missions, largely to developing countries, for the ILO. There his views that bargaining structures were capable of being changed and that wage outcomes to some extent should be administered had a more sympathetic audience than in the UK. However, some of Robinson's thinking also has a strange resonance with economic debate in Britain today. His ambition to reform wage bargaining was based on a belief that the market set only broad limits and was motivated by the contemporary anxieties about both the level of inflation and the inflation/unemployment trade off. Today and in more recent times, concern about inequality has caused some economists to suggest that intervention in a now very different wage determination process is both desirable and feasible.Robinson was primarily an institutionalist, researching industrial relations as much as conventional labour economics. Some contemporaries accused him of neglecting theory—indeed of being positively hostile to it. This was unfair. What he despised was theory from those who had little or no knowledge of the institutions and history of the labour market. Sometimes, he was possibly too frank in expressing his contempt but he was intent on nurturing and protecting political economy. This reflected not just a view about what researchers should be doing but a view about what undergraduate education should be about. For many years, the Oxford PPE syllabus had a “bridge” optional paper between Politics and Economics entitled “Labour Economics and Industrial Relations”.
In the 1970s through until the early 1990s, when industrial relations issues were such a prominent part of the national political debate, it was one of the most popular options. Robinson taught it for many years. He recognised that the vast majority of his students were not going to become professional economists and that indeed the specifics of what they had learnt in Oxford economics courses would soon be forgotten once they had moved into the world of work. Certainly, they needed to learn technical aspects of the subject but this should not lead to the undergraduate syllabus simply being a piece of watered-down professional training. Professional preparation, in that sense, was the preserve of the Master's degree. He saw his role as developing students' general intellectual and cognitive capabilities through studying subjects they found interesting. That is what would remain with them in later life. He wanted his students to learn to think critically and carefully, to assemble and use evidence effectively and to write persuasively.Perhaps this influence on generations of undergraduate and graduate students, some of whom did go on to work on labour matters (whether as academics, public servants or union activists), together with his early insights into the workings of an imperfectly competitive labour market, are his two lasting legacies.