Corporate Governance Systems and Industrial Relations

The individualization of industrial relations and the general decline of unions over the past two decades have neither been a uniform nor an uncontested process.* In some contexts, the practice of industrial relations has remained persistently collectivist, while unions retained a prominent role in some national settings. While it can be argued that much of this uneven nature of systemic change reflects strategic choices by social actors, the range of options and outcomes reflects structural realities. The latter encompass the sources of firm finance, corporate governance, and embedded formal and informal rules and norms. In this chapter we review the alternative institutional explanations for persistent variations in national industrial relations practice, and test these explanations in the light of large scale trans-national survey evidence, provided by the Cranet survey (Cranet is a survey of HR practices in private and public sector organizations across Europe and the rest of the world). Given the chapter’s central coverage of corporate governance, we focus on those institutional accounts that place governance at the centre of their analysis: this includes both rational incentive accounts and the socio-economic account of Hall and Soskice (2001), rather than approaches (see Amable, 2003) that see governance as only one of many formative institutional features, or more mainstream contemporary regulationist thinking. However, we return to the relevance of such accounts in our concluding sections.