As one of the youngest of the social sciences, the approach of industrial relations to the empirical world is still in a state of flux. Among the most important and well known meta-theoretical efforts to date was the formulization by John Dunlop of the conception of an industrial relations system. The essay by Noah Meltz in this volume reviews its status today, three decades after it was first proposed. He notes that Dunlop developed the model in order to provide tools of analysis to interpret and to gain understanding of the widest possible range of industrial relations facts and pratices. The model was composed of actors (labour, management and the state) each with their own ideology and power interacting to produce outcomes, which Dunlop called rules within a context of technological, market and power constraints.