Service Delivery Networks and Employment Relations at German Airports: Jeopardizing Industrial Peace on the Ground?
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Author | Markus Helfen,Jörg Sydow,Carsten Wirth |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12439 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12439
58:1 March 2020 0007–1080 pp. 168–198
Service Delivery Networks and
Employment Relations at German
Airports: Jeopardizing Industrial
Peace on the Ground?
Markus Helfen ,J
¨
org Sydow and Carsten Wirth
Abstract
In this article, we ask how organizational restructuring towards a network
form of service delivery challenges an established form of employment
relations in Germany, that is labour–management collaboration. Building on a
theoretical discussion of the marketizationhypothesis, we develop a structuration
perspective on the relationship between network restructuring and labour–
management collaboration, which highlights the political economy of inter-firm
networks. Empirically, we focus on two major airport authorities in Germany.
Our findings show how these authorities at the core of service delivery networks
face a strategic trade-o between short-term labour cost reductions and more
adversarial employment relations.Apart from coinciding with a deterioration in
working conditions for service workers, the handling of this trade-o depends
on managers’ and worker representatives’ commitment to collaboration across
the network. While unions and works councils initially continued with social
partnership-type practices, the more adversarial management practices for
enacting the network restructuring cause a fragmentation on the workers’ side
and increase the conflict potential. We concludethat the agency of management
and worker representatives in the enactment of inter-firm networks oscillates
between more partnership-like and more conflictive practices, which turn the
network restructuring into a political process with divergent outcomes for
employment relations.
Markus Helfen is at the University of Innsbruck. J¨
org Sydow is at Freie Universit¨
at Berlin.
Carsten Wirth is at the University of AppliedSciences Dar mstadt.
C
2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Service DeliveryNetworks and Employment Relations at German Airports 169
1. Introduction
What are the eects of network restructuring for employment relations
and industrial peace in an institutional context characterized by labour–
management collaboration? Several authors — also in this journal — have
studied the consequences of organizational restructuring for work and
employment in various industries and sectors (Doellgast and Greer 2007;
Flecker 2009; Grimshaw and Rubery 2005; Holst 2014; Kalleberg 2001,
2003, 2011; Marchington et al. 2005). With very few exceptions, most of
this research has focused on establishing the empirical link between forms of
restructuring, in particular outsourcing and subcontracting, and substantive
working and employment conditions of workers. Deteriorating pay (Flecker
2009), intensification of work and loss in occupational status (Flecker et al.
2016), and increases in occupational health and safety risks (Nygren et al.
2017) are well documented, mostly for contracted-out workers.
From an employment relations perspective, however, two conceptual
problems arise from this research for deepening our knowledge about the
link between organizational restructuring and employment relations: First,
we know very little about how collaborative employment relations, that is
rather long-term reciprocal relationships between management and labour,
characterized by low levels of industrial action and cooperative negotiation
behaviour (for the German system of industrial relations, see M¨
uller-Jentsch
2008), are aected by restructuring. Second, there is some opaqueness
regarding the characterization of the restructuring, especially with respect to
the ‘network form’ (Powell 1990) of organization. Some claim — whether
implicitly or explicitly — that the observed forms of restructuring merely
reflect ‘marketization’ (e.g. Doellgast et al. 2016), making the very notion of
the network essentially irrelevant;others argue that the network constellation
is key to understanding the observed outcomes in employment and working
conditions of the current era of organizational restructuring (Grimshaw and
Rubery 2005).
In what follows, we engage with these two issues by examining how
organizational actors process organizational restructuring. We concentrate
on locally embedded practices of employment relations in networks, that
is negotiations, industrial disputes and labour–management collaboration,
to explain the observed dynamics and qualities in network restructuring.
Thereby, we avoid a linear and direct connection between organizational
restructuring and substantive working conditions (see, however, Doellgast
et al. 2016). Instead, we emphasize agency and process in relation to
structural conditions in order to explain divergent outcomes of network
restructuring. For this purpose, we have chosen structuration theory as a
theoretical grounding for our examination of employment relations in a
network restructuringwithin a collaborative setting. In our view,structuration
theory is suitable because it helps to clarify the recursive interplay of agency
and structure (Giddens 1984) in practising employment relations. Here, we
focus on the interplay of regulatorychanges and market pressure as structural
C
2018 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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