Abstract
This is the latest edition of a highly successful series on comparative employment relations that has chalked-up over 30 years of publication. For those of us that are long in the tooth it is sobering to recall the first edition published back in 1987. Like long-running theatre productions, the plot has stayed broadly the same over the years (with some tweaks) but there have been some changes to the cast along the way. Russell Lansbury and Nick Wailes have stepped back from the editorial team, replaced by Fang Lee Cooke and Virginia Doellgast, and there are new author teams for the chapters, for example, on the UK (Johnstone and Dobbins), Italy (Dorigatti and Pedersini) and India (Noronba and D’Cruz). There is also the welcome introduction of a chapter on South Africa (by Maree, Klerck and Benya). All are great additions to the cast.
Books on comparative employment relations need to focus on countries, processes across countries, or a combination of the two. This book has always primarily examined industrial relations ‘systems’ by country, though the Introduction and Conclusion highlight comparative processes. The common format adopted by the country chapters facilitates a comparative perspective. As such, this book provides an essential set of building blocks for international and comparative industrial relations courses, and this helps to explain the success of this textbook over the years. It also provides an extremely useful and concise encyclopedia of industrial relations actors and institutions in the selected countries. You want to know about trade union confederations in France, for instance? Check out Béthoux and Laroche's chapter. There are several countries included in the book that I must confess to not knowing a great deal about: the relevant country chapters would be my first port-of-call to rectify this.
Each chapter broadly follows a common format: contexts, actors, processes and current issues, supplemented by guides to further reading and useful websites. The new edition updates information on each of these. Perhaps most notably, the current issues section in each chapter enables the book to keep abreast of the wide-ranging and often fundamental developments that are taking place in the world of work and employment. For instance, the UK and Australian chapters highlight the issues arising from the emergence of the ‘gig economy’. Most chapters mention responses to COVID, though fuller discussions probably await the 8th edition.
The introductory and concluding chapters by the editors situate the country chapters in a global, comparative context, and evaluate how far recent developments in work and industrial relations actors and processes are similar across countries. Unsurprisingly, the editors adopt a convergence/divergence perspective. To do this, they draw (like their immediate predecessors) on the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach. To my mind, this discussion works much better in the new edition. A problem in the previous edition was that ‘varieties’ was used as the primary organising framework but its dichotomous approach (liberal market economies vs co-ordinated market economies) lacked complementarity with the multiple types of country covered in the book. In the new edition, the editors make more use of work such as Kathleen Thelen's, which emphasizes that a variety of models can emerge despite common trends, whilst also drawing on work by Baccaro and Howell that highlights the commonality of these trends (towards neo-liberalism and deregulation). The editors also draw on a recent strand of industrial relations research which highlights sub- national differences.
These themes are brought to fruition in the conclusion. Here it is argued that, whilst there are indeed similarities in aspects of industrial relations change in most countries covered in the book, there is persistence of distinct institutional arrangements and national differences (pace Thelen). The actors in each setting respond to these common challenges in different ways, based in part on extant institutional arrangements. An emphasis in this edition is the role of employment relations actors in influencing outcomes. The editors also highlight differences between sectors (e.g. between highly unionised sectors and those entirely without unions) within countries. The conclusion finishes with a very useful and insightful discussion of global forces influencing employment relations, such as multinationals, global supply chains, digitalisation and artificial intelligence, climate change, and public health crises.
I hesitate to make recommendations for the next edition but for my money I would like to see a little more on the influences of financialisation and changes in corporate ownership.
Financialisation, defined by Epstein (2005: 3) as ‘the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors in domestic and international economies’, is mentioned at the outset but does not feature much henceforth. Yet it has had substantial impacts on employment security, employer strategies and national welfare regimes. Patterns of corporate ownership have also changed considerably in some countries in the twenty-first century – note the decline of the relative importance of enterprises listed on stock exchanges in the USA, UK, and some European countries (though not in Australia and China) and the corresponding rise of private-equity ownership. To my mind these developments are intertwined with those other influences on employment relations changes identified by the editors.
These observations aside, this book has done a great job over the years in charting the contours and changes in employment relations in major national economies. This edition is no exception, and I strongly recommend it to anyone teaching or researching comparative and international employment relations.