The intense debate of the 1980s on employers' strategies for the reorganization of production and work (Piore and Sabel 1984; Kern and Scumann 1984; Boyer 1986; Dore 1986; Streeck 1987) probably paid insufficient attention to the variability of managerial attitudes towards the use of human resources and the problem of in-company consensus. Not that these issues were omitted from analysis; indeed, they received considerable attention in both the social sciences and management literature. But they were too frequently taken simply as corollaries to more general changes in production patterns – as phenomena, therefore, that did not require specific explanation. In other words, the variability in managerial policies of labour regulation – a concept that I clarify later – was for the most part interpreted in a straightforward manner as an aspect and a consequence of the diversification of production models.

The premise of this chapter is instead that the different strategies pursued by European employers in personnel management and industrial relations depend only in part on productive, technological and organizational choices. Institutional and social factors play no less important a role, during a phase in which previous action models have proved clearly inadequate and in which uncertainty has consequently increased. My intention here is, first, to provide an analytical scheme which helps us to understand the range and significance of the search for greater labour consensus that has characterized the strategies of various European companies in recent years. I shall then use this analytical scheme to explain the more general changes that have taken place in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, I shall examine a number of differences among the European countries and the factors that explain these differences.