Regulation and representation in Italian industrial relations: between continuities and contradictions

Sabrina Colombo and Stefania Marino

Chapter 4 in Work and Employment Relations in Southern Europe, 2023, pp 73-92 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Italy has been ranked at the bottom of the various indexes of corporatism due to its low level of institutionalization of industrial relations. However, social dialogue has played a dominant role in Italian policy-making, especially in the 1990s. Such contradictions are primarily explained by a higher degree of variation in the strategies and behaviours of industrial relations actors, as due, in turn, to the variation of their respective interests and relative power. Although aspects of such voluntaristic traditions have been celebrated by industrial relations actors, the regulatory efficacy of the model has been called into question in recent times, amid increasing pressures deriving from changing economic and political contexts as well as the expansion of unregulated areas of work. In this chapter, we look specifically at the period following the 2008 economic and the COVID-19 crisis and analyse the impact on the Italian model of industrial relations and its actors. The analysis of the Italian context highlights how social actors continue to play an important role in the regulation of the economy. However, specific tensions remain in relation to the three main domains of action considered in this chapter, namely social dialogue, collective bargaining and representation.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance; Law - Academic; Law - Professional; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781789909548/9781789909548.00009.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:19388_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().