New Forms of Company Co-operation and Effects on Industrial Relations

Abstract

Starting from the reorganisation of large companies, the organisation of industrial value chains has been undergoing a tremendous change during the last years. Some Buzzwords in this context are: strategic decentralisation, outsourcing, value chain reengineering. While the reorganisation of single companies is not in the focus of my interests, what is very interesting to me is the question if patterns of reorganisation can be recognized. If many companies change their organisation in the same way and if these changes do not remain company-internal but influence inter-company relations and the structure of whole industries, it would mean that a substantial change is happening. From my point of view as an industrial sociologist, this would be a most interesting development, arousing a lot of new questions. And one of these questions is what effects these changing forms of industrial governance will have on industrial relations. The paper on hand looks into these questions. First, I am going to introduce the theory of "industrial governance" and the thesis that already two competing paradigms of industrial governance can be found. The second paragraph deals with my concrete subject of interest: operator models as a special form of company co-operation that is of current interest. Afterwards I am going to present some hypotheses on the possible consequences of the spread of operator models for industrial relations in Germany. Finally, I will try to connect these two strands, stressing the importance of research into the correlation between economic strategy and industrial relations.