No need to go! Workplace studies and the resources of the revised National Statement

In their article 'Unintended consequences of human research ethics committees: au revoir workplace studies?', Greg Bamber and Jennifer Sappey set out some real obstacles in the practices and attitudes of some Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs), to research in the social sciences and particulalry in industrial sociology. They sheet home these attitudes and practices to the way in which various statements in the NHMRC's National Statement [1999] are implemented, which they say is often in 'conflict with an important stream of industrial sociological research' in Australia. They do not discuss the recently completed revision of the NS. We undertake to show that the revised National Statement meets their concerns about research in industrial sociology, and to draw attention to the resources of the revised National Statement that engage with those concerns. A more general aim is to display the greater scope, in the revised National Statement, for researchers to show to HRECs that their research is justified by virutue of its reflecting the established methodology and traditions of their discipline. The revised National Statement, we suggest, provides for a more flexible and responsive approach than its predecessor to the ethical review of many areas of research.