Informal Labour Market Governance: the Case of the British and German Media Production Industries

Arne Baumann
Additional contact information
Arne Baumann: European University Institute, Florence, Italy baumann@iue.it

Work, Employment & Society, 2002, vol. 16, issue 1, 27-46

Abstract: This article is concerned with labour market transactions in the occupational labour markets (OLM) of the media production industries of Germany and the UK. In both countries, labour markets are characterized by a high inter-firm mobility of workers and patterns of short-term employment and freelance work. In this environment, missing standards produce uncertainty about skill levels of workers and qualification needs of firms. As a result, co-operation costs increase and opportunism becomes possible. It will be argued that, in the absence of manifest labour market institutions such as apprenticeships or skill certificates, which traditionally safeguard OLM transactions, the use of intermediaries and restriction of access will take over as informal mechanisms for governing the labour market. Labour market data from interviews with media firms in Germany and the UK, and from surveys on German and British media professionals, are used in order to test this hypothesis.

Keywords: freelance employment; labour market institutions; media industry; reputation; social mechanisms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170222119236 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:16:y:2002:i:1:p:27-46

DOI: 10.1177/09500170222119236

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().