Employment Relations is widely taught in business schools around the world. However, an increasing emphasis is being placed on the comparative and international dimensions of the relationships ...between employers and workers. It is becoming crucial to consider today's work and employment issues alongside the dynamics between global financial and product markets, global production chains, national and international employment actors and institutions, and the ways in which these relationships play out in different national contexts.
Comparative Employment Relations in the Global Economy addresses this need by presenting a cross-section of country studies - including the UK, Germany, USA, Brazil, India, Russia, China and South Africa - alongside integrative thematic chapters covering essential topics such as theoretical approaches, collective representation and employment regulation.
This second edition benefits from:
Careful updates to theory and real-life developments
A new chapter on employment relations in Italy
Fuller treatment of topics such as labour migration, gender and discrimination, global value chains and corporate governance
A more logical ordering of chapters, with globalization issues appearing earlier
This textbook is the perfect resource for students on advanced undergraduate and postgraduate comparative and international programmes across areas such as employment relations, industrial relations, human resource management, political economy, labour politics, industrial and economic sociology, regulation and social policy.
This book, originally published in 1999, provided the first comparative, in-depth analysis of workplace relations in east and west Germany. The collapse of communism and the ensuing process of reform ...means that East Germany provides a particularly interesting case, having experienced rapid and radical political and economic transformation, and representing an historically outstanding experiment of the shifting of an entire social system onto a different society. This book examines the success of the institutional transfer of west German labour organisations into east Germany workplaces and addresses central questions such as : Can capitalist labour institutions be imposed on a former communist workforce? What conditions determine the success or failure of these institutions? Can 'social partnership/ between capital and labour be learned?
1. Introduction 2. Workplace Relations in the Former Socialist GDR Part 1: The Institutional Setting: Transformation of Workplace Relations in East Germany 3. Transforming Socialist Workplace Relations: Co-operation or Subservience? 4. Social Partnership in the East German Clothing Industry 5. Transformation at Enterprise Level: The Case of Bodywear Part 2: the Cultural Embeddedness of New Labour Institutions in the East 6. Workers' Attitudes in Post-Socialist East Germany 7. methodology fo the Union Membership Surveys in the East and West German Clothing Industry 8. Collective Commitment in the East and West Part 3: Explaining Post-Socialist Participation in Collective Activities 9. Theories of Participation in Collective Activities 10. Determinants of Union Membership Participation in the East and West. Conclusion
The article reviews the existing English‐ and German‐speaking literature on the German works council. Three major research topics are discussed: the ontology and typologies of works councils; their ...current practice and transformation; and their economic outcomes. Although much research has been conducted on the internal functioning of the works council–management relationship, it is clear that we still know little about the determinants of different workplace relations and their outcomes. The article concludes by advocating a reviving research interest in the link between codetermination and political democracy.
This book provides the first comparative, in-depth analysis of workplace relations in East and West Germany. The author examines the success of the institutional transfer of West German labour ...organizations to East German workplaces in an effort to address questions central to the discussion of workplace relations in transitional economies, including: * can capitalist labour institutions be imposed on a former communist workforce? * what conditions determine the success or failure of these institutions? * can 'social partnership' between capital and labour be learned?
Industrial relations (IR) research faces various pressures of internationalization. Not only do global economic forces increasingly shape the subject of the discipline, employment relations, but also ...the academic community itself is becoming more international. The article discusses whether and in what ways IR research is affected by these trends. It is based on a comparative, longitudinal study of journal publications in the USA, Britain and Germany. The findings reveal significantly different patterns of IR research across the three countries. In particular, the strong variation between US and British research patterns challenges the common notion of a homogeneous Anglo‐Saxon style in conducting social science research. The analysis suggests that despite growing internationalization, IR research continues to be strongly embedded in nationally specific research cultures and traditions.
The overall complexity of employment relations today raises new challenges for scholars to extend their work across the boundaries of particular geographies, organizations, theoretical perspectives ...and disciplines. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the British Journal of Industrial Relations, this article introduces key aspects of global challenges facing employees and research on employment relations. Drawing on the articles of this anniversary issue, we identify several theoretical concepts drawn from the wider social sciences that have proven useful in understanding global challenges around global value chains, transnational and multi‐level institutional frameworks, and the role of global finance. We also identify and discuss the emergence of new actors that have a growing salience for global employment research and the establishment of more global forms of worker representation. By further developing theoretical concepts around these global challenges, we argue that employment relations research will increase its dialogue with and distinctive contribution to wider debates in the social sciences.
Germany and the USA have very different systems of legal representation and rights at work, but these differences and their effects may have lessened. We draw on a large-scale telephone survey to ...explore worker perceptions of these systems, and find that perceptions of German workers are more favourable than those of their US counterparts, but not by as much as might be expected. Our findings could in part be explained by cross-national differences in both worker ideologies and the way the different systems function, but they also point to the importance of perceptions in understanding and assessing cross-national institutional differences, and have implications for the future of workplace representation and rights in both nations.
This article argues that in order to successfully explore any structural transformation of industrial relations, actors' attitudes need to be taken into account. In the case of Germany, then, ...significant transformation would be instantiated by change in works councils' traditional cooperative attitudes. Survey findings reveal that despite deteriorating bargaining conditions, cooperative attitudes prevail among works councils in the chemical and postal/telecom industries towards management and union. Contrary to popular scholars this suggests workplace stability rather than change. The article then explores determinants of cooperative attitudes and finds that balanced power relations between works council and management accompany cooperative attitudes. If works councils feel powerful they are more likely to express cooperative attitudes towards management. Thus, even in Germany's highly institutionalized context, workplace cooperation is dynamic and dependent on actors' day-to-day power relations.
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