‘Commodifying institutions’: vertical disintegration and institutional change in German labour relations

Hajo Holst

Work, Employment & Society, 2014, vol. 28, issue 1, 3-20

Abstract: The article analyses the impact of vertical disintegration on German labour relations. Previous research argued that the proliferation of outsourcing, divestment and non-standard employment results in a ‘dualism’ between a core of secure workplaces and a growing fringe of precarious jobs. Evidence from two key sectors, metalworking and telecommunications, however, suggest that this clear-cut division is replaced by a fragmented landscape of labour relations. In terms of institutional change, the analysis reveals a specific form of incremental transformative change, namely a shift in the meaning of formally stable legal-political institutions. Even in the allegedly stable core areas, the institutions of labour relations are gradually transformed from market-constituting institutions to market-dependent variables. Vertical disintegration plays an important role in this process of institutional commodification. It not only moves the core–periphery boundary; it is also deployed to subjugate collective bargaining, workplace co-determination and the utilization of labour law to firm-level economic calculations.

Keywords: call centres; economic sociology; Germany; institutional change; labour relations; metalworking; outsourcing; telecommunications; temporary agency work; vertical disintegration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wes.sagepub.com/content/28/1/3.abstract (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:28:y:2014:i:1:p:3-20

Access Statistics for this article

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