Industrial relations is a multidisciplinary field that studies the employment relationship. Industrial relations is increasingly being called employment relations because of the importance of non-industrial employment relationships. Many outsiders^[who?] also equate industrial relations to labour relations. Industrial relations studies examine various employment situations, not just ones with a unionized workforce.

Industrial relations has three faces: science building, problem solving, and ethical. In the science building phase, industrial relations is part of the social sciences, and it seeks to understand the employment relationship and its institutions through high-quality, rigorous research. In this vein, industrial relations scholarship intersects with scholarship in labor economics, industrial sociology, labor and social history, human resource management, political science, law, and other areas. In the problem solving phase, industrial relations seeks to design policies and institutions to help the employment relationship work better. In the ethical phase, industrial relations contains strong normative principles about workers and the employment relationship, especially the rejection of treating labor as a commodity in favor of seeing workers as human beings in democratic communities entitled to human rights. The term human relations refers to the whole field of relationship that exists because of the necessary collaboration of men and women in the employment process of modern industry. It is that part of management which is concerned with the management of enterprise - whether machine operator, skilled worker, or manager. It deals with either the relationship between the state and employers and workers organisation or the relation between the occupational organisation themselves.