Introduction1
The son of a coal miner, Derek Robinson was brought up in Barnsley and entered the Civil Service in a clerical post straight from school. His background is fundamental to understanding his work as an economist.
He was fond of telling how his line manager in London asked him not to answer the office phone because of the poor impression his Yorkshire accent might give. He became a union activist there and as a consequence won a union scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, after which he went on to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he obtained a First in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). After a brief spell teaching at Sheffield University, Robinson took an appointment at the Oxford University Institute of Economics and Statistics where he remained for the rest of his career, simultaneously holding a Fellowship at Magdalen College. Although he revelled in Oxford college life, he continued to embrace his trade union routes. A regular at the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), he was on first name terms1 Much of the biographical material on Derek Robison is taken from two obituaries I wrote not long after his death. They can be found in the January 2015 Newsletter of the Royal Economic Society (Mayhew 2015a) and in the September 2015 issue of the Economic and Labour Relations Review (Mayhew 2015b).
K. Mayhew (*)
Oxfordshire, UK
e-mail: ken.mayhew@pmb.ox.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 545
R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_23
with most of the prominent union leaders of the time who recognised someone who believed in the union movement but who was prepared to criticise its shortcomings and mistakes. By the same token, employers saw in him an academic who would treat each case on its merits, who would objectively examine the facts before coming to any conclusions or recommendations without fear or favour.
Robinson was a researcher whose main concern was the practicalities and realities of the labour market, practicalities and realities that he believed too many theoreticians ignored or assumed away. This approach meant that his contribution was as strong, if not stronger, in the corridors of Whitehall as in the groves of academe.When he arrived at the Institute of Economics and Statistics in 1961, the golden era of industrial relations at Oxford represented, amongst others, by Hugh Clegg, George Bain, Allan Flanders and Alan Fox was in full swing. Though Clegg, Bain and Flanders subsequently decamped to the University of Warwick, Robinson maintained and enhanced the study of industrial relations at Oxford alongside Bill McCarthy and Arthur Marsh. The three of them never worked together and the other two were not economists, but Robinson regarded the study of labour economics and industrial relations as inextricably intertwined. He was very firmly an institutionalist.
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