Ideology and Industrial Relations in New Zealand

It is a truism that there is in New Zealand culture a widespread if inarticulate suspicion of ideas, of theory, of ideology and a general preference for the practically useful, for the matter-of-fact treatment of things, for the pragmatic. While the polarisation of theory and practice is not a logically sustainable one — pragmatism after all is based on some theory, some system or principle purporting to explain or predict relationships between events — nevertheless it has in New Zealand a strong emotive appeal that can be used to stigmatise those who profess a particular ideology or who dabble in the ‘unreal’ world of ideas.