Accomplishment is to be celebrated but also creates a benchmark Des réalisations à souligner et une référence pour l’avenir

We are honoured to take over as the editors of RI/IR. Our new responsibility, formally assumed in September 2018, weighs heavily on us. We know that the journal is special. Since 1945, it has carved out a reputation for being at the vanguard in presenting research concerning work, employment and the labour market, as well as for being transcendent in how it delivers its product. RI/IR distinguishes itself from its rivals in the way it brings together professionals from disparate cultural, linguistic and epistemological backgrounds. Much like Canada itself, the journal serves as a reminder that diversity is a strength and that respect for difference, far from being a matter of jaundiced tolerance, is in fact a critical precursor of greatness. Aside from its role as a broad church of ideas, methodologies and ideological orientations, RI/IR has provided a platform for francophone scholars to showcase their work alongside their Anglophone peers. This experiment must have seemed risky in fall 1948 when Gérard Dion, the journal’s founding editor, adopted a fully bilingual format for the first time. However, it has worked, so much so that RI/IR is now the only dual-language scholarly publication addressing employment relations to be classed amongst the best in the world. In light of such impressive achievement, we admit to being apprehensive. We know the bar is high for us. We also believe that a more of the same strategy, at least as our only blueprint for action, will likely lead to diminishing returns. The world of 2019 is certainly not that of the mid and late 20th century. However, at the time of writing, our context is also different in important ways to the milieu of even three years ago. Such change matters—for both the way we manage and what we publish. As editors, we must face our responsibility to set goals and priorities for the journal. Such endeavour cannot occur in a vacuum, which gives rise to a somewhat pressing challenge for us: the contemporary milieu of work and employment is difficult to make sense of, let alone formally and confidently characterize. At a global level, its contextual elements are discordant. These include a return to archaic modes of economic protectionism and isolationism in many OECD countries as seen with Brexit and the recent reinstatement of tariffs in the US, distinctively 21st century forms of xenophobia, continuing emphasis on the market solution as the default public-policy remedy to employment and work-related problems and, increasing fragmentation and individualism in workplace bargaining. Certain of these agendas are antithetical with our values as employment relations specialists. Indeed, some of them are anathema to us. However, in our frustration at seeing the jettisoning of much of what we have learned over decades about an ideal institutional and strategic environment for the employment relationship to deliver for each of its parties, we should not be blind to a less obvious point: several of the new contextual elements are thematically incoherent. They resurrect a superficial commitment to the precepts of new-dealism and regulated state capitalism. However, they simultaneously embody intransigent longer-term commitment to measures that exacerbate inequality and wealth concentration and an associated erosion of hard-won worker rights and protections. In many respects, the contemporary era’s mishmash of incompatible ideas that frame (or distract from) debate about employment relations is a repudiation of theory. Such rejection sets up an historical disjuncture that influences how we approach our craft. Until the recent past, what labour scholars said about their subject matter was nested in the orthodoxy that there are, roughly speaking, two competing worldviews. We were, in a sense, testing and …