National Labour Relations in Internationalized Markets: A Comparative Study of Institutions, Change and Performance

Abstract

The regulation of the labour market by industrial-relations institutions has been an important theme in sociology, political science, economics, and jurisprudence. What has particularly attracted attention from a comparative perspective is the astonishing variety of national labour-relations institutions. This variety, when confronted with persistent economic internationalisation raises two main questions. First, does internationalisation impose pressures for change and, more specifically, for convergence on institutions? If such pressures are at work, is there a superior model the national systems are converging on? Second, under economic internationalisation, cross-national differences in national arrangements may have an increasing impact on national economic performance. Hence the question is whether national labour-relations systems perform differently, and to what extent their performance has changed over time due to shifting circumstances. This book investigates these questions on the basis of a cross-national comparison, including comparable data from twenty OECD countries.Part I The Theoretical and Methodological Framework of Analysis 1 Theoretical Perspectives on Internationalization, Performance, and Institutions 2 Concepts and Hypotheses 3 Measurement, Data, and Statistical Analysis Part II The Organization of Interests: Patterns and Dynamics 4 Concepts and Hypotheses 5 Representational Domains 6 Associational Centralization 7 Associational Power Part III Wage Regulation and Bargaining 8 Concepts and Hypotheses 9 The Levels of Bargaining 10 Macroeconomic Wage Coordination 11 The Role of the State 12 The Coverage of Collective Bargaining Part IV Labour Relations and Economic Performance 13 Concepts and Hypotheses 14 The Organization of Interests 15 Wage Regulation 16 Labour Relations and their Interaction with Economic Policy 17 Performance and Labour Relations: Hypotheses and Evidence Revisited Part V Instead of Convergence: Neoliberalism and Lean Corporatism as Alternatives 18 The Prevalence of Path Dependency 19 Collective Action and Bargaining in Internationalized Markets 20 Coordination, Institutions, and Performance 21 The Metamorphoses of Labour Relation