ABSTRACT
How do employment relations affect economic performance? Do the institutions of employment relations distort competition in labour markets and impede employment, or can they facilitate the equitable sharing of income without shrinking the overall size of the economic pie? Like many important issues, the wider economic and political context influences how we approach these questions. During the 1960s and 1970s when notions of corporatism were in vogue, both among theoreticians and policy-makers, scholars across a mix of social sciences demonstrated, for the most part, the institutional advantages of social partners building centralized and coordinated wage-fixing structures to achieve better economic performance (e.g. Schmitter 1974; Cameron 1984). The analytical approach tended to be historical, observant of the path dependencies and intricacies of specific country rules and conditions.
