 German chemical giants' business and social models in transition – financialisation as a management strategyJürgen Kädtler
Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2009, vol. 15, issue 2, 229-249 Abstract: This article is concerned with the financialisation of the German chemical and pharmaceutical industry since the 1990s and its impact on industrial relations in these domains. Those relations are analysed as a particularly cooperative variant of the German ‘social partnership’ that developed out of Verbundchemie' s production and social model and proved highly stable up until the 1990s. Drawing on the restructuring of Germany's traditional ‘Big Three’ chemical and pharmaceutical companies - Hoechst, Bayer und BASF - oriented towards the financial markets, it is demonstrated that gearing tactics to the financial market leads individual companies from very similar starting points to highly contrastive lines of development. This fact serves to underline that corporate strategies geared to the financial markets are determined by the companies' management, rather than by institutional investors. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that workforce representatives capable of managing conflicts can exert considerable influence on this development. Keywords: financialisation; social partnership; conflictual partnership; shareholder-value management; German chemical industry (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:treure:v:15:y:2009:i:2:p:229-249 DOI: 10.1177/102425890901500206 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research |
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