of models of management organization, product strategy, production organization
and working practice has been observed amongst major companies based in dif-
ferent countries. Instances include car manufacture and telecommunications
(Katz and Darbishire, 2000). Such convergence processes extend also to inter-firm
relations which cross-cut national boundaries. As the major car manufacturers
internationalize their sources of supply, they are also increasingly imposing com-
mon production and work practices down the supply chain. With single sourc-
ing and JIT (just-in-time) management, firms along the supply chain are
increasingly dependent on each other, but most particularly on the multina-
tional enterprise that organizes inter-corporate production. ‘Eurocompanies’ can
have Europeanizing consequences beyond their own, directly owned, operations.
In summary, the societal-specific institutions in which enterprises are
embedded at national level are a prominent influence on their behaviour and
structure. Concomitantly, the diversity which exists within national systems,
its overlapping nature across national borders and the convergence of produc-
tion and management practices within and between MNCs as a result of two-
way processes of cross-border diffusion, mean that the Eurocompany is not
reducible to a set of national variants. Neither is the Eurocompany a uniform
transnational form: rather it signifies a plurality of forms which transcend
national borders within Europe. The implication for European-level industrial
relations arrangements, such as European Works Councils (EWCs), is, first, that
they will not be primarily international extensions of different national indus-
trial relations arrangements and, second, that commonalties between EWCs
(and other European-level structures) will be evident according to influences
which cut across national borders such as sector and type of enterprise.
4 EUROPE AS A DISTINCT SOCIAL SPACE
Growing economic integration within the European Union stimulated pres-
sures for a ‘social dimension’, given impetus by the ‘social charter’ proposed by
the Commission in 1989. This was carried forward by the social policy proto-
col of the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, subsequently incorporated as the social chap-
ter of the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty. Yet, as compared with the progress of
economic integration, the development of ‘social Europe’ has been hesitant
and more limited. Although extending European-level regulation of aspects of
industrial relations significantly beyond anything that has previously been
achieved, the measures involved are nonetheless restricted in their scope. This
reflects the limited legal competence of the EU and its institutions to legislate
in the industrial relations field (Hall, 1994; Streeck, 1994). The inability of the
EU to develop a vertically integrated system of industrial relations, providing
comprehensive regulation of the European labour market, which mirrors those
466 International Human Resource Management