Work and Employment in Europe

A New Convergence?

Peter Cressey, Bryn Jones

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415125321
• eBook ISBN: 9781134801749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Europe's work force is subject to a dual convergence process: from the transnational spread of new management practices and from the political force of European union. Trade union rights, hours of work, working practices and training provisions are all being subjected to these twin pressures. Work and Employment in Europe assesses both the convergent and divergent developments taking place at both pan-European and cross-national levels. Comparisons of British and French retailing, German and Italian manufacturing jobs, German and British youth training schemes, and small business strategies of Britain, France and Italy show simultaneous elements of convergence and national specifity.

1

CONVERGENCE AND/OR SOCIETAL EFFECT FOR THE EUROPE OF THE FUTURE?

Marc Maurice

INTRODUCTION

The projected political and economic integration within the EC and the extension of markets into the ex-communist economies suggest a new process of Europeanisation of distinct national societies. How can social scientists analyse these processes? In particular should Europeanisation be viewed as a convergence of the various societies or, on the contrary, will this apparent convergence be thwarted by the exacerbation of national peculiarities? To further debate on these questions I will draw upon my own experiences as a sociologist, working with economist colleagues, in a particular type of international comparative analysis.

In the first part of this chapter I shall outline the context within which ‘Europeanisation’ is located. Here it necessary to stress the heterogeneity of the different nations involved in this collective process. A process which, in our perspective, means creating new social spaces and new actors. In this respect I shall refer to the different temporalities within which national spaces, and the actors associated with them, have been formed historically. I will thus have recourse to history, in order better to understand the future development of Europe without, however, falling into the trap of historicism. These initial observations will refer to various aspects of the current debate within the social sciences: sociology, economics, history.

The second part of the chapter will deal directly with the question of whether Europeanisation is likely to involve convergence, or its negation by national particularities. This assessment allows some observations on the theoretical implications of likely responses to the question, and on the ensuing methodological choices. To answer this question we must probe beneath its assumptions. It is true that support for the European project already reflects varying degrees of genuine convergence of political will amongst the member states of the EC, even though this convergence is rooted in a diversity of national strategies. However, there seems to be a popular assumption—sometimes a fear—that the current process of ‘unification’ necessarily involves a kind of convergence in which the elimination of economic specificities also means the elimination of the social, and even political, specificities of the various countries.

This question itself has a number of component propositions. Before unambiguous answers can be given, each of the terms—nation, state, convergence, specificity, unification—ought to be clearly defined. Within the constraints of the present chapter it is not possible to elaborate these possible meanings. Let us, to progress the argument, simply consider the possible nature of unification. A united Europe need not necessarily be one which is institutionally unified. It is possible, for example, that there might be a common will and attempts to define rules and obligations whose constraints and benefits would be equally shared by each member state. Yet, even under these conditions, one could still imagine that each of the countries would adopt different solutions or make different choices to comply with, and acquire gains from, the common framework.

This is where a sociological or, from my point of view, a ‘societal’ perspective becomes essential. For neither legal nor economic perspectives and policies will be able to overcome national particularities or specificities. The principal reason for this is that each individual society is itself a particular ‘actor’ in the European game. Thus each of these actors has its own interests, capabilities and resources. This perspective allows us to highlight some of the theoretical—and ideological—implications which underlie the more or less explicit choices behind decisions and agreements reached at the European level.

Such an approach is, of course, very academic in its nature. Nevertheless it could also be of considerable value to all of those involved in making these decisions and choices, in various capacities. Public debate tends to polarise between a notion of convergence that rejects national specificities and, on the other hand, an excessively rigid emphasis on national specificity which contradicts the goal of unification. Both of these approaches can only diminish the notion of a united Europe. By contrast the societal perspective can be the analytical starting point for an approach which conceptualises Europeanisation as a process, but steers a course between the two poles of the debate.

The relevance of our societal perspective is that it has previously been used to deal with contrasting academic approaches to social change between different societies. These approaches mirror the positions on convergence and national specificities in the contemporary debate over Europeanisation. Like the European convergence assumptions for example, economic development approaches in the 1950s and 1960s adopted a cross-national method of analysis which assumed inevitable convergence to a universal type of society—often as a liberal-pluralist model. Opposed to the crossnational perspective was the cross-cultural approach, for which the particu larisms of national cultures meant that specific developments were always tied to the national cultures.

In contrast to these polarised arguments societal analysis grew out of comparisons of work and employment in different societies which took account of specific societal institutions, but did not reduce the relevant phenomena to expressions of these institutions. It was possible to demonstrate that phenomena, such as occupational structures or wages systems, neither evolved autonomously through a universal logic of development, nor simply expressed the culture of the society in question. On the contrary, such phenomena developed in a ‘social space’ arising from the interaction of institutions such as the education system and production system. Analysis thus proceeds not on the basis of universal phenomena abstracted from their societal contexts, nor from a macro characterisation of each society as a whole. Instead the comparison is between the relevant societal complexes of each country—within which the phenomena are both situated and socially constructed by the actors involved.

In the first instance, however, I want to indicate the relevance of a societal approach by a brief overview of the recent trend to historical reflections amongst investigators of economic change. That is to say, why extrapolation from economic models or general theories of politico-legal decision-making will not help to assess the likely Europeanisation process. This recourse has emerged from an awareness amongst social scientists that both economic rationality, and its institutions such as the firm, are not absolute constants in all societies. Rather, historical investigations have arisen because industrial economies, of the same market-capitalist stamp, vary in the institutions which regulate them, and because of past variations in the historical stage at which forms of regulation are adopted.

Thus future convergence on solutions to problems of economic regulation is problematised by methodological and substantive considerations. Substantively because of the evidence that past institutional solutions—the Keynesianism or mass production/mass consumption structures of ‘Fordism’—varied in source and achievement between societies. Methodologically because these enquiries show that existing sociological or economic models—for which convergence was a more straightforward proposition - were inadequate to explain the complexity of what has already developed in each industrial capitalist society.

CONCEIVING THE FUTURE OF EUROPE BY REFERENCE TO HISTORY

The more general awareness of the methodological complexity of assessing large-scale economic adjustment between countries is indicated by the question posed by Robert Boyer about the future of the old continent of Europe:

will one single dominant model be imposed on an international scale, or is it possible to conceive of a variety of national trajectories?

(Boyer, 1989:1418)

Boyer’s question is significant as it comes at the end of an article, with which Anglophone readers may not be familiar, where he makes a plea for a new alliance between economics and history. In such a stark form, moreover, it forces us to remember that the European integration is far removed from the model originally followed by the United States of America. The European Community is made up of a number of nations which already have a long history, some of which acquired their present shape only after being constituted or experiencing great upheavals in their territory and population in the course of successive wars. The differences in temporality that characterise the social and economic development of each nation have helped, just as much as the culture associated with them, to form the identity of each of them. In this sense, the Europe of twelve is already heterogeneous, and Greater Europe, enlarged to include the countries of eastern Europe, will be even more heterogeneous, for all sorts of reasons, the most obvious of which is the existence for several generations of communist regimes which, in spite of their desire for uniformity, never succeeded in erasing the historical and cultural specificities of each country. (See Héthy, this volume, Chapter 9.)

As far as the Europe of twelve is concerned, it is sufficient to observe how the firm, the institution which embodied both industrialisation and the.market economy, has evolved in each nation over the course of time, in order to become aware of the particularities specific to each one of them. Indeed, so wide are the divergences that a whole wave of economists, notably Robert Boyer in France and Michael Piore and Charles Sabel in the United States, have had recourse to history in order to explain recent changes in the economic order and the model of the firm, changes which neo-classical economics cannot account for. Boyer, for example, has developed the original Marxist insights of Palloix and Aglietta, on stages of capitalism which are regulated by complexes of government, corporate and industrial relations institutions, to explain the emergence of the market flexibility regimes of the 1980s and 1990s (Boyer, 1986:111–35; Boyer and Orléan, 1991:233–72; Piore and Sabel, 1984; Aglietta, 1976).

This recourse to history, in which certain sociologists (e.g. Burkart Lutz, 1984) are also involved, is certainly not fortuitous. Does it not, in part, reflect the intellectual disarray of certain researchers after the period dominated by holistic approaches, particularly among Marxists and structuralists? It would appear that attempts are now being made to look back in time in order to uncover the origins or traces of the forms or regulation in which actors’ strategies—or forms of the social bond—developed. Moreover, at the same time, the relativity of economic rationality, both in time and space, is recognised.

This interest in history is not in itself an innovation in the field of the social sciences, and is today no longer a surprise, even though sociology developed (at least in France with Durkheim) in opposition to history.¹ I shall return, however, to the distortions to which such allusions might give rise; and which, for historians, constitute the worst of errors, that of anachronism, or the equally pernicious one of teleological illusion. Just as it is essential today for economists attempting to conceptualise the newly emerging economic order to take account of ‘the historicity of economic phenomena and of their variability in time and space’, to quote Robert Boyer (1989:1397), so it is also necessary to accept that this objective will be best achieved by cooperation between economists or sociologists and historians. The multi-disciplinary approach should not reduce the specificity of each discipline: on the contrary, each discipline should be enriched by the contribution of the other. This point will be taken up again later.

To return to our subject, it is now also important, in considering the future of Europe, to use an historical perspective in order to reveal the variability over time of the forms of economic and social regulation that have gradually crystallised in each country and given rise in consequence to forms of variability in space. Such a strategy would lead to the combining of the historical approach with that based on international comparisons.

To confine ourselves to the ‘immediate past’, international comparisons carried out over the last decade have already highlighted the variability of responses to economic crisis, and strategies for escaping from it, which leading European countries, the USA and Japan have implemented. In this sense, the last decade might be judged to have been characterised, not so much by convergence, but rather by differences between the strategies adopted by the various countries in response to economic crisis.

To summarise these initial observations, it may very well be valuable, in analysing the processes of Europeanisation, to develop research programmes that take into account the variability in time and in space of the economic, social and political choices and solutions adopted by the various current or potential member states of the European Community. This could be achieved by combining the historical approach with that based on international comparison.

CONVERGENCE AND SPECIFICITY: THE THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

Old wine—new bottles: defining the actors

The preceding observations are also part of a wider sphere of reflection. After the recent ebbing of the grand theories, whether Marxist or structuralist, and the ensuing debates between supporters of the ‘holistic approach’ and ‘methodological individualism’, a new tendency is emerging, one which is aware of the limits of individualism. This swing of the pendulum has several consequences: on the one hand, as Robert Boyer recently pointed out, greater interest is being shown in intermediate notions and objectives which had hitherto been concealed by both the holistic and the ‘individualistic’ approaches. On the other hand, account is being taken of the interactions between actors and the spaces or spheres that are being constructed in time (Boyer, 1989:1402). In other words, we are witnessing a renewal of interest on the part of researchers in the search for new solutions to classic questions in the social sciences: the interactions between micro and macro analysis of economic and social phenomena, and the articulation between actors, structures and spheres of action.

The search for new paradigms is inspired in part by the renewal of the paradigm of the firm as an entity with definite relationships to other social and economic institutions. It also coincides with the previously mentioned revival of interest among economists and sociologists in international comparisons and historical research. As a result, issues such as the achievement of model forms of business organisation, the systems of industrial relations, and the spread of a transnational recipe for economic growth resemble, in many respects, problems of the 1960s, or even 1970s, and are reproduced in new terms in today’s debates. The most notable recrudescence is the thesis of the convergence of industrial societies and its contrast with the stress in the culturalist approach on the specificity of national cultures, or cultural invariants, to be found in social and cultural anthropology.²

In consequence, any attempts to conceptualise or rethink the process of Europeanisation lead us to cast a critical eye over these different approaches, which implicitly underlie the policies and practices that constitute the process of European unification. The approach of societal analysis, outlined below, lays particular emphasis on the identification of the relevant social actors and the social spaces within which they can act. This consideration is becoming important in the debates over European unification; but notions such as ‘subsidiarity’—the demarcation of separate spheres of regional, national and political authority—do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction—‘Europeanisation’: Motor or Mirage for Employment Systems?
• 1 Convergence and/or Societal Effect for the Europe of the Future?
• 2 Maastricht and the Governance of Labour Markets: The Case of Ireland
• 3 The Future of Employee Relations Within European Enterprises
• 4 Euro-Unionism and the Great Auction: An Assessment of the Prospects for the European Labour Movement Post-Maastricht
• 5 Commonalities and Divergences in Small-Firm Competitive Strategies: Textiles and Clothing Manufacture in Britain, France and Italy
• 6 New Production Concepts in Germany and Italy
• 7 Patterns of Working Hours in Large-Scale Grocery Retailing in Britain and France - Convergence After European Union?
• 8 How Young People are Marginalised in English and German Labour Markets
• 9 Hungary’s Employment System on the Way to a Market Economy—in 1990 and Afterwards
• 10 Workers’ Rights and European Integration: An External View from the Nordic Area
• Index