1st Edition

The Role of Social Partners in Managing Europe’s Great Recession Crisis Corporatism or Corporatism in Crisis?

Edited By Bernhard Ebbinghaus, J. Timo Weishaupt Copyright 2022
    324 Pages 29 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    324 Pages 29 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This comprehensive study of the Great Recession and its consequences provides comparative analyses of the extent to which social concertation between government, unions, and employers varied over time and across European countries.

    This edited volume – a collaboration of international country experts – includes eight in-depth country case studies and analysis of European-level social dialogue. Further comparisons explore whether social concertation followed economic necessity, was dependent on political factors, or rather resulted from labour’s power resources. The importance of social partners’ involvement is again evident during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Examining contemporary crises, the book will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of public and social policies, comparative political economy, and industrial relations – and more broadly to those following European and EU politics.

    Preface by Jelle Visser

    Part 1: Concertation during times of crisis

    1. Introduction: Studying social concertation in Europe
    Bernhard Ebbinghaus and J. Timo Weishaupt

    2. Social concertation in Europe during the Great Recession: Exploring when governments include social partners in crisis management
    Benedikt Bender and Bernhard Ebbinghaus

    Part 2: Preventing a crisis through pragmatic crisis management

    3. Back to the future: Germany’s turn to neo-corporatism in times of crisis
    J. Timo Weishaupt

    4. Wage autonomy, political reforms and the absence of social pacts in Denmark
    Bjarke Refslund and Jens Lind

    5. Crisis management in the Netherlands: Social concertation and constructive opposition
    Marc van der Meer, Anton Hemerijck and Jan Karremans

    6. Unilateral crisis prevention and crumbling social partnership in Poland
    Adam Mrozowicki and Jan Czarzasty

    Part 3: The perils of concertation in austere crisis contexts

    7. The rise and fall of Irish social partnership
    Aidan Regan

    8. The decline of social concertation or the crumbling pillars of legitimacy in Spain
    Oscar Molina

    9. A biased pendulum: Italy's oscillations between concertation and disintermediation
    Arianna Tassinari and Stefano Sacchi

    10. The crisis and the changing nature of political exchange in Slovenia
    Miroslav Stanojević and Alenka Krašovec

    Part 4: Crisis concertation in European perspective

    11. Conflict or cooperation? Explaining the European Commission’s and social partners’ preferences for low-level social dialogue
    Vincent Lindner

    12. Social concertation at a cross-road: crisis corporatism or corporatism in crisis?
    Bernhard Ebbinghaus and J. Timo Weishaupt

    13. Postscript: Social partnership facing the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic
    Bernhard Ebbinghaus and J. Timo Weishaupt

    Biography

    Bernhard Ebbinghaus is Professor of Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, UK.

    J. Timo Weishaupt is Professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Göttingen, Germany.