Intensified competition in international markets, increased capital mobility, and changing production technologies are creating new and serious problems for labor movements in the advanced industrial countries (e.g., Streeck 1987, 1993; Locke and Thelen 1995). A large and growing literature has been devoted to assessing the impact of these developments on industrial-relations institutions and practices cross-nationally. While some authors emphasize a common trend toward bargaining decentralization (e.g., Katz 1993), others see continued national diversity (Boyer 1996; Hyman 1994). Previous concerns that current international trends would produce a convergence of industrial-relations systems through competitive deregulation have been partly allayed by empirical studies that point instead to a high degree of stability in bargaining institutions across most of the advanced industrial countries (e.g., Wallerstein and Golden, this volume).

Much attention has been devoted to explaining cases such as Denmark and Sweden that have in fact experienced significant institutional change. But we know that bargaining institutions in cases typically coded as “stable” — such as Germany — have been under tremendous strain lately as well (Turner 1998; Silvia 1996). Institutional resiliency is often chalked up rather unsatisfyingly to institutional “stickiness,” or it is attributed vaguely to the “continuing interests” of various actors in existing arrangements - but without tracing precisely which actors and what interests. As a result, we are left with a continuing overabundance of (“globalization”) theories that tell us why these systems should be breaking down when in fact what we need is a more robust explanation for why — despite these strains - many of these systems are holding together at all.

Germany is a good case to mine for insights and hypotheses into these questions because here the deep ambivalence of employers toward traditional bargaining institutions has been very much on public display. Germany has been invoked as a case in point both for those analysts wishing to draw attention to new strains and pressures in collective-bargaining institutions (Streeck 1995; Mahnkopf 1991), and by those who stress the resiliency of these arrangements in spite of such pressures (Lange, Wallerstein, and Golden, 1995; Turner 1998). In emphasizing one dimension, however, each side has a tendency simply to downplay or ignore the other.