LAC Alan Fox later became quite well known...
When the Second World War broke out, Fox joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) and applied for aircrew training, but was rejected due to poor eyesight.[2] He served initially as a ground staff photographer in India and Burma, with the rank of Corporal. He volunteered for service as an aerial photographer with No. 3 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, which undertook hazardous missions over Japanese-held areas, using North American Mitchell aircraft. Fox, who was promoted to Sergeant, received the Distinguished Flying Medal (RAF). After the war, Fox worked for the Forestry Commission in Scotland.
In 1947–48, he undertook a diploma in public administration at Ruskin College, an independent institution in Oxford. Fox then entered the University of Oxford, where he spent the majority of his academic career, studying economics and political science at Exeter College. In 1950, while lecturing at Ruskin, he completed a Bachelor of Letters (B.Litt.) thesis on the history of industrial relations in the Black Country.[3] That same year, Fox married Margaret Dow, with whom he had two sons. In 1958, he became a research fellow at Nuffield College and in 1963, he became a lecturer at Nuffield, in the Department of Social and Administrative Studies.
Fox rose to prominence with a 1966 paper, Industrial Sociology And Industrial Relations, written for the Donovan Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations (1965–68). In it he described the dominance in industrial relations of two, rival ideological/theoretical perspectives.[4] The first, for which Fox coined the name "unitary" (later unitarist), denies that the interests of employers and employees were significantly different from each other.[5] For the other perspective, he used an existing term from political science: "pluralist", a perspective which suggests that multiple parties are involved in decision-making. However, Fox himself was strongly influenced by a third major theoretical position: the "radical" perspective, especially Marxism.[6]