1st Edition
The Role of Social Partners in Managing Europe’s Great Recession Crisis Corporatism or Corporatism in Crisis?
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.