BOOK REVIEWS
| Date | 01 September 1993 |
| Published date | 01 September 1993 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1993.tb00408.x |
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
31:3
Sept 1993
0007-1080
BOOK
REVIEWS
Union
of
Parts: Labor Politics in Postwar Germany
by Kathleen A. Thelen. Cornell
University Press, Ithaca,
NY,
1992, xii
+
262 pp.,
$32.50.
German industrial relations, and especially their distinctive ‘dualism’ of works
councils and industrial unions, have for long resisted analytical conquest, by
Germans and non-Germans alike. Given that Germany
is
one of the three most
important industrial countries, and by far the leading economic power in the
European Community, this was a particularly embarrassing blank on the discipline’s
intellectual map. Now, together with Lowell Turner’s
Democracy ar Work
-
which
appeared in the same year and is also based on a Berkeley political science
dissertation supervised by Harold Wilensky -Thelen’s superb book puts an end to a
situation in which ignorance of German industrial relations in academic and policy
circles could be excused by lack
of
comprehensive, synoptic, theoretically sophisti-
cated and historically up-to-date research. After Thelen and Turner, whoever
ventures into monographic
or
comparative assertions on German unions and co-
determination will be entitled to be taken seriously only if he
or
she can prove
familiarity with their work.
Union
of
Parts
combines historical, institutional and policy analysis, drawing on an
impressive synthesis
of
existing literature
-
including German work difficult to
access even for Germans
-
as well as on in-depth original research, among other
things wide-ranging interviews with leading figures from the metalworkers’ union,
IG Metall. Conceptually, the book treats Germany
as
a special
case
of neo-
corporatism, showing that, because
of
the ‘dual system’, pressures for decentraliza-
tion of collective bargaining present less of a threat to union strength in Germany
than in other corporatist countries; that the works council system and
its
linkage with
industry-wide bargaining has endowed the German economy with a unique capacity
for
what Thelen calls ‘negotiated adjustment’, even without national-level ‘political
exchange’; and that, far from weakening unions, co-determination today provides an
institutional underpinning for a wide variety
of
union policies intervening in the
organization and operation
of
the supply side of the economy.
Readers who had their occasional unhappy encounters with the mysteries
of
German industrial relations will gladly turn to Thelen’s work to resolve many of the
puzzles that are likely to have haunted them ever since
-
for example, how works
councils, which after
1945
were instituted against union resistance, could have
evolved into bastions of union power;
or
how exactly unions and works councils,
collective bargaining and co-determination, centralized and decentralized joint
regulation, and wage and non-wage bargaining are separated from and at the same
time related to each other in Germany. Seasoned
aficionados,
for their part, will be
impressed by the rich material base of the historical accounts, and the almost
472
British
Journal
of
Industrial Relations
complete absence
of
glitches in them; by Thelen’s sophisticated combination
of
institutional and political analysis, as encapsulated in the guiding notion of
institutional change caused by ‘strategic manoeuvring within dynamic constraints’;
by a truly brilliant recapitulation of the formative events around the strike wave
of
1969;
by a perceptive and, again, astonishingly well-informed presentation
of
German unions’ initiatives in the
1970s
and
1980s
on
working-time and technology;
and
by
the sovereign use of comparative analysis contrasting Germany with
the
United States and Sweden.
This book is
a
major scholarly accomplishment whose contribution
to
the analysis
of industrial relations,
in
Germany and generally, will last for many years.
WOLFGANG
STREECK
University
of
Wisconsin
-
Madison
British Industrial Relations,
2nd edn, by Howard
F.
Gospel and Gill Palmer.
Routledge, London,
1993,311
pp.,
f12.99
paper.
This
is
a revised, tidied-up and updated version
of
Gill Palmer’s
1983
textbook
British Industrial Relations.
The acid test
of
any second edition is whether it
maintains existing strengths while adding new ones
(or
at least eliminating areas
of
weakness). Most teachers of industrial relations will agree that this edition succeeds
admirably on these criteria.
The main strength of Palmer’s first edition was that it managed to convey, more
than most other
-
possibly all
-
textbooks
on
the market,
how
and
why
British
industrial relations is the way it
is.
It did this in a number
of
ways. One, it provided a
set of historical accounts of the development
of
the
main industrial relations actors,
institutions and forms
of
regulation. Two, it drew freely on ‘core’ disciplines
-
political science and sociology especially
-
to
address important questions such as
why work-groups behave
in
the way they do and why some types
of
trade union are
more powerful than others. By adopting an historical and thematic approach, it was
able to provide a broad-brush picture
of
the nature and development of British
industrial relations.
To
mix metaphors, it gave a clear explanation
of
the contours
of
the wood without getting bogged down in the minutiae of individual trees.
As
would be expected, the new edition updates material on issues such as trade
union membership, industrial relations legislation and strike trends. It also amends
the chapter order and shifts some material between chapters.
For
instance, the
chapters dealing with collective bargaining in the first edition had not been entirely
successful, since one of them (on theories
of
bargaining and control) doubled-up as a
conclusion and another
-
on the system
of
collective bargaining
-
contained
material (e.g. on individual employment rights) that would have been better situated
elsewhere. This has now been rationalized to provide a more logical progression
of
chapters on bargaining theory, bargaining institutions, and government initiatives to
reform industrial relations.
More important than the tidying-up, the new edition contains a number
of
substantive innovations. There is much greater use
of
insights derived from
economics and business history to complement those drawn from politics and
sociology.
For
instance, the notion of transaction costs is discussed as an explanatory
factor behind management strategies, and much more attention is given to the
influence
of
market structures on employer approaches to industrial relations. In this
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