International and Comparative Employment Relations: Assessing the Global, National and Local Level Contributions to the Field of CER

Excerpt

The book International and Comparative Employment Relations by Bamber et al. (2016) is an indispensable piece for any researcher interested in comparative employment relations (CER) and how labor and employment have evolved in past decades. Focusing on a comparison of several countries, both developed and emerging, this study explores how common pressures and divergent consequences inherent in different industrial relations systems affect employment relations. The theoretical approach used by the editors is drawn from the Varieties of Capitalism literature. This literature postulates that despite major changes in the global economy since the 1980s, different models of national capitalism have co-existed and have kept (at least in part) their coherence. National systems of employment relations, as the chapters in the book show, faced common liberalizing pressures but the consequences have been diverse since national institutions still matter in some respects. While rich empirical results and comparisons enable us to capture the evolution of contemporary employment relations systems, by focusing on national institutions and regimes, as the authors suggest in their concluding chapter, this does not bring to light the importance of other changes affecting the dynamics of social relations in the workplace, including the models of capitalism that underpin them. Systems, regimes, and regulations are not the only factors structuring action that enable us to understand contemporary employment relations. …