Conflictual Complementarity: New Labour Actors in Corporatist Industrial Relations

Assaf S Bondy

Work, Employment & Society, 2022, vol. 36, issue 4, 683-700

Abstract: Liberalisation of industrial relations entails the weakening of unions and a respective rise of alternative, ‘new labour actors’, altering traditional class representation by introducing new strategies. Research on this phenomenon has focused on decentralised contexts, where new actors are seen to pursue both independent strategies as well as cooperation with unions to contest rising employers’ discretion. Drawing on multiple qualitative methodologies, this article analyses the roles and contributions of new actors in the context of corporatist industrial relations, to find rising conflicts between them and unions. Combining social movement theories of strategic change with industrial relations theories of power and theories of institutional complementarity, reveals conflictual forms of complementarity between new actors and corporatist unions. Through interacting with new labour actors, corporatist union strategies are seen to change in a ‘spin-off’ form, reforming unions’ traditional power and dominance to (partially) counter previous liberalisation of industrial relations.

Keywords: complementarity; corporatism; inter-actor relations; new labour actors; social movements; unions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0950017020981557 (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:36:y:2022:i:4:p:683-700

DOI: 10.1177/0950017020981557

Access Statistics for this article

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