Labor Relations is a topic that was quite popular in the early
years of the journal, comprising 25 percent or more of published
articles in the 1965–1969 and 1980–1984 time periods. However,after 1989 the topic virtually disappeared, with only one more
published article on it in the 2010–2014 time frame. This seems
consistent with the significant drop in the number and influence of
unionized employees and their unions, particularly in the USA,
during the 1980s. While labor unions remained more consistently
influential in some countries outside the USA, the USA-centric
tendency in Journal of World Business, particularly in the 1980s,
may have created a pattern in which labor relations scholars saw
other outlets as more appropriate.