Most accounts claiming that there is a distinctive ‘German model’ have focused on manufacturing industries. Less attention has been paid to the service sector, in part because of the claim that many services are not exposed to the international economy. This article examines one service industry in Germany, grocery retailing. This industry is of interest because its most successful firms – the ‘hard discounters’ such as Aldi – deviate from the manufacturing model of production along at least two dimensions: labour relations and product policy. Nevertheless, the hard discounters are very successful, both domestically and abroad. The explanation for the success of the hard discounters offered here is based on both an institution central to Germany – the Mittelstand – as well as industry-specific factors. This complexity cannot be neglected when analysing changes in the German economy

In this article we examine the industrial relations practices of three large European food retailers when they transfer the hypermarket format to other countries. We ask, first, how industrial relations in hypermarkets differ from those in other food retailing outlets. Second, we examine how far the approach characteristic of each company's country-of-origin (Germany, France and the UK) shapes the practices adopted elsewhere. Third, we ask how they respond to the specific industrial relations systems of each host country (Turkey, Poland, Ireland and Spain).

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This article examines how the rules of micro-political game playing, based on the global standardization and cost leadership approach of a European 'hard discounter', are interpreted in practice in Finland, Germany, Ireland, Spain and the UK. We find that small store size, together with centralized authority relations and power structures, make it difficult for actors to engage effectively in coalition-building and political strategies to influence work and employment. Our comparison also reveals that the interpretation of employment-related rules of the game is country-specific. In Finland, and to some extent in Spain, national employment systems enabled employees to build more robust toolkits for playing micro-political games than in the other countries investigated.

■ This article examines the restructuring process following a cross-border merger in the pharmaceuticals sector. We show how national industrial relations systems account for some aspects of cross-national differences in the process and outcomes of restructuring. However, we also argue that institutionalist approaches to comparative analysis must be complemented by a focus on the material interests of organizational actors and the resources that they can deploy.