International Human Resource Management-MJ Version

‘mainstreamed’ within industrial relations, rather than treated as subsidiary
(and perhaps irrelevant?). Undoubtedly there are important cross-national differ-
ences in all these respects.
Are there distinctive configurations of these four regimes in different
national settings? It seems possible to delineate, albeit crudely, four simplified
‘models’. This takes slightly more account of the diversity of national situations
than Esping-Andersen’s three-part classification, which has been criticised for
neglecting important cross-national differences (Arts and Gelissen, 2002:
142–6):

• an Anglo-American model (which applies to a large extent in all English-speak-
  ing countries), characterised by a liberal property regime, a Fordist production
  regime, a liberal welfare regime, and a formally egalitarian but in practice patri-
  archal gender regime;


• a northern European model, with a strongly regulated property regime, varying
  degrees of status-based production regime, an extensive (social-democratic or
  conservative) welfare regime, and in some cases a relatively egalitarian gender
  regime. This model displays two main variants, considered in more detail below,
  which may be termed ‘Nordic’ and ‘Germanic’;


• a southern European model, with a property regime which is also regulated
  (though in very different ways), varying degrees of status-based production
  regime, a less developed welfare regime, and a ‘male breadwinner’ gender regime
  (though with recent modifications); and


• a Japanese model, with yet another form of regulated property regime, a dis-
  tinctive status-based production regime, a conservative welfare regime, and a
  ‘male breadwinner’ gender regime.

These are crude stereotypes, indeed caricatures; in the case of Europe they will
be refined below. However, they serve to underline the point that capitalisms
aredifferent, and that the social context of industrial relations varies so greatly
between different parts of the world that we cannot assume that the same
dynamics necessarily apply. Indeed on the contrary, as Peck insists (1996: xv),
‘labor markets...workin different ways in different places’.

3 SOME IMPORTANT ANALYTICAL DISTINCTIONS

Status and contract

Writers on cross-national economic differences have often based their analyses
on a limited number of conceptual distinctions. Perhaps fundamental to all of
these is whether economic actors are perceived primarily as autonomous

National industrial relations and transnational challenges 417