This article addresses the challenges connected with interest representation in transnational labour markets. It draws on an in-depth case study of the labour market that matches Eastern European workers to jobs in the German meat industry. This labour market has emerged under the European Union Posted Workers Directive. The posting regime has entailed dumping wages and extreme exploitation in the German meat industry. The German Food Workers Union has faced great difficulties in organising workers posted in the meat industry and in negotiating collective agreements because of strong employer resistance to industry-level bargaining. Yet 2014 saw a shift towards a new employment regime and a re-ordering of the transnational labour market, which entailed several improvements for workers. This article sheds light on how this change came about through campaigning by a coalition of different sorts of (collective) actors and not traditional collective action by the union. The role and impact of campaigning for labour protection in transnational labour markets in the Global North are further discussed.

In this article, I suggest that transnational labour markets are characterized by their multi-layered embeddedness, not only in national but also in transnational institutional settings. Hence, the national institutional factors formerly at the centre of sociological labour market theories insufficiently explain the newly emerging transnational labour markets. To account for the full complexity and institutional context of the latter, I propose an inductive theoretical approach to transnational labour markets and develop a research heuristic to instruct empirical studies about particular transnational labour markets and inductive theory building. This heuristic draws on analytical categories as developed by the new economic sociology of markets. The empirical example of the transnational labour market that matches eastern European workers to jobs in the German meat industry serves to illustrate how one can use this heuristic, which reveals some preliminary features of transnational labour markets compared with national ones, as well as some research gaps to be addressed by future studies.

In this article we explore expatriate managers as international boundary spanners and problem solvers in promulgating knowledge exchange in multinational companies (MNCs). Theoretical perspectives on agency, expatriation and MNCs connect notions of individual volition with expatriation interactions and organizational outcomes. This conceptualization questions the exaltation of individual excellence in the earlier heroic perspective on the expatriate. Rather, interculturally competent, strategically localized expatriate managers address recurring global–local tensions in everyday interactions with the host country subsidiary staff. The expatriates' boundary spanning, problem solving and knowledge exchange enhance the global integration, national responsiveness, and worldwide innovation and learning concomitant with the transnational form of the MNC.

No abstract

No abstract