Industrial relations and Economics and Sociology of Conventions

Beyond an economic determinism associating industrial structures (or "Fordism") to collective bargaining, EC/SC envisage Industrial Relations (IR) from the concrete coordinations of employees starting at the workplace level, as a normative expression of their collectivities. It has analyzed firstly IR as "investments in form", that can be used as reference enabling people to find their way in labor conventions. IR are not the result of a pure spontaneous mobilization of the workers' collectivity, but their dynamic is based on legal definitions of the collective agreements, the procedure of negotiation and their actors (employees-employers), by which it refers to legislation as a state production expressing conventions of the state. The sociohistorical emergence of labor law and employment explains a radical modernization of IR evidenced by the French case at the beginning of the XXth century. IR have followed paths specific to different states influencing each other in a "histoire croisée", leading sometimes to transnational negotiated legislations as in the 1990s EU. The current developments of IR during the neoliberal period witness an open-ended process articulating new issues, such as employment in the face of intense restructuring, and reactivating mobilization on wages issues in a context of inflation.