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Elias's great work, The Civilizing Process (2 vols), was originally published in the inauspicious year of 1939. Elias wrote it as an associate of Mannheim's Frankfurt circle. The Second World War, and his fraught attempts to establish himself in British academic sociology in the first two decades after 1945, plunged his works into obscurity. Only now, as his early publications are starting to become available in English, is the resonance and insight of his sociological method coming to be widely appreciated. This paper considers the main features of the figurational approach and critically assesses its value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offers a critique of important contributions made by the `new' approach in the debate on the structure and development of industrial relations in capitalist society. Features of the new industrial relations approach; Influence of the struggle between capital and labour on social and economic relations; Terms of reference for the process of capitalism; Problem of transcending capitalist forms of organization.