Following a period of almost obsessive academic attention in the 1980s, in the early 1990s the concept of corporatism fell from favor, as its explanatory powers appeared to wane and the Keynesian welfare systems under which it had flourished apparently fell into decline. In the late 1990s, a new interest in corporatism emerged, in line with new patterns of concertation and corporatist behavior in some unexpected places-countries in which the institutional basis for collaborative, bargained methods of policy making and conflict resolution seemed distinctly unpromising. We review the extensive literature on corporatism since the 1970s and consider its applicability in the contemporary period. We argue that an excessively structural-functionalist interpretation of corporatism led many wrongly to predict its demise as a form of policy making, and that an understanding of its persistence and new manifestations today must resurrect and strengthen some early, recently neglected insights into processes of political exchange.

VoC theory seems to be caught in a trade-off between parsimony and explanatory capacity. It provides high heuristic value-added for analysing countries where performance-enhancing complementarities rely on clearly different patterns of actor interaction and forms of coordination. It appears more difficult to extend to ‘deviant’ cases where there is a mix of logics, a high degree of institutional incoherence and an apparent absence of complementarities. This chapter uses the tools of VoC to explain how mechanisms of market and non-market coordination work and change over time in two ‘mixed market economies’ (MMEs) — Italy and Spain. It focuses on the relationship between production regimes and welfare systems, and specifically the wage-labour nexus and employment protection. In contrast to arguments for a distinctive form of state capitalism alongside ‘market’ and ‘managed’ varieties, this chapter argues that the state's role is distinctive but not unique in the Mediterranean countries, and has also undergone considerable change in recent years. It also argues that two different trends can be perceived in these countries: the growth of ‘autonomous coordination’ in which actors seek to manage the economy via new kinds of non-market governance; and ‘market colonization’, a process whereby market modes of coordination emerge and prevail.

This article analyses the role of the state in industrial relations and the development of collective bargaining autonomy in three Southern European countries. The starting point is the impact of contradictory forces on the direction of change. While there are strong pressures towards less state regulation of working conditions and collective bargaining, the macroeconomic framework of monetary union imposed new coordination requirements upon these economies. Social pacts in the 1990s and 2000s provided a mechanism of state-coordinated governance while at the same time helping to enhance negotiated self-regulation. Nonetheless, significant cross-national differences remained in the extent and form of autonomous collective bargaining and in its outcomes. The structural challenges facing social partners in these countries, together with an emphasis on institutional strategies of revitalization, left them in a weak position at both company and national levels to face the challenges brought on by the crisis. Thus recent developments show a clear pattern of increased unilateral state interference, which raises important questions regarding the future of bargaining autonomy and the role of trade unions.

We explore the factors behind the long-term erosion of National Social Dialogue Institutions (NSDIs) to provide insights about the conditions for their revitalization. By applying policy analysis insights into the industrial relations field, we argue that limited policy effectiveness goes a long way towards explaining the erosion experienced by many NSDIs worldwide in recent years. Drawing on a global survey and on case studies of NSDIs in Brazil, Italy and South Korea, we show that these institutions’ policy effectiveness crucially depends on combinations of their problem-solving capacity, an encompassing mandate to deal with relevant socioeconomic issues and an enabling environment that grants the inclusion of social dialogue into decision making. With regard to rekindling their role, the article provides substantial evidence that two sub-dimensions of effectiveness are key: enjoying political support and having an ‘effective mandate’ as opposed to relying on just a formal remit to deal with socioeconomic issues of interest.

No abstract