Suchergebnisse

There is an ongoing debate in business and industrial relations literature regarding the role of social actors in shaping employment policies in multinational companies. However, less attention has been given to how sub-national employment levels are shaped by social actors within multinational companies. This article contributes to that question by investigating the conditions under which social actors engage in the development of regional employment policies, inter-firm employment policies and company-specific policies. Based on four case studies of multinational companies with different subsidiaries in Belgium, the study reveals that social actors shape these employment policies in line with their employment aims where they have access to sub-national resources. Furthermore, high levels of entrepreneurship were found if sub-national resources were available at multiple complementary sub-national levels. The availability of these resources is dependent on the specific historical development of each of these sub-national levels.

The article develops a perspective on Europeanization and employee involve ment centered on social agents. It assesses its contribution to the understand ing of both the making of an EU political field at the top and the emergence of European social fields at the bottom. This perspective, intellectually informed by post-determinist institutional thinking, provides a way to deepen existing analy sis on the variety of employee involvement's practices and its contribution to Europeanization by embedding sociological aspects in European political-institutional study. By using an actor-centred approach of the European institutions, we examine the practices of European Works Councils (EWCs) in the light of the actions of the European actors operating within these European structures. The paper identifies a large variety of EWCs practices which contribute to different extent to Europeanization: practices determined by growing regime competition; practices which help to develop joint interests and commonalities; pro-active practices built on strong trade union structures.

Under international market pressure, companies are increasingly forced to restructure their operations. The diverse outcomes of such restructurings have important employment implications, as illustrated by recent examples such as Opel, Carrefour and AB-InBev. Comparative research has mainly studied the influence of different industrial relations systems on restructuring processes. This institutional literature has, however, been criticised for being overly deterministic. This article aims to accommodate such criticism by not only considering the institutional context (market regime) but also the role of social actors (management and trade unions) and the market environment. The study is based on a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 12 case studies in seven countries. The findings show that institutional structures do restrain social actors' behaviour but that actors also actively use these structures for pursuing their interests and shaping the content of restructuring.