Two contrasting views tend to dominate the literature on the impact of recessions on employment. One view is that recessions amount to a ‘critical conjuncture’ for work and employment systems, a time when firms try to transform radically existing employment models. The alternative...

The Irish Airports Authority and its unions have developed a radical partnership initiative which seeks to involve staff and unions in operational and strategic decision-making. The initiative allows for an empirical assessment of arguments regarding the effects of partnership on union...

Research claims that industrial relations in greenfield sites in Ireland are commonly individualized. Data from a representative sample of workplaces in Ireland show that no trend towards more pronounced individualization is apparent in the use of HRM practices in new as compared with...

The Irish model of social partnership is considered distinctive as it is based on the principles of deliberative democracy more than adversarial bargaining. The deliberative features of the model are considered to be threefold. First, the negotiations to conclude national social agreements are...

This paper argues that European integration has constrained the discretion of industrial relations actors. The result has been not the widely predicted institutional fragmentation of collective bargaining, but a change in the" functioning" of these systems. At the same time, widespread 'social...

This article uses the theory of path dependency to explain the evolution of employment conflict resolution systems in Ireland and Sweden. It argues that the traditional 'voluntarist' conflict management path followed in Ireland has fragmented as a result of a series of internal developments that...

The present system of social partnership in Ireland is in its twentieth year. A range of explanations have been put forward to explain why social partnership has been so durable even though it does not possess the institutional endowments often considered necessary to sustain tripartite...