Getting together or breaking apart? Trade union strategies, restructuring and contingent workers in Southern Europe

The article considers the strategies of trade unions towards the representation of call centre workers. Using a comparative case study, it examines the divergent union responses to the growth of contingent labour by looking at the telecommunications industries in Italy and Greece. Although the trade unions in Italy pursued inclusive strategies embracing the call centre workers and negotiating the restructuring of the whole sector, the unions in Greece followed a policy of exclusion leaving call centre workers outside representation and negotiating their internal restructuring. The article argues that the different union identities, and the diverse power resources and internal organizational politics help explain the variation in the trade unions’ strategic responses

Social partners and the welfare state: Recalibration, privatization or collectivization of social risks?

This is the author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by Sage Publications and can be found at: http://ejd.sagepub.com/.The comparative political economy literature has been inconclusive in its assessment of the extent of welfare state retrenchment. One strand of research emphasised that welfare states have not undergone outright retrenchment, but recalibration. Another strand argued that there is a shift towards the privatization of risks and increased reliance on the market. While these assessments likely represent differences in magnitude, our paper seeks to contribute to these debates with an alternative argument: collectivization of social risks. We employ a method of contextualized comparisons, examining three cases of collectivization across diverse contexts: the financing of disability insurance in the Netherlands, training provision for employed and unemployed in Greece, and regulation of atypical contracts in Italy. The paper concludes by discussing the political dynamic that ensued and the wider relevance of the argument to debates in comparative political economy and comparative industrial relations

Exploring TQM awareness in the Greek national business context: between conservatism and reformism cultural determinants of TQM

This paper develops the theoretical understanding of the application of Total Quality Management (TQM) in business environments that differ from those from where it emerged. Business systems that are less developed tend to adopt more 'sophisticated' and formal strategic initiatives. The adoption of TQM by Greek organizations is a prime example. However, less has been said about the understanding of TQM or its cultural determinants in such environments. This paper, based on the results of 73 semi-structured interviews conducted with managers working in Greek public and private organizations, argues that there are two antithetical business-cultural 'forces' - conservatism and reformism - that seem to substantially affect the awareness and application of total quality concepts. Both features create pressures in the system, either restraining or promoting TQM implementation. In this context, the tension between traditional business culture and a modernization logic is the key to understanding the development of TQM.No Full Tex

Union autonomy in context: An international comparison

This is the second of two linked articles on the question of union autonomy; the first appeared in the previous issue of this journal. It considers state control and approach to union autonomy in the wider context of state controls on unions' bargaining activities including industrial action. Two questions are posed: whether there is any “balance” between state respect for union autonomy and state confidence that union collective bargaining activities take place within a legally prescribed framework; and how the state in the UK was able to shift so rapidly from the traditional, voluntary approach and the incipient neo-corporatism of the 1970s, to the detailed and onerous regulation of union internal and external activities in the 1980s and 1990s

Union autonomy, a terminal case in the UK? A comparison with the approach in other European countries and the USA

Since 1979, the Conservative government in the UK has introduced wide-ranging and detailed regulations for the conduct of union internal affairs; a number of other Western industrialized countries have not done so (or have not done so to the same extent) but have continued their tradition of relying on unions themselves to establish democratic procedures. Alternative views of the role of the state in industrial relations underlie these differences. A second, linked article, appearing in Employee Relations (Vol. 15 No. 4), examines state approaches to union autonomy in the context of attitudes towards other controls on union activities and attempts to explain the successive shifts in British policy in the UK since the 1960s