The regulation of collective labour relationships : an assessment of the Oliver Williamson's private ordering-public ordering divide

This research article proposes to undertake a critical review of Oliver Williamson's law and economic theory from the analysis of collective labour relationships in the United States. From a positive point of view, the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate explains that law determines the rules of play (public ordering), and then individuals freely negotiate the rules that constitute the institutions of governance (private ordering). From a normative perspective, Williamson argues that this partition is efficient with respect to the economizing logic of individuals. However, we show that, actually, the American law of labour relationships is based on legal pluralism and that the model of private ordering, which has been less and less used since the 1980s, has strong limitations. In this context, the analysis of the public ordering/private ordering framework that Williamson proposes is of little interest.