Roles and Rules: Ambiguity, Experimentation and New Forms of Stakeholderism in Germany**/Rollen Und Regeln: Ambiguität, Experimente Und Neue Formen Der Sozialpartnerschaft in Deutschland

Zusammenfassung

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An opposition between social cooperation (stakeholderism) and Neoliberal market solutions paralyzes political and scientific debate on reform in Germany today. This essay rejects that opposition by recasting the way in which each of the categories is understood. Pressure to become more flexible in many areas of work and organizational life has not given rise to a blanket embrace of "the market" on a local level. Instead, it has induced widespread experimentation with alternative forms of workplace and firm governance that involve continual and collaborative recomposition of stakeholder roles in and among firms and social actors. In other words, stakeholder governance is not disintegrating or giving way to the market in Germany. It is being redefined. Experimentation with roles and rules by creative actors drives the alternative analysis. The argument is developed empirically by a discussion of current local trends in the system of industrial relations

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Auszug

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Roles and Rules: Ambiguity, Experimentation and New Forms of Stakeholderism in Germany**/Rollen Und Regeln: Ambiguität, Experimente Und Neue Formen Der Sozialpartnerschaft in Deutschland

By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, there was widespread agreement across the German political spectrum on the need for reform in the central institutions of the "German Model" of political economy: i.e., in the systems of industrial relations, vocational training, corporate governance, and finance. Remarkably, despite such broad agreement on the need for change, no workable coalitions or reform programs have emerged that a majority of German citizens find acceptable. Indeed, as a grand coalition fragmented and parties split into ever hardening positions, perhaps the only consensus about reform that broad groupings of Germans across the political spectrum shared was that they did not want to push their society in the direction of the United States. By this they meant that they did not want crucial questions in their society - how the labor market should work, how relations between employers and employees should be governed, how corporations should be governed and financed -to be adjudicated exclusively by market processes.

How else these questions should be adjudicated, however, has not been settled. Indeed, debate has become nearly immobilized. There is a pervasive sense that the range of possibilities for reform is defined by the following opposition: Either outcomes in these core areas will be negotiated out among the traditional social stakeholders (social cooperation) - OR - they will be determined by arms length price taking market relations. The former is considered to be politically desirable and just (and traditionally German), but overly rigid and increasingly unworkable. The latter is viewed as workable but unjust and undesirable. The national stalemate is indicative of the absence of any practical conceptual way to move forward in the face of what many regard as an inescapable zero-sum opposition.

Paralysis at the national level has not meant, however, that there is no change occurring in Germany. Far from it. At the level of firms and regions, as well as within specific functional institutional realms, such as in industrial relations, there has been very remarkable change. Interestingly, the same opposition between stakeholder negotiation and market principles also structures the way that these changes have been understood. Commentators, on both the left and the right, have claimed that much of the local level change has been the result of "liberalization"; i.e., the embrace at the local level of precisely the kind of market principles that the Germans reject at the national level (e.g., Streeck 2005; Lane 2000; Keller 2006). As at the national level, the consensus is that the old institutional system of social coordination is too rigid to be able to foster competitiveness in the current competitive environment. Markets are coded, even by those who object to their social and political consequences, as the vehicles of contemporary flexibility. They make it possible for firms and social actors to rapidly and capaciously reallocate resources and even embrace new roles. Thus, nearly all local efforts in the workplace, in firms and in associations to achieve flexibility, define new roles and move away from the traditional rules of social cooperation have been characterized a...

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