Horen Voskeritsian

How Can Competitiveness be Achieved in Post-crisis Europe: Deregulating Employment Relations or Enhancing High Performance Work Practices?

Abstract The recent Eurozone crisis has reinvigorated neoliberal policies and brought to the fore an academic and policy debate over the deregulation of employment relations’ institutions ‘in the name of competitiveness’. In the context of this debate, we ask the following question: have firms with employment relations institutions been less able to improve productivity during the crisis? We consider this question by examining data from the European Company Survey. We also look into different models of capitalism to gauge whether there are context-specific institutional effects that may mediate firm-level outcomes. Contrary to the dominant neoliberal discourse, we do not find any strong evidence that employment relations institutions are negatively associated with productivity increases. Instead, we find that certain high performance work practices are positively and significantly associated with productivity increases across EU-15 and in particular institutional contexts. Taken together these results challenge the neoliberal ‘low road’ policies that are focused on dismantling employment relations institutions and suggest shifting the attention towards context-sensitive ‘high road’ policies and practices.

Getting together or breaking apart? Trade union strategies, restructuring and contingent workers in Southern Europe

The article considers the strategies of trade unions towards the representation of call centre workers. Using a comparative case study, it examines the divergent union responses to the growth of contingent labour by looking at the telecommunications industries in Italy and Greece. Although the trade unions in Italy pursued inclusive strategies embracing the call centre workers and negotiating the restructuring of the whole sector, the unions in Greece followed a policy of exclusion leaving call centre workers outside representation and negotiating their internal restructuring. The article argues that the different union identities, and the diverse power resources and internal organizational politics help explain the variation in the trade unions’ strategic responses.

International and comparative human resource management

The internationalization of business and the intensification of global competition have brought new challenges into the management of human resources in multinational enterprises (MNEs). These processes have also created the need for a renewed theoretical and practical interest in the management of the employment relationship from an international and comparative perspective. Academic scholarship responded to this need with the emergence of international and comparative human resource management (HRM) as a disciplinary field (Brewster & Mayrhofer, 2012; Delbridge, Hauptmeier, & Sengupta, 2011; Dowling, Festing & Engle, 2008; Martinez-Lucio, 2014).

The genesis of a scientific community: the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and the field of industrial relations in Britain, c.1950–1983

Scholarship dealing with labour-related topics has been prevalent in Britain from the early twentieth century, but a scientific field dedicated exclusively to the study of industrial relations did not emerge until the second half of the century. Although the socio-economic context of the post-war years provided a fertile ground for the fields emergence, the reason for its eventual development was a socialization process that took place in the early 1950s with the establishment of an informal group of industrial relations scholars. The group would grow to become the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and its activities would help the emerging community develop a ‘disciplinary identity’ and form the institutions that would subsequently define the field of Industrial Relations.

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers, by Michael Perelman

disparity between clients (claimants) and decision-makers should be counterbalanced. To this purpose, according to the authors, it is necessary to intervene with measures that affect the way in which officials assign priorities. This approach arises from the consideration that, usually, officials subordinate the realization of individual rights to the achievement of institutional, organizational, and professional goals. From the perspective of the realization of individual rights, the author is very critical towards activation policies and, in particular, the use of sanctions in case of non-compliance with obligations by social assistance recipients and argues that they do not have to be reduced to a financial matter (considering their goals to decrease public expenditure). The book will interest a variety of readers. Due to the originality of the themes investigated, it will be attention-grabbing and useful both for scholars who are engaged in the study of welfare systems (activation policies, conditionality, etc.) and those interested in the protection of rights.