- usually, voice is articulated within standardised systems of workplace representation
(established by law or peak-level collective agreement, or both); - both socialist and catholic traditions have encouraged non-liberal welfare
regimes which substantially ‘decommodify’ labour; and - the concept of the ‘social wage’ (which in Britain, for example, has
little meaning) is taken for granted: the collective bargaining agenda encom-
passes social policy and the ‘social partners’ are key actors in the development
and implementation of the welfare regime.
In many cases, the institutional framework of industrial relations is the out-
come of past social and economic crises. Austria is a good example: in the
1930s the confrontation between strongly organised employers and trade
unions helped precipitate a bloody civil war and paved the way for the Nazi
takeover; the institutions of ‘social partnership’ were subsequently embraced in
part as a bulwark against a similar disaster in the future. For Austria, and much
more generally in continental Europe, postwar efforts to rebuild a shattered
economy also encouraged the institutionalised regulation of economic activity.
Moreover, the interwar experience of mass unemployment had widely discred-
ited belief in the virtues of ‘free’ markets. An additional factor of importance in
many European countries is the prevalence of coalition governments: the polit-
ical system contains an inbuilt bias towards compromise, creating obstacles to
radical change in the institutional order once this has become stabilised.
Yet if the organised capitalisms of western Europe share important com-
mon features in their industrial relations systems, there are also major
differences – to some degree reflecting the different models of capitalism discussed
earlier. Crouch (1993) has indeed argued that every national system of indus-
trial relations is distinctive, in that the historical evolution of employment reg-
ulation has been shaped by specific national ‘state traditions’. This is certainly
true; viewed from inside Europe, the diversity of national industrial relations
systems is obvious. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a limited number of
national types. Britain is an ‘outlier’: it possesses neither a tradition of exten-
sive state regulation, nor strong central organisations of unions and employers;
consequently it is scarcely possible to speak of a national system, since there is
large scope for each company to establish its own employment regime. But in
mainland (western) Europe it is possible to identify three main ‘models’
(though indeed many ‘mixed cases’ exist):
- a ‘Germanic’ model, in which economic governance is largely private but sub-
ject to strong collective institutions; the actors and procedures of industrial rela-
tions are in important respects juridically defined; and in many cases there is
significant legal regulation of substantive employment conditions; - a ‘Nordic’ model, in which economic governance is also largely private but mod-
ified by an extensive, egalitarian welfare system; an industrial relations system
422 International Human Resource Management