Having One's Cake and Being Eaten too: Irish Neo-liberal Corporatism

Abstract

This paper argues that neo-liberal globalization has neither homogenized Ireland's institutional social economy nor forced a retreat into an Irish cultural fortress. Instead, the elite community of Irish social partners responded to its own national crisis, American led globalization and European integration by taking the country in two apparently contradictory directions at once: towards European neo-corporatism and Anglo-American neo-liberalism. In so doing, they refashioned Ireland's liberal corporatist welfare state into a new form of Irish neo-liberal corporatism symbolically situated between Boston, Berlin and London. However, it is unclear if the internal tensions generated within Irish society by this attempt to reconcile apparent contradictions, and the changing external environment, will allow the Irish to continue having their cake and eating it too.globalization, neo-liberalism, neo-corporatism, Irish institutional social economy,

Institutional Change And Irish Public Broadcasting

“…It is in this context that the policy approaches to restructure public broadcasting took on a dual approach, commensurate with a general policy environment of neo-liberal corporatism. 22 According to Boucher and Collins, the Irish political economy is characterised by a dualistic European neo-corporatism (social partnership) that is accompanied by American institutional redesign (flexibilisation, outsourcing and productivism). In summary, public service institutions are preserved, but only as a quid pro quo for the introduction of flexible work practices and productivist-based mechanisms of operation.…”

Peripheral governance: administering transnational health-care flows

“…Decisions not to provide certain forms of health care contribute to development just as much as decisions to provide (see further, O 'Connell, 2005;Harrington and Stuttaford, 2012). 22 On Irish social partnership more generally, see Boucher and Collins (2003). Moreover, the concept of development has played a role in characterisations of the Irish state that help contextualise the normalisation of this domestic failure and extra-territorial reliance.…”

Skills shortages are not always what they seem: migration and the Irish software industry

“…The combination of low taxes, liberal regulation of the labour market (including allowing foreign high‐technology firms to remain firmly anti‐union) and low social expenditures means that Ireland is usually treated as an ‘Anglo‐Saxon’ welfare state and an LME. At the same time, however, the Irish achievement has been to also create a socio‐political consensus through national ‘partnership agreements’ in which the trade unions are not only ‘partners’ in national wage bargaining but participate in national socio‐economic policy making (Boucher and Collins, 2003; Hastings et al ., 2007).…”