Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Globalization: Consequences for Work and Employment in Advanced Capitalist Societies

Item

Title

Globalization: Consequences for Work and Employment in Advanced Capitalist Societies

Author

Elger, Tony

Research Area

Social Processes

Topic

Globalization

Abstract

This essay considers the consequences of globalization for work and employment in advanced capitalist societies. It outlines the classic arguments of hyperglobalists, sceptics, and transformationalists. It first discusses the roles of multinational companies (MNCs) in both disseminating and differentiating distinctive models of work organization and employment relations across their international operations, emphasizing the micropolitical mediation of such processes and the interplay of “system,” “societal,” and “dominance” effects in the selection and hybridization of such models. It next considers the roles of corporate and state actors in recasting national institutional configurations, highlighting the contradictory and contested features of such configurations, and the scope for substantive remaking despite apparent institutional continuity. It then considers agendas for future research which build on these arguments but give fuller consideration to service MNCs and MNC operations beyond advanced capitalist societies. Finally, it notes the possible impact of other vectors of globalization on overall trends and variations in work and employment across societies.

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Identifier

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extracted text

Globalization: Consequences for
Work and Employment in Advanced
Capitalist Societies
TONY ELGER

Abstract
This essay considers the consequences of globalization for work and employment
in advanced capitalist societies. It outlines the classic arguments of hyperglobalists,
sceptics, and transformationalists. It first discusses the roles of multinational companies (MNCs) in both disseminating and differentiating distinctive models of work
organization and employment relations across their international operations, emphasizing the micropolitical mediation of such processes and the interplay of “system,”
“societal,” and “dominance” effects in the selection and hybridization of such models. It next considers the roles of corporate and state actors in recasting national
institutional configurations, highlighting the contradictory and contested features
of such configurations, and the scope for substantive remaking despite apparent
institutional continuity. It then considers agendas for future research which build on
these arguments but give fuller consideration to service MNCs and MNC operations
beyond advanced capitalist societies. Finally, it notes the possible impact of other
vectors of globalization on overall trends and variations in work and employment
across societies.

INTRODUCTION
Long-standing arguments about patterns of convergence or divergence in
work and employment across advanced capitalist societies have focused primarily on the impact of common technical and organizational imperatives.
Recently, however, attention has shifted to globalization (the increasingly
rapid movement and interaction of people, objects, and images across the
world), both as an explanation of convergence and of the recasting of differences across firms and states.
Analyses of the impact of globalization must recognize that it is a contested
concept, with disagreements about the relative weight, scope, and impact
of the processes involved. Furthermore, globalization is not simply an
outcome of technical or market imperatives but is an organized project
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

involving active political processes that are themselves contested by different social actors, especially multinational companies (MNCs) and state
and supra-state agencies, but also labor and social movements. Scholarly
attention has focused on the actions and impacts of MNCs and on the
policies and capacities of the states on whose territories they operate, but
I also note other ways in which globalization may impinge on patterns of
work and employment.
CLASSIC ARGUMENTS
Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton (1999) identified three classic
positions on globalization. The hyperglobalists argued that market forces and
the policies of global firms successfully marginalized nation states, which
were no longer capable of implementing regulatory and social policies at
odds with corporate priorities. Thus, MNCs treat the globe as a “borderless
world,” readily moving operations across different localities to select attractive policy regimes and compliant workforces. Optimistic versions of this
diagnosis project virtuous circles of growth and the spread of universal “best
practices,” ultimately benefiting both employers and employees through
shared enterprise and enhanced prosperity. Pessimistic versions forecast
the growing vulnerability of workers to a footloose capital seeking fresh
supplies of cheap and malleable labor.
The sceptics questioned both the nationless character of modern firms and
the powerlessness of contemporary nation states. MNCs usually remain
linked to home economies, especially if they have a substantial home
market, and retain disproportionately home-based share-ownership, senior
management, and R&D. Furthermore, MNCs adopt varied strategies and
structures for internationalization, implying differences in their overseas
operations. Meanwhile, nation states are constrained by their modes of
insertion within the international economy, but nevertheless retain significant (although variable) leverage to pursue distinctive national or regional
policies which sustain national patterns of work and employment. Such
arguments referenced Japan’s distinctive political economy and contrasts
between the state policies and work and employment relations of different
European economies. This prompted distinctions between several “varieties
of capitalism” or “national business systems” with distinctive clusters of
complementary institutions (work systems, bargaining structures, training
systems, welfare policies), specific bases for international competitiveness,
and “path-dependent” trajectories of change. Such cross-national differences in work and employment patterns, rooted in distinctive relationships
between state, capital, and organized labor, remain relatively resilient rather
than eroded by the dynamics of globalization.

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Some sceptics replaced the hyperglobalists’ linear conception of intensifying globalization with a purely cyclical account of the ebb and flow of
internationalization. The transformationalists, however, argue that the scope
and speed of cross-national flows of contacts, information, and power are so
unprecedented that they generate qualitatively new patterns of social relations on a global scale, not least in work and employment. They underline
the major expansion and increasingly sophisticated internal coordination
of MNCs, which also extend their reach through supplier networks or
“production chains.” Different phases of corporate activity may then be
disaggregated and redistributed across operations located in distinctive
settings, sometimes involving advanced technology R&D clusters but more
often locating marketing or final assembly in high-wage metropolitan
centers and initial manufacture or parts production in labor-intensive
low-wage economies. The spread of such coordinated MNC operations
across different national economies shifts the balance of power in favor of
corporations, against workers, suppliers, localities, and states. But MNCs
continue to juggle cross-cutting objectives that limit their scope to open and
close operations in a truly “footloose” manner. Cost reduction is qualified by
“sunk costs” of existing investments or efforts to access particular markets,
employee skills, or “innovation clusters.” The implications of these features
are played out in distinctive ways across industrial sectors and global
regions. MNCs still concentrate flows within the “triad” of Europe, North
America, and Japan, but several tiers of East Asian newly industrialized
countries, Eastern Europe, China, and now India and Brazil, play growing
but distinctive roles.
Thus, the transformationalists accept some of the specific criticisms of
hyperglobalism developed by the sceptics—recognizing the need for more
differentiated accounts of the organization, leverage, and strategies of
MNCs (and their production chains) and the capacities, priorities, and
policy repertoires of nation states—but reject a merely cyclical interpretation
of the consequences. A further reorientation of debate followed the financial
and economic crises of the new millennium because they dramatized the
contradictions and uncertainties besetting both firms and states. As a result,
power relations, conflicts of interest, and contested alternatives are gaining
renewed attention in discussions of MNCs, national states, and broader
processes of globalization.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Recent research on the role of MNCs in disseminating work systems and
employment practices across their international operations has combined
the empirical mapping of these features across different firms and societies

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and the elaboration of fresh conceptual tools for understanding the complex patterns this research has documented. Indicative examples of such
research include analyses of the management of employment relations by
US multinationals across four European national destinations (Almond
& Ferner, 2006); studies of the international transfer and hybridization of
production models in the auto sector (Boyer, Charron, Jürgens, & Tolliday,
1998); survey comparisons of MNCs of varied national origins operating
in four distinctive political economies (Edwards, Marginson, & Ferner,
2013; Edwards, Tregaskis, Collings, Jalette, & Susaeta, 2013); case studies
of Japanese subsidiaries in different sectors and supply-chain positions
in one UK labor market (Elger & Smith, 2005); comparisons of the Czech
subsidiaries of German, Austrian, and US automotive and finance firms
(Meardi, Strohmer, & Traxler, 2013); comparisons between white-goods
factories operating in East Asia, Brazil, Turkey, and Southern Africa (Nichols
& Cam, 2005); studies of major fast-food companies across a wide range of
national economies (Royle & Towers, 2002; Royle, 2010); and comparisons of
call centers in Britain and India providing similar services for UK financial
service providers (Taylor & Bain, 2005). These studies, from which examples
are drawn throughout this essay, underline the wide range of comparisons in
play, by sector, national origins, and location, and the varied methodologies
that have been deployed to analyze the international dissemination and
adaptation of work practices and forms of employment.
One influential analytical starting point, rooted in sceptical analyses of
globalization, highlights the obstacles to dissemination arising from the cultural and institutional distance between “home” and “host” countries. Such
societal effects continue to be significant, but recent research also suggests
these are often qualified or overridden by other processes. Corporations
based in dominant economies may be in a position to push the adoption of
their home practices across their international operations, despite the variety
and distinctiveness of host institutions and practices: US firms, for example,
have often pursued similar HR policies across their subsidiaries. Meanwhile,
management consultants have also codified and disseminated the policy
repertoires of such dominant firms and economies. Furthermore, such
powerful models and recipes may eventually gain the status of pervasive
international “best practices,” thus moving from dominance effects to system
effects (Edwards et al., 2013; Smith, 2008). For example, “lean production”
has become an influential model beyond Japanese manufacturing, borrowed
and adapted across many other firms and sectors.
The corporate managers at the locus of such societal, dominance, and system
effects are, nevertheless, more likely to develop mixed and modified policy
repertoires than simply transplant home practices in an unmodified manner.

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In part, this is a response to the cross-pressures arising from societal and dominance effects, but “labor process theorists” also suggest that system effects
are themselves characterized by contradictory features, not least in regard
to the dynamics of work and employment relations. One way of addressing
the development and implementation of the resultant organizational innovations is through the concept of hybridization, developed particularly in a
sophisticated research program which dissects the evolution and fate of a
spectrum of such hybrids (Boyer et al., 1998; see also Maerdi & Tóth, 2006).
MNCs also remain heterogeneous, pursuing varied logics of internationalization and thus different priorities (Rubery & Grimshaw, 2003). Some prioritize market access, with little interest in transferring distinctive work and
employment practices; others emphasize financial returns across their operations, and seek to disseminate monitoring and investment procedures rather
than details of work processes and industrial relations; while those committed to standardized and integrated production platforms seek to transfer
their core production practices, but may be more selective about employment
arrangements. Finally, fresh attention is now being paid to the distinctive
mandates which various subsidiaries may have within an MNC, highlighting how firms may select different elements of their monitoring procedures,
production, and HR repertoires for implementation in different subsidiaries.
At the same time, such mandates may change, extending from, say, market
access to design and development, or contracting through noninvestment or
even closure (echoing the classic vulnerability of “branch plants”).
Together, these analytical resources help to explain processes of selective
transfer and uneven hybridization of both work systems and employment
relations across the international operations of MNCs. These processes
clearly compromise any strong reproduction of societal effects but they also
undermine any simple convergence in work and employment practices.
Instead, MNCs as global actors contribute to both convergence and continuing differentiation, the latter influenced by differences of national origins,
modes of internationalization, sectors, locations in corporate divisions of
labor, and host political economies. In regard to dominant trajectories, it
may be argued that the capacities of MNCs to coordinate and control their
international operations, combined with intensified cross-border corporate
rivalry, tend to expose workers to more stringent work routines, greater
work intensity, increased job insecurity, and challenges to effective collective
representation. But it is also evident that MNCs and their supplier chains
continue to transfer and modify work systems and employment practices in
quite varied, complex, and uneven ways, so that any such shared tendencies
coexist with persistent differences of experience.
Two complementary strands of current research provide important
resources for extending such arguments, namely, studies of the internal

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

dynamics of corporate policy making and analyses of the scope for MNCs
to influence the reconstruction of specific national political economies. The
first focuses on the micropolitics of MNC decision making through which work
systems and employment relations are constructed and reconstructed across
international operations (Ferner, Bélanger, Tregaskis, Morley, & Quintanilla,
2013; Ferner, Edwards, & Tempel, 2012; Geppert & Dörrenbächer, 2011;
Morgan, 2005a). Particular attention is given to the relationships between
headquarters and subsidiary managers, as they address cross-cutting
pressures, uncertainties, and competing priorities in policy formation and
implementation, and work through their implications for patterns of transfer, hybridization, superficial adoption, or even neutralization of corporate
models and policy packages at these subsidiaries. Differences of priorities
and resources among middle managers (say, between production and HR),
the roles of different categories of workers, and possible alliances across
these categories, add further complexity.
Headquarters managers clearly command key resources, which give them
the dominant hand in policy making and allow them to “force and foster”
change within subsidiaries. Their legal and organizational authority allows
them to define corporate objectives and what counts as “best practice”; their
decisions on flows of funding and expertise are crucial for subsidiary survival; and investment is usually conditional on various forms of audit, benchmarking, and performance measurement. They also influence the rewards
and career prospects of individual managers and can develop cadres of experienced international managers whose primary commitment is to the center
even when deployed into subsidiaries. Nevertheless, unresolved tensions
between different priorities may persist, say, between immediate cost reductions, development of longer term production capabilities, or market access,
while the lessons of audits and benchmarking exercises can be ambiguous
and contested within management, especially when sites vary in multiple
ways (size, product mix, equipment vintages, skill portfolios). Such uncertainties, together with “sunk costs,” may make the curtailment of investment, let alone site closure, an expensive option, while also risking concerted
opposition, but investment bargaining still affords top management considerable leverage, while the threat of closure remains a powerful sanction of
last resort.
Meanwhile, local managers may claim particular expertise in managing
national institutional rules, distinctive features of local labor markets,
or forms of collective representation, affording them significant scope to
influence processes of transfer or hybridization (Elger & Smith, 2005).
Furthermore, innovations in working practices or employment relations
are usually intended to challenge existing arrangements and practices, but
this needs active legitimation by subsidiary management, and this may

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7

allow them to negotiate aspects of the proposed policy and potential bases
of legitimacy, by invoking different motifs within the corporate culture or
arguments about (in)appropriateness to local conditions. Ferner et al. (2012)
discuss the reworking of both bonus payment systems and “workplace
diversity policies” in these terms. Managers who make such arguments
may embrace interests that diverge from those of headquarters (local HR
managers may give greater priority to securing worker cooperation than
HQ staff), and managers and workers may discover shared interests in
securing subsidiary survival, but the leverage of local managers primarily
hinges on performance in terms of objectives set from above. There may be
scope for them to renegotiate the mandate of their plant, bidding for local
design and development, for example, or gaining responsibility for different
products or services, but such proposals are often rebuffed, underlining
the ultimate power of top management. The arguments developed in
micropolitical rivalry among middle managers do influence outcomes, but
this is primarily because they provide significant resources for top corporate
decision makers, both by identifying the dilemmas involved and promoting
alternative possibilities among which top managers adjudicate.
So far, employees have figured only as problems or potential allies for
subsidiary managers, but analyses of corporate micropolitics must also
address their concerns and resources. As discussions of “high-performance
work models” suggest, workplace innovations may enhance the skills and
involvement of workers, although this may also involve reduced job security
(Murray, Bélanger, Giles, & Lapointe, 2002). More often, quite mundane
changes in work organization combine greater responsibility with work
intensification but little scope for greater job control. Clearly there may be
scope for workers to embrace benign versions of such innovation, while the
“disciplined worker thesis” suggests that even modest improvements in
organizational effectiveness may have attractions for employees. However,
research on actually existing “lean production,” for example, suggests
that gaps between rhetoric and practice often expose the costs incurred by
workers and fuel scepticism or opposition, although different patterns of
collective organization and activity (or their absence) inflect such outcomes.
Differences in experience along gender and occupational or generational
lines also influence how employees articulate their interests and act in
relation to innovations in work and employment relations within both home
and host workplaces (Durand & Hatzfeld, 2003). Overall, analyses of these
micropolitical dynamics of subsidiary operations enrich our understandings
of policy processes and outcomes, especially if they are embedded within
a wider understanding of the interplay of societal, dominance, and system
effects.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

The other key strand of current research has begun to address the
macro-political role of MNCs as significant actors in the modification and
reconstruction of the national institutional frameworks across which they
operate (Bélanger & Edwards, 2006). This highlights the extent to which
particular institutional configurations represent contestable compromises
between organized actors, where shifts in power relations, priorities, and
alliances may be translated into demands for change or even the repudiation of historic settlements, emphasizing limitations to the coherence
and stability of apparently resilient “national business systems” (Morgan,
2005b). For example, Sweden’s “historic compromise” dating from the
1930s was initially eroded by demands from the dominant union federation
but then (more successfully) by strategies of the major employers’ association, while in Japan a new, more aggressive, stance by the employers’
association has substantially weakened “enterprise corporatism” (Imai,
2011). Meanwhile, state agencies and policies may be actively implicated in
remaking such arrangements through new combinations of intervention and
de/reregulation, often legitimized in terms of “enhancing competitiveness,”
while dominant states may carry such initiatives into the international arena,
bilaterally or through their influence in supra-state agencies.
Presumptions of institutional coherence at the national level have also
been qualified by recognition of differences between regions, sectors, or
enterprise networks, opening the scope for currently subordinate configurations to become alternative repertoires for evolving corporate and state
policies. Thus, small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany embrace
different strategies to the big corporations, and inward investors sometimes
align themselves more with the former than the latter. This argument has
particular leverage in relation to forms of organized capitalism that have an
overtly dualist character, but as Morgan (2009) shows it can also be extended
to address the internal heterogeneity of liberal market political economies.
Thus, MNCs have contributed to the reconfiguration of several different
variants of capitalist political economy, often in ways that have remade or
extended significant institutional diversity, while the routes and agencies
of change have varied too. Liberal market capitalisms have afforded scope
for MNCs to cultivate regionally and/or sectorally distinctive corporate
regimes, while in “business corporatist” Japan foreign MNCs have gained
little leverage but change has been driven by domestic firms. Morgan also
develops the distinctive argument that Germany’s “inclusive corporatism”
has been modified more through the impact of financial MNCs providing
financial and professional services to large firms, than by the actions of
manufacturing inward investors.
Recent analyses of the complicated relationships between institutional
arrangements and outcomes have also highlighted the scope for substantive

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change within apparent institutional continuity, by stepwise modifications
to the objectives of such institutions, adding new elements that reorient their
operation, or allowing changing conditions on the ground to bias outcomes
in new ways. The work of Streeck and Thelen (2005) has shown how
powerful policy makers used these processes of “conversion,” “layering,”
and “drift” to accomplish gradual but ultimately substantial changes in
the organization and outcomes of collective bargaining in Germany. Thus,
“national business systems” involve unevenly articulated and contested
complexes of institutional arrangements which offer significant scope for
both external and internal challenge, especially by powerful corporate actors
and business associations, and such “systems” and their distinctive work
and employment relations must always be located within broader processes of capitalist development and renewal (Streeck, 2009). Furthermore,
challenges to existing state policy regimes and institutional settlements
cannot simply be construed in terms of globalization processes, but must be
analyzed in relation to other features of the international capitalist economy,
including recurrent phases of growth, turbulence, and crisis.
AGENDAS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The work reviewed earlier has generated important insights into the changing patterns of work and employment within advanced capitalist societies,
but also suggests an extensive agenda for further research. The research on
management micropolitics underlines the scope for fuller investigation and
analysis of the distinctive interests and priorities of corporate managers, subsidiary managers, and employees, and the power resources they bring to
bear in processes of decision making, negotiation, and contention about the
selection, transfer, and/or hybridization of work systems and employment
packages. It also suggests that detailed studies of corporate micropolitics
must be explicitly located in wider economic and institutional contexts, as the
society, system, and dominance framework seeks to do, if they are to offer a
more adequate explanation of both dominant trends and contextually varied
outcomes.
Although major MNCs operate in services, much research has concentrated on manufacturing, perhaps because the comparative immobility of
face-to-face services encourages such firms to prioritize access to consumer
markets rather than relocating to capitalize on cheaper labor or enhanced
management prerogatives. Given the importance of service employment in
the advanced capitalist economies, however, such MNCs deserve more systematic attention. Where there is no strongly defined “host” model of service
provision, dominant firms may still seek to transfer their work organization
and employment practices. In finance, this may involve reproducing team

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and reward structures within white-collar hierarchies, while in fast food
it commonly involves disseminating highly standardized work routines
performed by low-paid and insecure workers. International service firms are
also in the vanguard of transformations in both privatized and state services
in many countries, both through consultancy activities and by participation
in marketized reorganization. Furthermore, there is scope to “offshore”
some service activities, especially back-office functions, and technical
advances in digital communication have facilitated movement of call centrr
service provision. The internationalization of such activities (within firms or
through contracted service providers) often involves the relocation of tightly
defined and monitored work routines and mundane forms of team working
and quality assurance, which may yield substantial labor–cost savings even
with improved pay and prospects for recruits. But significant problems
include limited service delivery and erosion of worker commitment; hence,
repatriation of such operations is not unknown. Meanwhile high-end
financial and legal services companies may disseminate repertoires of
corporate reorganization across contrasting national economies, with wider
ramifications for employment practices in those economies.
Although my discussion has focused on MNC operations within advanced
capitalist societies, analyses of the work and employment practices of
MNCs must also address how different places and spaces across the globe
may play particular roles in corporate reorganization over time (Herod,
Rainnie, & McGrath-Champ, 2007), for the activities of MNCs beyond
the most mature capitalist economies condition the scope and character
of their operations within such economies. For example, both corporate
and subsidiary managers may perceive “home” employment institutions
and policies more as constraints than resources to be transferred, and use
subsidiary operations to escape from those constraints, a feature exemplified
by German car companies investing in Eastern Europe. Or innovations
without a specific “home” inspiration may be widely adopted across international firms and subsidiaries, as with the rapid expansion of temporary
and subcontract employment in white goods firms, to become codified
as a generic “flexibilization” strategy even though modified in different
firms and national settings. The scope and ramifications of such processes
require urgent further research, not least because they suggest that in
current circumstances the growing internationalization of manufacturing
production increases scope for a broad erosion of employment conditions
and marginalization of independent worker representation, although (as the
geographers emphasize) this will remain both uneven and contested.
While analyses of MNCs are crucial to our contemporary understanding
of the impacts of globalization, research should also address other ways in

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which globalization impinges upon patterns of work and employment relations. International financial flows and credit ratings clearly impinge directly
upon the activities of both private firms and state policy makers. The initiatives of supra-state agencies, such as the WTO, World Bank, and EU are
also important. Finally, consumers, citizens, and workers may form organizations and alliances across national borders, both to respond to these dominant
international actors and to pursue their own transnational forms of mobilization and leverage.
In addition to tracing the immediate implications of such processes for
work organization and employment practices, it would be valuable to
trace their wider ramifications in overall trends and patterns within and
across national economies, but there are few systematic studies to underpin
such wide-ranging societal comparisons. However, Gallie (2007, 2013) and
colleagues have pioneered comparative surveys of the quality of work and
employment, mapping changes in skills, job control, training, work intensity,
job security, and work/life conflict across 19 European countries over a
period of substantial economic turbulence. They show, for example, that
work intensity increased across all countries but was also strongly linked to
the differing severity of recessions between economies, while “high-stress”
jobs (high intensity and low job control) only increased in the liberal market
economies, Eastern Europe, and France. What emerges, then, is a complex
mix of broadly shared trends and continuing societal distinctiveness, which
invites interrogation in relation to globalization processes, although Gallie
does not pursue this himself.
Such surveys, alongside arguments about the contested and evolving
character of “national business systems” rehearsed earlier, also highlight
the need for further research on the scope and limits of advanced capitalist
states in mediating processes of globalization and influencing patterns of
work and employment. They suggest there are still “societal effects,” as
different configurations of institutional arrangements and state policies
continue to influence such features as pay differentials, forms of employee
involvement, and other aspects of job quality, but also that their persistence is
not guaranteed in the context of an evolving and crisis-ridden international
political economy. Furthermore, existing institutions may provide distinctive resources for the active recasting of work and employment relations,
and dominant actors, especially major firms, employers’ associations, and
state agencies may pursue new agendas which alter existing relationships
between employers and workers. Such possibilities refocus the research
agenda to examine how distinctive national work and employment patterns
persistently represent terrains of policy contention and political contest,
in which both home-based and inward-investing multinational firms are
often influential players. They direct attention to the ways in which such

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

influences may bring about syncopated and incremental, but nevertheless
cumulative changes in work and employment relations, rather than abrupt
transformations. They also underline the importance of considering how
real changes may be obscured by formal institutional continuities. And
finally they point to the importance of investigating how the effects of such
changes may be unevenly distributed across sectors and among categories
of workers, often with growing inequalities in working conditions, pay, and
insecurity within national political economies. For example, Baccaro and
Howell’s (2011) analysis of the remaking of industrial relations institutions
and outcomes across a range of advanced capitalist societies suggests this
has continued to involve varied institutional arrangements and pathways
of change, but also a broadly shared trajectory of development, one they
label neoliberal because it generally delivers increasing scope for employer
discretion and reduced worker leverage across societies.
CONCLUSION
This overview of current and prospective research on the impact of globalization on patterns of work and employment in advanced capitalist economies
has concentrated particularly on studies of the dissemination and reconfiguration of work systems and employment relations across MNC subsidiaries,
and analyses of the role of national states in sustaining or modifying distinctive institutional frameworks. It has emphasized that globalization is a
contested project with complex implications, colored by cyclical features of
crisis and recovery and producing fresh forms of differentiation as well as
broadly common trends. Finally it has outlined several directions in which
further research may both build upon and go beyond the core of existing
research.
REFERENCES
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employment relations across national borders. Oxford, England: OUP.
Baccaro, L., & Howell, C. (2011). A common neoliberal trajectory: The transformation
of industrial relations in advanced capitalism. Politics and Society, 39(4), 521–563.
Bélanger, J., & Edwards, P. (2006). Towards a political economy framework: TNCs as
national and global players. In A. Ferner, J. Quintanilla & C. Sanchez-Rundé (Eds.),
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and diversity in the global economy (pp. 24–52). Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke,
England.
Boyer, R., Charron, E., Jürgens, U., & Tolliday, S. (Eds.) (1998). Between imitation and
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Elger, T., & Smith, C. (2005). Assembling work: Remaking factory regimes in Japanese
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Ferner, A., Edwards, T., & Tempel, A. (2012). Power, institutions and the crossnational transfer of employment practices in multinationals. Human Relations,
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Ferner, A., Bélanger, J., Tregaskis, O., Morley, M., & Quintanilla, J. (2013). U.S. multinationals and the control of subsidiary employment policies. Industrial and Labor
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Gallie, D. (Ed.) (2007). Employment regimes and the quality of work. Oxford, England:
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Gallie, D. (Ed.) (2013). Economic crisis, quality of work and social integration. Oxford,
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Geppert, M., & Dörrenbächer, C. (2011). Politics and power in the multinational corporation: An introduction. In C. Dörrenbächer & M. Geppart (Eds.), Politics and
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Herod, A., Rainnie, A., & McGrath-Champ, S. (2007). Working space: Why incorporating the geographical is central to theorizing work and employment practices.
Work, Employment and Society, 21(2), 247–264.
Imai, J. (2011). The transformation of Japanese employment relations: Reform without labor.
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Maerdi, G., & Tóth, A. (2006). Who is hybridizing who? Insights on MNCs’ employment policies in central Europe. In A. Ferner, J. Quintanilla & C. Sanchez-Runde
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Morgan, G. (2005a). Understanding multinational corporations. In S. Ackroyd, P.
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Between global and local. Cambridge, England: CUP.
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labour process and globalization. Work, Employment and Society, 19(2), 261–282.

TONY ELGER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Tony Elger has worked at the Universities of Aberdeen, Birmingham,
and Warwick, and is currently an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at
Warwick, affiliated to the Connecting Research on Employment and Work
(CREW) network and the Centre for Comparative Labour Studies. He has
a long-standing interest in economic sociology and labor process analysis
and, in collaboration with Chris Smith, has conducted extensive research on
Japanese multinationals, including ethnographic case studies of their subsidiary operations in the United Kingdom. He now lives in East Lothian in
Scotland and divides his time between writing, grandchild care, and walking.

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Globalization: Consequences for
Work and Employment in Advanced
Capitalist Societies
TONY ELGER

Abstract
This essay considers the consequences of globalization for work and employment
in advanced capitalist societies. It outlines the classic arguments of hyperglobalists,
sceptics, and transformationalists. It first discusses the roles of multinational companies (MNCs) in both disseminating and differentiating distinctive models of work
organization and employment relations across their international operations, emphasizing the micropolitical mediation of such processes and the interplay of “system,”
“societal,” and “dominance” effects in the selection and hybridization of such models. It next considers the roles of corporate and state actors in recasting national
institutional configurations, highlighting the contradictory and contested features
of such configurations, and the scope for substantive remaking despite apparent
institutional continuity. It then considers agendas for future research which build on
these arguments but give fuller consideration to service MNCs and MNC operations
beyond advanced capitalist societies. Finally, it notes the possible impact of other
vectors of globalization on overall trends and variations in work and employment
across societies.

INTRODUCTION
Long-standing arguments about patterns of convergence or divergence in
work and employment across advanced capitalist societies have focused primarily on the impact of common technical and organizational imperatives.
Recently, however, attention has shifted to globalization (the increasingly
rapid movement and interaction of people, objects, and images across the
world), both as an explanation of convergence and of the recasting of differences across firms and states.
Analyses of the impact of globalization must recognize that it is a contested
concept, with disagreements about the relative weight, scope, and impact
of the processes involved. Furthermore, globalization is not simply an
outcome of technical or market imperatives but is an organized project
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

involving active political processes that are themselves contested by different social actors, especially multinational companies (MNCs) and state
and supra-state agencies, but also labor and social movements. Scholarly
attention has focused on the actions and impacts of MNCs and on the
policies and capacities of the states on whose territories they operate, but
I also note other ways in which globalization may impinge on patterns of
work and employment.
CLASSIC ARGUMENTS
Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton (1999) identified three classic
positions on globalization. The hyperglobalists argued that market forces and
the policies of global firms successfully marginalized nation states, which
were no longer capable of implementing regulatory and social policies at
odds with corporate priorities. Thus, MNCs treat the globe as a “borderless
world,” readily moving operations across different localities to select attractive policy regimes and compliant workforces. Optimistic versions of this
diagnosis project virtuous circles of growth and the spread of universal “best
practices,” ultimately benefiting both employers and employees through
shared enterprise and enhanced prosperity. Pessimistic versions forecast
the growing vulnerability of workers to a footloose capital seeking fresh
supplies of cheap and malleable labor.
The sceptics questioned both the nationless character of modern firms and
the powerlessness of contemporary nation states. MNCs usually remain
linked to home economies, especially if they have a substantial home
market, and retain disproportionately home-based share-ownership, senior
management, and R&D. Furthermore, MNCs adopt varied strategies and
structures for internationalization, implying differences in their overseas
operations. Meanwhile, nation states are constrained by their modes of
insertion within the international economy, but nevertheless retain significant (although variable) leverage to pursue distinctive national or regional
policies which sustain national patterns of work and employment. Such
arguments referenced Japan’s distinctive political economy and contrasts
between the state policies and work and employment relations of different
European economies. This prompted distinctions between several “varieties
of capitalism” or “national business systems” with distinctive clusters of
complementary institutions (work systems, bargaining structures, training
systems, welfare policies), specific bases for international competitiveness,
and “path-dependent” trajectories of change. Such cross-national differences in work and employment patterns, rooted in distinctive relationships
between state, capital, and organized labor, remain relatively resilient rather
than eroded by the dynamics of globalization.

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Some sceptics replaced the hyperglobalists’ linear conception of intensifying globalization with a purely cyclical account of the ebb and flow of
internationalization. The transformationalists, however, argue that the scope
and speed of cross-national flows of contacts, information, and power are so
unprecedented that they generate qualitatively new patterns of social relations on a global scale, not least in work and employment. They underline
the major expansion and increasingly sophisticated internal coordination
of MNCs, which also extend their reach through supplier networks or
“production chains.” Different phases of corporate activity may then be
disaggregated and redistributed across operations located in distinctive
settings, sometimes involving advanced technology R&D clusters but more
often locating marketing or final assembly in high-wage metropolitan
centers and initial manufacture or parts production in labor-intensive
low-wage economies. The spread of such coordinated MNC operations
across different national economies shifts the balance of power in favor of
corporations, against workers, suppliers, localities, and states. But MNCs
continue to juggle cross-cutting objectives that limit their scope to open and
close operations in a truly “footloose” manner. Cost reduction is qualified by
“sunk costs” of existing investments or efforts to access particular markets,
employee skills, or “innovation clusters.” The implications of these features
are played out in distinctive ways across industrial sectors and global
regions. MNCs still concentrate flows within the “triad” of Europe, North
America, and Japan, but several tiers of East Asian newly industrialized
countries, Eastern Europe, China, and now India and Brazil, play growing
but distinctive roles.
Thus, the transformationalists accept some of the specific criticisms of
hyperglobalism developed by the sceptics—recognizing the need for more
differentiated accounts of the organization, leverage, and strategies of
MNCs (and their production chains) and the capacities, priorities, and
policy repertoires of nation states—but reject a merely cyclical interpretation
of the consequences. A further reorientation of debate followed the financial
and economic crises of the new millennium because they dramatized the
contradictions and uncertainties besetting both firms and states. As a result,
power relations, conflicts of interest, and contested alternatives are gaining
renewed attention in discussions of MNCs, national states, and broader
processes of globalization.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Recent research on the role of MNCs in disseminating work systems and
employment practices across their international operations has combined
the empirical mapping of these features across different firms and societies

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and the elaboration of fresh conceptual tools for understanding the complex patterns this research has documented. Indicative examples of such
research include analyses of the management of employment relations by
US multinationals across four European national destinations (Almond
& Ferner, 2006); studies of the international transfer and hybridization of
production models in the auto sector (Boyer, Charron, Jürgens, & Tolliday,
1998); survey comparisons of MNCs of varied national origins operating
in four distinctive political economies (Edwards, Marginson, & Ferner,
2013; Edwards, Tregaskis, Collings, Jalette, & Susaeta, 2013); case studies
of Japanese subsidiaries in different sectors and supply-chain positions
in one UK labor market (Elger & Smith, 2005); comparisons of the Czech
subsidiaries of German, Austrian, and US automotive and finance firms
(Meardi, Strohmer, & Traxler, 2013); comparisons between white-goods
factories operating in East Asia, Brazil, Turkey, and Southern Africa (Nichols
& Cam, 2005); studies of major fast-food companies across a wide range of
national economies (Royle & Towers, 2002; Royle, 2010); and comparisons of
call centers in Britain and India providing similar services for UK financial
service providers (Taylor & Bain, 2005). These studies, from which examples
are drawn throughout this essay, underline the wide range of comparisons in
play, by sector, national origins, and location, and the varied methodologies
that have been deployed to analyze the international dissemination and
adaptation of work practices and forms of employment.
One influential analytical starting point, rooted in sceptical analyses of
globalization, highlights the obstacles to dissemination arising from the cultural and institutional distance between “home” and “host” countries. Such
societal effects continue to be significant, but recent research also suggests
these are often qualified or overridden by other processes. Corporations
based in dominant economies may be in a position to push the adoption of
their home practices across their international operations, despite the variety
and distinctiveness of host institutions and practices: US firms, for example,
have often pursued similar HR policies across their subsidiaries. Meanwhile,
management consultants have also codified and disseminated the policy
repertoires of such dominant firms and economies. Furthermore, such
powerful models and recipes may eventually gain the status of pervasive
international “best practices,” thus moving from dominance effects to system
effects (Edwards et al., 2013; Smith, 2008). For example, “lean production”
has become an influential model beyond Japanese manufacturing, borrowed
and adapted across many other firms and sectors.
The corporate managers at the locus of such societal, dominance, and system
effects are, nevertheless, more likely to develop mixed and modified policy
repertoires than simply transplant home practices in an unmodified manner.

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In part, this is a response to the cross-pressures arising from societal and dominance effects, but “labor process theorists” also suggest that system effects
are themselves characterized by contradictory features, not least in regard
to the dynamics of work and employment relations. One way of addressing
the development and implementation of the resultant organizational innovations is through the concept of hybridization, developed particularly in a
sophisticated research program which dissects the evolution and fate of a
spectrum of such hybrids (Boyer et al., 1998; see also Maerdi & Tóth, 2006).
MNCs also remain heterogeneous, pursuing varied logics of internationalization and thus different priorities (Rubery & Grimshaw, 2003). Some prioritize market access, with little interest in transferring distinctive work and
employment practices; others emphasize financial returns across their operations, and seek to disseminate monitoring and investment procedures rather
than details of work processes and industrial relations; while those committed to standardized and integrated production platforms seek to transfer
their core production practices, but may be more selective about employment
arrangements. Finally, fresh attention is now being paid to the distinctive
mandates which various subsidiaries may have within an MNC, highlighting how firms may select different elements of their monitoring procedures,
production, and HR repertoires for implementation in different subsidiaries.
At the same time, such mandates may change, extending from, say, market
access to design and development, or contracting through noninvestment or
even closure (echoing the classic vulnerability of “branch plants”).
Together, these analytical resources help to explain processes of selective
transfer and uneven hybridization of both work systems and employment
relations across the international operations of MNCs. These processes
clearly compromise any strong reproduction of societal effects but they also
undermine any simple convergence in work and employment practices.
Instead, MNCs as global actors contribute to both convergence and continuing differentiation, the latter influenced by differences of national origins,
modes of internationalization, sectors, locations in corporate divisions of
labor, and host political economies. In regard to dominant trajectories, it
may be argued that the capacities of MNCs to coordinate and control their
international operations, combined with intensified cross-border corporate
rivalry, tend to expose workers to more stringent work routines, greater
work intensity, increased job insecurity, and challenges to effective collective
representation. But it is also evident that MNCs and their supplier chains
continue to transfer and modify work systems and employment practices in
quite varied, complex, and uneven ways, so that any such shared tendencies
coexist with persistent differences of experience.
Two complementary strands of current research provide important
resources for extending such arguments, namely, studies of the internal

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

dynamics of corporate policy making and analyses of the scope for MNCs
to influence the reconstruction of specific national political economies. The
first focuses on the micropolitics of MNC decision making through which work
systems and employment relations are constructed and reconstructed across
international operations (Ferner, Bélanger, Tregaskis, Morley, & Quintanilla,
2013; Ferner, Edwards, & Tempel, 2012; Geppert & Dörrenbächer, 2011;
Morgan, 2005a). Particular attention is given to the relationships between
headquarters and subsidiary managers, as they address cross-cutting
pressures, uncertainties, and competing priorities in policy formation and
implementation, and work through their implications for patterns of transfer, hybridization, superficial adoption, or even neutralization of corporate
models and policy packages at these subsidiaries. Differences of priorities
and resources among middle managers (say, between production and HR),
the roles of different categories of workers, and possible alliances across
these categories, add further complexity.
Headquarters managers clearly command key resources, which give them
the dominant hand in policy making and allow them to “force and foster”
change within subsidiaries. Their legal and organizational authority allows
them to define corporate objectives and what counts as “best practice”; their
decisions on flows of funding and expertise are crucial for subsidiary survival; and investment is usually conditional on various forms of audit, benchmarking, and performance measurement. They also influence the rewards
and career prospects of individual managers and can develop cadres of experienced international managers whose primary commitment is to the center
even when deployed into subsidiaries. Nevertheless, unresolved tensions
between different priorities may persist, say, between immediate cost reductions, development of longer term production capabilities, or market access,
while the lessons of audits and benchmarking exercises can be ambiguous
and contested within management, especially when sites vary in multiple
ways (size, product mix, equipment vintages, skill portfolios). Such uncertainties, together with “sunk costs,” may make the curtailment of investment, let alone site closure, an expensive option, while also risking concerted
opposition, but investment bargaining still affords top management considerable leverage, while the threat of closure remains a powerful sanction of
last resort.
Meanwhile, local managers may claim particular expertise in managing
national institutional rules, distinctive features of local labor markets,
or forms of collective representation, affording them significant scope to
influence processes of transfer or hybridization (Elger & Smith, 2005).
Furthermore, innovations in working practices or employment relations
are usually intended to challenge existing arrangements and practices, but
this needs active legitimation by subsidiary management, and this may

Globalization

7

allow them to negotiate aspects of the proposed policy and potential bases
of legitimacy, by invoking different motifs within the corporate culture or
arguments about (in)appropriateness to local conditions. Ferner et al. (2012)
discuss the reworking of both bonus payment systems and “workplace
diversity policies” in these terms. Managers who make such arguments
may embrace interests that diverge from those of headquarters (local HR
managers may give greater priority to securing worker cooperation than
HQ staff), and managers and workers may discover shared interests in
securing subsidiary survival, but the leverage of local managers primarily
hinges on performance in terms of objectives set from above. There may be
scope for them to renegotiate the mandate of their plant, bidding for local
design and development, for example, or gaining responsibility for different
products or services, but such proposals are often rebuffed, underlining
the ultimate power of top management. The arguments developed in
micropolitical rivalry among middle managers do influence outcomes, but
this is primarily because they provide significant resources for top corporate
decision makers, both by identifying the dilemmas involved and promoting
alternative possibilities among which top managers adjudicate.
So far, employees have figured only as problems or potential allies for
subsidiary managers, but analyses of corporate micropolitics must also
address their concerns and resources. As discussions of “high-performance
work models” suggest, workplace innovations may enhance the skills and
involvement of workers, although this may also involve reduced job security
(Murray, Bélanger, Giles, & Lapointe, 2002). More often, quite mundane
changes in work organization combine greater responsibility with work
intensification but little scope for greater job control. Clearly there may be
scope for workers to embrace benign versions of such innovation, while the
“disciplined worker thesis” suggests that even modest improvements in
organizational effectiveness may have attractions for employees. However,
research on actually existing “lean production,” for example, suggests
that gaps between rhetoric and practice often expose the costs incurred by
workers and fuel scepticism or opposition, although different patterns of
collective organization and activity (or their absence) inflect such outcomes.
Differences in experience along gender and occupational or generational
lines also influence how employees articulate their interests and act in
relation to innovations in work and employment relations within both home
and host workplaces (Durand & Hatzfeld, 2003). Overall, analyses of these
micropolitical dynamics of subsidiary operations enrich our understandings
of policy processes and outcomes, especially if they are embedded within
a wider understanding of the interplay of societal, dominance, and system
effects.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

The other key strand of current research has begun to address the
macro-political role of MNCs as significant actors in the modification and
reconstruction of the national institutional frameworks across which they
operate (Bélanger & Edwards, 2006). This highlights the extent to which
particular institutional configurations represent contestable compromises
between organized actors, where shifts in power relations, priorities, and
alliances may be translated into demands for change or even the repudiation of historic settlements, emphasizing limitations to the coherence
and stability of apparently resilient “national business systems” (Morgan,
2005b). For example, Sweden’s “historic compromise” dating from the
1930s was initially eroded by demands from the dominant union federation
but then (more successfully) by strategies of the major employers’ association, while in Japan a new, more aggressive, stance by the employers’
association has substantially weakened “enterprise corporatism” (Imai,
2011). Meanwhile, state agencies and policies may be actively implicated in
remaking such arrangements through new combinations of intervention and
de/reregulation, often legitimized in terms of “enhancing competitiveness,”
while dominant states may carry such initiatives into the international arena,
bilaterally or through their influence in supra-state agencies.
Presumptions of institutional coherence at the national level have also
been qualified by recognition of differences between regions, sectors, or
enterprise networks, opening the scope for currently subordinate configurations to become alternative repertoires for evolving corporate and state
policies. Thus, small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany embrace
different strategies to the big corporations, and inward investors sometimes
align themselves more with the former than the latter. This argument has
particular leverage in relation to forms of organized capitalism that have an
overtly dualist character, but as Morgan (2009) shows it can also be extended
to address the internal heterogeneity of liberal market political economies.
Thus, MNCs have contributed to the reconfiguration of several different
variants of capitalist political economy, often in ways that have remade or
extended significant institutional diversity, while the routes and agencies
of change have varied too. Liberal market capitalisms have afforded scope
for MNCs to cultivate regionally and/or sectorally distinctive corporate
regimes, while in “business corporatist” Japan foreign MNCs have gained
little leverage but change has been driven by domestic firms. Morgan also
develops the distinctive argument that Germany’s “inclusive corporatism”
has been modified more through the impact of financial MNCs providing
financial and professional services to large firms, than by the actions of
manufacturing inward investors.
Recent analyses of the complicated relationships between institutional
arrangements and outcomes have also highlighted the scope for substantive

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change within apparent institutional continuity, by stepwise modifications
to the objectives of such institutions, adding new elements that reorient their
operation, or allowing changing conditions on the ground to bias outcomes
in new ways. The work of Streeck and Thelen (2005) has shown how
powerful policy makers used these processes of “conversion,” “layering,”
and “drift” to accomplish gradual but ultimately substantial changes in
the organization and outcomes of collective bargaining in Germany. Thus,
“national business systems” involve unevenly articulated and contested
complexes of institutional arrangements which offer significant scope for
both external and internal challenge, especially by powerful corporate actors
and business associations, and such “systems” and their distinctive work
and employment relations must always be located within broader processes of capitalist development and renewal (Streeck, 2009). Furthermore,
challenges to existing state policy regimes and institutional settlements
cannot simply be construed in terms of globalization processes, but must be
analyzed in relation to other features of the international capitalist economy,
including recurrent phases of growth, turbulence, and crisis.
AGENDAS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The work reviewed earlier has generated important insights into the changing patterns of work and employment within advanced capitalist societies,
but also suggests an extensive agenda for further research. The research on
management micropolitics underlines the scope for fuller investigation and
analysis of the distinctive interests and priorities of corporate managers, subsidiary managers, and employees, and the power resources they bring to
bear in processes of decision making, negotiation, and contention about the
selection, transfer, and/or hybridization of work systems and employment
packages. It also suggests that detailed studies of corporate micropolitics
must be explicitly located in wider economic and institutional contexts, as the
society, system, and dominance framework seeks to do, if they are to offer a
more adequate explanation of both dominant trends and contextually varied
outcomes.
Although major MNCs operate in services, much research has concentrated on manufacturing, perhaps because the comparative immobility of
face-to-face services encourages such firms to prioritize access to consumer
markets rather than relocating to capitalize on cheaper labor or enhanced
management prerogatives. Given the importance of service employment in
the advanced capitalist economies, however, such MNCs deserve more systematic attention. Where there is no strongly defined “host” model of service
provision, dominant firms may still seek to transfer their work organization
and employment practices. In finance, this may involve reproducing team

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and reward structures within white-collar hierarchies, while in fast food
it commonly involves disseminating highly standardized work routines
performed by low-paid and insecure workers. International service firms are
also in the vanguard of transformations in both privatized and state services
in many countries, both through consultancy activities and by participation
in marketized reorganization. Furthermore, there is scope to “offshore”
some service activities, especially back-office functions, and technical
advances in digital communication have facilitated movement of call centrr
service provision. The internationalization of such activities (within firms or
through contracted service providers) often involves the relocation of tightly
defined and monitored work routines and mundane forms of team working
and quality assurance, which may yield substantial labor–cost savings even
with improved pay and prospects for recruits. But significant problems
include limited service delivery and erosion of worker commitment; hence,
repatriation of such operations is not unknown. Meanwhile high-end
financial and legal services companies may disseminate repertoires of
corporate reorganization across contrasting national economies, with wider
ramifications for employment practices in those economies.
Although my discussion has focused on MNC operations within advanced
capitalist societies, analyses of the work and employment practices of
MNCs must also address how different places and spaces across the globe
may play particular roles in corporate reorganization over time (Herod,
Rainnie, & McGrath-Champ, 2007), for the activities of MNCs beyond
the most mature capitalist economies condition the scope and character
of their operations within such economies. For example, both corporate
and subsidiary managers may perceive “home” employment institutions
and policies more as constraints than resources to be transferred, and use
subsidiary operations to escape from those constraints, a feature exemplified
by German car companies investing in Eastern Europe. Or innovations
without a specific “home” inspiration may be widely adopted across international firms and subsidiaries, as with the rapid expansion of temporary
and subcontract employment in white goods firms, to become codified
as a generic “flexibilization” strategy even though modified in different
firms and national settings. The scope and ramifications of such processes
require urgent further research, not least because they suggest that in
current circumstances the growing internationalization of manufacturing
production increases scope for a broad erosion of employment conditions
and marginalization of independent worker representation, although (as the
geographers emphasize) this will remain both uneven and contested.
While analyses of MNCs are crucial to our contemporary understanding
of the impacts of globalization, research should also address other ways in

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which globalization impinges upon patterns of work and employment relations. International financial flows and credit ratings clearly impinge directly
upon the activities of both private firms and state policy makers. The initiatives of supra-state agencies, such as the WTO, World Bank, and EU are
also important. Finally, consumers, citizens, and workers may form organizations and alliances across national borders, both to respond to these dominant
international actors and to pursue their own transnational forms of mobilization and leverage.
In addition to tracing the immediate implications of such processes for
work organization and employment practices, it would be valuable to
trace their wider ramifications in overall trends and patterns within and
across national economies, but there are few systematic studies to underpin
such wide-ranging societal comparisons. However, Gallie (2007, 2013) and
colleagues have pioneered comparative surveys of the quality of work and
employment, mapping changes in skills, job control, training, work intensity,
job security, and work/life conflict across 19 European countries over a
period of substantial economic turbulence. They show, for example, that
work intensity increased across all countries but was also strongly linked to
the differing severity of recessions between economies, while “high-stress”
jobs (high intensity and low job control) only increased in the liberal market
economies, Eastern Europe, and France. What emerges, then, is a complex
mix of broadly shared trends and continuing societal distinctiveness, which
invites interrogation in relation to globalization processes, although Gallie
does not pursue this himself.
Such surveys, alongside arguments about the contested and evolving
character of “national business systems” rehearsed earlier, also highlight
the need for further research on the scope and limits of advanced capitalist
states in mediating processes of globalization and influencing patterns of
work and employment. They suggest there are still “societal effects,” as
different configurations of institutional arrangements and state policies
continue to influence such features as pay differentials, forms of employee
involvement, and other aspects of job quality, but also that their persistence is
not guaranteed in the context of an evolving and crisis-ridden international
political economy. Furthermore, existing institutions may provide distinctive resources for the active recasting of work and employment relations,
and dominant actors, especially major firms, employers’ associations, and
state agencies may pursue new agendas which alter existing relationships
between employers and workers. Such possibilities refocus the research
agenda to examine how distinctive national work and employment patterns
persistently represent terrains of policy contention and political contest,
in which both home-based and inward-investing multinational firms are
often influential players. They direct attention to the ways in which such

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

influences may bring about syncopated and incremental, but nevertheless
cumulative changes in work and employment relations, rather than abrupt
transformations. They also underline the importance of considering how
real changes may be obscured by formal institutional continuities. And
finally they point to the importance of investigating how the effects of such
changes may be unevenly distributed across sectors and among categories
of workers, often with growing inequalities in working conditions, pay, and
insecurity within national political economies. For example, Baccaro and
Howell’s (2011) analysis of the remaking of industrial relations institutions
and outcomes across a range of advanced capitalist societies suggests this
has continued to involve varied institutional arrangements and pathways
of change, but also a broadly shared trajectory of development, one they
label neoliberal because it generally delivers increasing scope for employer
discretion and reduced worker leverage across societies.
CONCLUSION
This overview of current and prospective research on the impact of globalization on patterns of work and employment in advanced capitalist economies
has concentrated particularly on studies of the dissemination and reconfiguration of work systems and employment relations across MNC subsidiaries,
and analyses of the role of national states in sustaining or modifying distinctive institutional frameworks. It has emphasized that globalization is a
contested project with complex implications, colored by cyclical features of
crisis and recovery and producing fresh forms of differentiation as well as
broadly common trends. Finally it has outlined several directions in which
further research may both build upon and go beyond the core of existing
research.
REFERENCES
Almond, P., & Ferner, A. (Eds.) (2006). American multinationals in Europe: Managing
employment relations across national borders. Oxford, England: OUP.
Baccaro, L., & Howell, C. (2011). A common neoliberal trajectory: The transformation
of industrial relations in advanced capitalism. Politics and Society, 39(4), 521–563.
Bélanger, J., & Edwards, P. (2006). Towards a political economy framework: TNCs as
national and global players. In A. Ferner, J. Quintanilla & C. Sanchez-Rundé (Eds.),
Multinationals, institutions and the construction of transnational practices: Convergence
and diversity in the global economy (pp. 24–52). Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke,
England.
Boyer, R., Charron, E., Jürgens, U., & Tolliday, S. (Eds.) (1998). Between imitation and
innovation: The transfer and hybridization of productive models in the international automobile industry. Oxford, England: OUP.

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Durand, J.-P., & Hatzfeld, N. (2003). Living labour: Life on the line at Peugeot France.
Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Edwards, P. K., Sánchez-Mangas, R., Tregaskis, O., Lévesque, C., McDonnell, A., &
Quintanilla, J. (2013). Human resource management practices in the multinational
company: A test of system, societal and dominance effects. Industrial and Labor
Relations Review, 66(3), 588–617.
Edwards, T., Tregaskis, O., Collings, D., Jalette, P., & Susaeta, L. (2013). Control over
employment practice in multinationals: Subsidiary functions, corporate structures, and national systems. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 66(3), 670–695.
Edwards, T., Marginson, P., & Ferner, A. (2013). Multinational companies in crossnational context: Integration, differentiation and the interactions between MNCs
and nation states. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 66(3), 549–587.
Elger, T., & Smith, C. (2005). Assembling work: Remaking factory regimes in Japanese
multinationals in Britain. Oxford, England: OUP.
Ferner, A., Edwards, T., & Tempel, A. (2012). Power, institutions and the crossnational transfer of employment practices in multinationals. Human Relations,
65(2), 163–187.
Ferner, A., Bélanger, J., Tregaskis, O., Morley, M., & Quintanilla, J. (2013). U.S. multinationals and the control of subsidiary employment policies. Industrial and Labor
Relations Review, 66(3), 645–669.
Gallie, D. (Ed.) (2007). Employment regimes and the quality of work. Oxford, England:
OUP.
Gallie, D. (Ed.) (2013). Economic crisis, quality of work and social integration. Oxford,
England: OUP.
Geppert, M., & Dörrenbächer, C. (2011). Politics and power in the multinational corporation: An introduction. In C. Dörrenbächer & M. Geppart (Eds.), Politics and
power in the multinational corporation: The role of institutions, interests and identities.
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Herod, A., Rainnie, A., & McGrath-Champ, S. (2007). Working space: Why incorporating the geographical is central to theorizing work and employment practices.
Work, Employment and Society, 21(2), 247–264.
Imai, J. (2011). The transformation of Japanese employment relations: Reform without labor.
Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Maerdi, G., & Tóth, A. (2006). Who is hybridizing who? Insights on MNCs’ employment policies in central Europe. In A. Ferner, J. Quintanilla & C. Sanchez-Runde
(Eds.), Multinationals, institutions and the construction of transnational practices: Convergence and diversity in the global economy (pp. 155–183). Basingstoke, England:
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Meardi, G., Strohmer, S., & Traxler, F. (2013). Race to the east, race to the bottom?
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Morgan, G. (2005a). Understanding multinational corporations. In S. Ackroyd, P.
Arnold, R. Batt & P. Thompson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of work and organization.
Oxford, England: OUP.
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systems of economic organization. Oxford, England: OUP.
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goods industry in Africa, South America, East Asia and Europe. Basingstoke, England:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Royle, T. (2010). ‘Low road Americanization’ and the global ‘McJob’: a longitudinal analysis of work, pay and unionization in the international fast-food industry.
Labor History, 51(2), 249–270.
Royle, T., & Towers, B. (Eds.) (2002). Labour relations in the global fast-food industry.
London, England: Routledge.
Rubery, J., & Grimshaw, D. (2003). The organization of employment: An international
perspective. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Smith, C. (2008). Work organisation within a dynamic globalising context: A critique
of national institutional analysis of the international firm and an alternative perspective. In C. Smith, B. McSweeney & R. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Remaking management:
Between global and local. Cambridge, England: CUP.
Streeck, W. (2009). Re-forming capitalism: Institutional change in the German political
economy. Oxford, England: OUP.
Streeck, W., & Thelen, K. (2005). Introduction: Institutional change in advanced political economies. In W. Streeck & K. Thelen (Eds.), Beyond continuity: Institutional
change in advanced political economies. Oxford, England: OUP.
Taylor, P., & Bain, P. (2005). ‘India calling to the far away towns’: The call centre
labour process and globalization. Work, Employment and Society, 19(2), 261–282.

TONY ELGER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Tony Elger has worked at the Universities of Aberdeen, Birmingham,
and Warwick, and is currently an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at
Warwick, affiliated to the Connecting Research on Employment and Work
(CREW) network and the Centre for Comparative Labour Studies. He has
a long-standing interest in economic sociology and labor process analysis
and, in collaboration with Chris Smith, has conducted extensive research on
Japanese multinationals, including ethnographic case studies of their subsidiary operations in the United Kingdom. He now lives in East Lothian in
Scotland and divides his time between writing, grandchild care, and walking.

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Globalization: Consequences for
Work and Employment in Advanced
Capitalist Societies
TONY ELGER

Abstract
This essay considers the consequences of globalization for work and employment
in advanced capitalist societies. It outlines the classic arguments of hyperglobalists,
sceptics, and transformationalists. It first discusses the roles of multinational companies (MNCs) in both disseminating and differentiating distinctive models of work
organization and employment relations across their international operations, emphasizing the micropolitical mediation of such processes and the interplay of “system,”
“societal,” and “dominance” effects in the selection and hybridization of such models. It next considers the roles of corporate and state actors in recasting national
institutional configurations, highlighting the contradictory and contested features
of such configurations, and the scope for substantive remaking despite apparent
institutional continuity. It then considers agendas for future research which build on
these arguments but give fuller consideration to service MNCs and MNC operations
beyond advanced capitalist societies. Finally, it notes the possible impact of other
vectors of globalization on overall trends and variations in work and employment
across societies.

INTRODUCTION
Long-standing arguments about patterns of convergence or divergence in
work and employment across advanced capitalist societies have focused primarily on the impact of common technical and organizational imperatives.
Recently, however, attention has shifted to globalization (the increasingly
rapid movement and interaction of people, objects, and images across the
world), both as an explanation of convergence and of the recasting of differences across firms and states.
Analyses of the impact of globalization must recognize that it is a contested
concept, with disagreements about the relative weight, scope, and impact
of the processes involved. Furthermore, globalization is not simply an
outcome of technical or market imperatives but is an organized project
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

involving active political processes that are themselves contested by different social actors, especially multinational companies (MNCs) and state
and supra-state agencies, but also labor and social movements. Scholarly
attention has focused on the actions and impacts of MNCs and on the
policies and capacities of the states on whose territories they operate, but
I also note other ways in which globalization may impinge on patterns of
work and employment.
CLASSIC ARGUMENTS
Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton (1999) identified three classic
positions on globalization. The hyperglobalists argued that market forces and
the policies of global firms successfully marginalized nation states, which
were no longer capable of implementing regulatory and social policies at
odds with corporate priorities. Thus, MNCs treat the globe as a “borderless
world,” readily moving operations across different localities to select attractive policy regimes and compliant workforces. Optimistic versions of this
diagnosis project virtuous circles of growth and the spread of universal “best
practices,” ultimately benefiting both employers and employees through
shared enterprise and enhanced prosperity. Pessimistic versions forecast
the growing vulnerability of workers to a footloose capital seeking fresh
supplies of cheap and malleable labor.
The sceptics questioned both the nationless character of modern firms and
the powerlessness of contemporary nation states. MNCs usually remain
linked to home economies, especially if they have a substantial home
market, and retain disproportionately home-based share-ownership, senior
management, and R&D. Furthermore, MNCs adopt varied strategies and
structures for internationalization, implying differences in their overseas
operations. Meanwhile, nation states are constrained by their modes of
insertion within the international economy, but nevertheless retain significant (although variable) leverage to pursue distinctive national or regional
policies which sustain national patterns of work and employment. Such
arguments referenced Japan’s distinctive political economy and contrasts
between the state policies and work and employment relations of different
European economies. This prompted distinctions between several “varieties
of capitalism” or “national business systems” with distinctive clusters of
complementary institutions (work systems, bargaining structures, training
systems, welfare policies), specific bases for international competitiveness,
and “path-dependent” trajectories of change. Such cross-national differences in work and employment patterns, rooted in distinctive relationships
between state, capital, and organized labor, remain relatively resilient rather
than eroded by the dynamics of globalization.

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Some sceptics replaced the hyperglobalists’ linear conception of intensifying globalization with a purely cyclical account of the ebb and flow of
internationalization. The transformationalists, however, argue that the scope
and speed of cross-national flows of contacts, information, and power are so
unprecedented that they generate qualitatively new patterns of social relations on a global scale, not least in work and employment. They underline
the major expansion and increasingly sophisticated internal coordination
of MNCs, which also extend their reach through supplier networks or
“production chains.” Different phases of corporate activity may then be
disaggregated and redistributed across operations located in distinctive
settings, sometimes involving advanced technology R&D clusters but more
often locating marketing or final assembly in high-wage metropolitan
centers and initial manufacture or parts production in labor-intensive
low-wage economies. The spread of such coordinated MNC operations
across different national economies shifts the balance of power in favor of
corporations, against workers, suppliers, localities, and states. But MNCs
continue to juggle cross-cutting objectives that limit their scope to open and
close operations in a truly “footloose” manner. Cost reduction is qualified by
“sunk costs” of existing investments or efforts to access particular markets,
employee skills, or “innovation clusters.” The implications of these features
are played out in distinctive ways across industrial sectors and global
regions. MNCs still concentrate flows within the “triad” of Europe, North
America, and Japan, but several tiers of East Asian newly industrialized
countries, Eastern Europe, China, and now India and Brazil, play growing
but distinctive roles.
Thus, the transformationalists accept some of the specific criticisms of
hyperglobalism developed by the sceptics—recognizing the need for more
differentiated accounts of the organization, leverage, and strategies of
MNCs (and their production chains) and the capacities, priorities, and
policy repertoires of nation states—but reject a merely cyclical interpretation
of the consequences. A further reorientation of debate followed the financial
and economic crises of the new millennium because they dramatized the
contradictions and uncertainties besetting both firms and states. As a result,
power relations, conflicts of interest, and contested alternatives are gaining
renewed attention in discussions of MNCs, national states, and broader
processes of globalization.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Recent research on the role of MNCs in disseminating work systems and
employment practices across their international operations has combined
the empirical mapping of these features across different firms and societies

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and the elaboration of fresh conceptual tools for understanding the complex patterns this research has documented. Indicative examples of such
research include analyses of the management of employment relations by
US multinationals across four European national destinations (Almond
& Ferner, 2006); studies of the international transfer and hybridization of
production models in the auto sector (Boyer, Charron, Jürgens, & Tolliday,
1998); survey comparisons of MNCs of varied national origins operating
in four distinctive political economies (Edwards, Marginson, & Ferner,
2013; Edwards, Tregaskis, Collings, Jalette, & Susaeta, 2013); case studies
of Japanese subsidiaries in different sectors and supply-chain positions
in one UK labor market (Elger & Smith, 2005); comparisons of the Czech
subsidiaries of German, Austrian, and US automotive and finance firms
(Meardi, Strohmer, & Traxler, 2013); comparisons between white-goods
factories operating in East Asia, Brazil, Turkey, and Southern Africa (Nichols
& Cam, 2005); studies of major fast-food companies across a wide range of
national economies (Royle & Towers, 2002; Royle, 2010); and comparisons of
call centers in Britain and India providing similar services for UK financial
service providers (Taylor & Bain, 2005). These studies, from which examples
are drawn throughout this essay, underline the wide range of comparisons in
play, by sector, national origins, and location, and the varied methodologies
that have been deployed to analyze the international dissemination and
adaptation of work practices and forms of employment.
One influential analytical starting point, rooted in sceptical analyses of
globalization, highlights the obstacles to dissemination arising from the cultural and institutional distance between “home” and “host” countries. Such
societal effects continue to be significant, but recent research also suggests
these are often qualified or overridden by other processes. Corporations
based in dominant economies may be in a position to push the adoption of
their home practices across their international operations, despite the variety
and distinctiveness of host institutions and practices: US firms, for example,
have often pursued similar HR policies across their subsidiaries. Meanwhile,
management consultants have also codified and disseminated the policy
repertoires of such dominant firms and economies. Furthermore, such
powerful models and recipes may eventually gain the status of pervasive
international “best practices,” thus moving from dominance effects to system
effects (Edwards et al., 2013; Smith, 2008). For example, “lean production”
has become an influential model beyond Japanese manufacturing, borrowed
and adapted across many other firms and sectors.
The corporate managers at the locus of such societal, dominance, and system
effects are, nevertheless, more likely to develop mixed and modified policy
repertoires than simply transplant home practices in an unmodified manner.

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In part, this is a response to the cross-pressures arising from societal and dominance effects, but “labor process theorists” also suggest that system effects
are themselves characterized by contradictory features, not least in regard
to the dynamics of work and employment relations. One way of addressing
the development and implementation of the resultant organizational innovations is through the concept of hybridization, developed particularly in a
sophisticated research program which dissects the evolution and fate of a
spectrum of such hybrids (Boyer et al., 1998; see also Maerdi & Tóth, 2006).
MNCs also remain heterogeneous, pursuing varied logics of internationalization and thus different priorities (Rubery & Grimshaw, 2003). Some prioritize market access, with little interest in transferring distinctive work and
employment practices; others emphasize financial returns across their operations, and seek to disseminate monitoring and investment procedures rather
than details of work processes and industrial relations; while those committed to standardized and integrated production platforms seek to transfer
their core production practices, but may be more selective about employment
arrangements. Finally, fresh attention is now being paid to the distinctive
mandates which various subsidiaries may have within an MNC, highlighting how firms may select different elements of their monitoring procedures,
production, and HR repertoires for implementation in different subsidiaries.
At the same time, such mandates may change, extending from, say, market
access to design and development, or contracting through noninvestment or
even closure (echoing the classic vulnerability of “branch plants”).
Together, these analytical resources help to explain processes of selective
transfer and uneven hybridization of both work systems and employment
relations across the international operations of MNCs. These processes
clearly compromise any strong reproduction of societal effects but they also
undermine any simple convergence in work and employment practices.
Instead, MNCs as global actors contribute to both convergence and continuing differentiation, the latter influenced by differences of national origins,
modes of internationalization, sectors, locations in corporate divisions of
labor, and host political economies. In regard to dominant trajectories, it
may be argued that the capacities of MNCs to coordinate and control their
international operations, combined with intensified cross-border corporate
rivalry, tend to expose workers to more stringent work routines, greater
work intensity, increased job insecurity, and challenges to effective collective
representation. But it is also evident that MNCs and their supplier chains
continue to transfer and modify work systems and employment practices in
quite varied, complex, and uneven ways, so that any such shared tendencies
coexist with persistent differences of experience.
Two complementary strands of current research provide important
resources for extending such arguments, namely, studies of the internal

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

dynamics of corporate policy making and analyses of the scope for MNCs
to influence the reconstruction of specific national political economies. The
first focuses on the micropolitics of MNC decision making through which work
systems and employment relations are constructed and reconstructed across
international operations (Ferner, Bélanger, Tregaskis, Morley, & Quintanilla,
2013; Ferner, Edwards, & Tempel, 2012; Geppert & Dörrenbächer, 2011;
Morgan, 2005a). Particular attention is given to the relationships between
headquarters and subsidiary managers, as they address cross-cutting
pressures, uncertainties, and competing priorities in policy formation and
implementation, and work through their implications for patterns of transfer, hybridization, superficial adoption, or even neutralization of corporate
models and policy packages at these subsidiaries. Differences of priorities
and resources among middle managers (say, between production and HR),
the roles of different categories of workers, and possible alliances across
these categories, add further complexity.
Headquarters managers clearly command key resources, which give them
the dominant hand in policy making and allow them to “force and foster”
change within subsidiaries. Their legal and organizational authority allows
them to define corporate objectives and what counts as “best practice”; their
decisions on flows of funding and expertise are crucial for subsidiary survival; and investment is usually conditional on various forms of audit, benchmarking, and performance measurement. They also influence the rewards
and career prospects of individual managers and can develop cadres of experienced international managers whose primary commitment is to the center
even when deployed into subsidiaries. Nevertheless, unresolved tensions
between different priorities may persist, say, between immediate cost reductions, development of longer term production capabilities, or market access,
while the lessons of audits and benchmarking exercises can be ambiguous
and contested within management, especially when sites vary in multiple
ways (size, product mix, equipment vintages, skill portfolios). Such uncertainties, together with “sunk costs,” may make the curtailment of investment, let alone site closure, an expensive option, while also risking concerted
opposition, but investment bargaining still affords top management considerable leverage, while the threat of closure remains a powerful sanction of
last resort.
Meanwhile, local managers may claim particular expertise in managing
national institutional rules, distinctive features of local labor markets,
or forms of collective representation, affording them significant scope to
influence processes of transfer or hybridization (Elger & Smith, 2005).
Furthermore, innovations in working practices or employment relations
are usually intended to challenge existing arrangements and practices, but
this needs active legitimation by subsidiary management, and this may

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7

allow them to negotiate aspects of the proposed policy and potential bases
of legitimacy, by invoking different motifs within the corporate culture or
arguments about (in)appropriateness to local conditions. Ferner et al. (2012)
discuss the reworking of both bonus payment systems and “workplace
diversity policies” in these terms. Managers who make such arguments
may embrace interests that diverge from those of headquarters (local HR
managers may give greater priority to securing worker cooperation than
HQ staff), and managers and workers may discover shared interests in
securing subsidiary survival, but the leverage of local managers primarily
hinges on performance in terms of objectives set from above. There may be
scope for them to renegotiate the mandate of their plant, bidding for local
design and development, for example, or gaining responsibility for different
products or services, but such proposals are often rebuffed, underlining
the ultimate power of top management. The arguments developed in
micropolitical rivalry among middle managers do influence outcomes, but
this is primarily because they provide significant resources for top corporate
decision makers, both by identifying the dilemmas involved and promoting
alternative possibilities among which top managers adjudicate.
So far, employees have figured only as problems or potential allies for
subsidiary managers, but analyses of corporate micropolitics must also
address their concerns and resources. As discussions of “high-performance
work models” suggest, workplace innovations may enhance the skills and
involvement of workers, although this may also involve reduced job security
(Murray, Bélanger, Giles, & Lapointe, 2002). More often, quite mundane
changes in work organization combine greater responsibility with work
intensification but little scope for greater job control. Clearly there may be
scope for workers to embrace benign versions of such innovation, while the
“disciplined worker thesis” suggests that even modest improvements in
organizational effectiveness may have attractions for employees. However,
research on actually existing “lean production,” for example, suggests
that gaps between rhetoric and practice often expose the costs incurred by
workers and fuel scepticism or opposition, although different patterns of
collective organization and activity (or their absence) inflect such outcomes.
Differences in experience along gender and occupational or generational
lines also influence how employees articulate their interests and act in
relation to innovations in work and employment relations within both home
and host workplaces (Durand & Hatzfeld, 2003). Overall, analyses of these
micropolitical dynamics of subsidiary operations enrich our understandings
of policy processes and outcomes, especially if they are embedded within
a wider understanding of the interplay of societal, dominance, and system
effects.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

The other key strand of current research has begun to address the
macro-political role of MNCs as significant actors in the modification and
reconstruction of the national institutional frameworks across which they
operate (Bélanger & Edwards, 2006). This highlights the extent to which
particular institutional configurations represent contestable compromises
between organized actors, where shifts in power relations, priorities, and
alliances may be translated into demands for change or even the repudiation of historic settlements, emphasizing limitations to the coherence
and stability of apparently resilient “national business systems” (Morgan,
2005b). For example, Sweden’s “historic compromise” dating from the
1930s was initially eroded by demands from the dominant union federation
but then (more successfully) by strategies of the major employers’ association, while in Japan a new, more aggressive, stance by the employers’
association has substantially weakened “enterprise corporatism” (Imai,
2011). Meanwhile, state agencies and policies may be actively implicated in
remaking such arrangements through new combinations of intervention and
de/reregulation, often legitimized in terms of “enhancing competitiveness,”
while dominant states may carry such initiatives into the international arena,
bilaterally or through their influence in supra-state agencies.
Presumptions of institutional coherence at the national level have also
been qualified by recognition of differences between regions, sectors, or
enterprise networks, opening the scope for currently subordinate configurations to become alternative repertoires for evolving corporate and state
policies. Thus, small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany embrace
different strategies to the big corporations, and inward investors sometimes
align themselves more with the former than the latter. This argument has
particular leverage in relation to forms of organized capitalism that have an
overtly dualist character, but as Morgan (2009) shows it can also be extended
to address the internal heterogeneity of liberal market political economies.
Thus, MNCs have contributed to the reconfiguration of several different
variants of capitalist political economy, often in ways that have remade or
extended significant institutional diversity, while the routes and agencies
of change have varied too. Liberal market capitalisms have afforded scope
for MNCs to cultivate regionally and/or sectorally distinctive corporate
regimes, while in “business corporatist” Japan foreign MNCs have gained
little leverage but change has been driven by domestic firms. Morgan also
develops the distinctive argument that Germany’s “inclusive corporatism”
has been modified more through the impact of financial MNCs providing
financial and professional services to large firms, than by the actions of
manufacturing inward investors.
Recent analyses of the complicated relationships between institutional
arrangements and outcomes have also highlighted the scope for substantive

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9

change within apparent institutional continuity, by stepwise modifications
to the objectives of such institutions, adding new elements that reorient their
operation, or allowing changing conditions on the ground to bias outcomes
in new ways. The work of Streeck and Thelen (2005) has shown how
powerful policy makers used these processes of “conversion,” “layering,”
and “drift” to accomplish gradual but ultimately substantial changes in
the organization and outcomes of collective bargaining in Germany. Thus,
“national business systems” involve unevenly articulated and contested
complexes of institutional arrangements which offer significant scope for
both external and internal challenge, especially by powerful corporate actors
and business associations, and such “systems” and their distinctive work
and employment relations must always be located within broader processes of capitalist development and renewal (Streeck, 2009). Furthermore,
challenges to existing state policy regimes and institutional settlements
cannot simply be construed in terms of globalization processes, but must be
analyzed in relation to other features of the international capitalist economy,
including recurrent phases of growth, turbulence, and crisis.
AGENDAS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The work reviewed earlier has generated important insights into the changing patterns of work and employment within advanced capitalist societies,
but also suggests an extensive agenda for further research. The research on
management micropolitics underlines the scope for fuller investigation and
analysis of the distinctive interests and priorities of corporate managers, subsidiary managers, and employees, and the power resources they bring to
bear in processes of decision making, negotiation, and contention about the
selection, transfer, and/or hybridization of work systems and employment
packages. It also suggests that detailed studies of corporate micropolitics
must be explicitly located in wider economic and institutional contexts, as the
society, system, and dominance framework seeks to do, if they are to offer a
more adequate explanation of both dominant trends and contextually varied
outcomes.
Although major MNCs operate in services, much research has concentrated on manufacturing, perhaps because the comparative immobility of
face-to-face services encourages such firms to prioritize access to consumer
markets rather than relocating to capitalize on cheaper labor or enhanced
management prerogatives. Given the importance of service employment in
the advanced capitalist economies, however, such MNCs deserve more systematic attention. Where there is no strongly defined “host” model of service
provision, dominant firms may still seek to transfer their work organization
and employment practices. In finance, this may involve reproducing team

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and reward structures within white-collar hierarchies, while in fast food
it commonly involves disseminating highly standardized work routines
performed by low-paid and insecure workers. International service firms are
also in the vanguard of transformations in both privatized and state services
in many countries, both through consultancy activities and by participation
in marketized reorganization. Furthermore, there is scope to “offshore”
some service activities, especially back-office functions, and technical
advances in digital communication have facilitated movement of call centrr
service provision. The internationalization of such activities (within firms or
through contracted service providers) often involves the relocation of tightly
defined and monitored work routines and mundane forms of team working
and quality assurance, which may yield substantial labor–cost savings even
with improved pay and prospects for recruits. But significant problems
include limited service delivery and erosion of worker commitment; hence,
repatriation of such operations is not unknown. Meanwhile high-end
financial and legal services companies may disseminate repertoires of
corporate reorganization across contrasting national economies, with wider
ramifications for employment practices in those economies.
Although my discussion has focused on MNC operations within advanced
capitalist societies, analyses of the work and employment practices of
MNCs must also address how different places and spaces across the globe
may play particular roles in corporate reorganization over time (Herod,
Rainnie, & McGrath-Champ, 2007), for the activities of MNCs beyond
the most mature capitalist economies condition the scope and character
of their operations within such economies. For example, both corporate
and subsidiary managers may perceive “home” employment institutions
and policies more as constraints than resources to be transferred, and use
subsidiary operations to escape from those constraints, a feature exemplified
by German car companies investing in Eastern Europe. Or innovations
without a specific “home” inspiration may be widely adopted across international firms and subsidiaries, as with the rapid expansion of temporary
and subcontract employment in white goods firms, to become codified
as a generic “flexibilization” strategy even though modified in different
firms and national settings. The scope and ramifications of such processes
require urgent further research, not least because they suggest that in
current circumstances the growing internationalization of manufacturing
production increases scope for a broad erosion of employment conditions
and marginalization of independent worker representation, although (as the
geographers emphasize) this will remain both uneven and contested.
While analyses of MNCs are crucial to our contemporary understanding
of the impacts of globalization, research should also address other ways in

Globalization

11

which globalization impinges upon patterns of work and employment relations. International financial flows and credit ratings clearly impinge directly
upon the activities of both private firms and state policy makers. The initiatives of supra-state agencies, such as the WTO, World Bank, and EU are
also important. Finally, consumers, citizens, and workers may form organizations and alliances across national borders, both to respond to these dominant
international actors and to pursue their own transnational forms of mobilization and leverage.
In addition to tracing the immediate implications of such processes for
work organization and employment practices, it would be valuable to
trace their wider ramifications in overall trends and patterns within and
across national economies, but there are few systematic studies to underpin
such wide-ranging societal comparisons. However, Gallie (2007, 2013) and
colleagues have pioneered comparative surveys of the quality of work and
employment, mapping changes in skills, job control, training, work intensity,
job security, and work/life conflict across 19 European countries over a
period of substantial economic turbulence. They show, for example, that
work intensity increased across all countries but was also strongly linked to
the differing severity of recessions between economies, while “high-stress”
jobs (high intensity and low job control) only increased in the liberal market
economies, Eastern Europe, and France. What emerges, then, is a complex
mix of broadly shared trends and continuing societal distinctiveness, which
invites interrogation in relation to globalization processes, although Gallie
does not pursue this himself.
Such surveys, alongside arguments about the contested and evolving
character of “national business systems” rehearsed earlier, also highlight
the need for further research on the scope and limits of advanced capitalist
states in mediating processes of globalization and influencing patterns of
work and employment. They suggest there are still “societal effects,” as
different configurations of institutional arrangements and state policies
continue to influence such features as pay differentials, forms of employee
involvement, and other aspects of job quality, but also that their persistence is
not guaranteed in the context of an evolving and crisis-ridden international
political economy. Furthermore, existing institutions may provide distinctive resources for the active recasting of work and employment relations,
and dominant actors, especially major firms, employers’ associations, and
state agencies may pursue new agendas which alter existing relationships
between employers and workers. Such possibilities refocus the research
agenda to examine how distinctive national work and employment patterns
persistently represent terrains of policy contention and political contest,
in which both home-based and inward-investing multinational firms are
often influential players. They direct attention to the ways in which such

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

influences may bring about syncopated and incremental, but nevertheless
cumulative changes in work and employment relations, rather than abrupt
transformations. They also underline the importance of considering how
real changes may be obscured by formal institutional continuities. And
finally they point to the importance of investigating how the effects of such
changes may be unevenly distributed across sectors and among categories
of workers, often with growing inequalities in working conditions, pay, and
insecurity within national political economies. For example, Baccaro and
Howell’s (2011) analysis of the remaking of industrial relations institutions
and outcomes across a range of advanced capitalist societies suggests this
has continued to involve varied institutional arrangements and pathways
of change, but also a broadly shared trajectory of development, one they
label neoliberal because it generally delivers increasing scope for employer
discretion and reduced worker leverage across societies.
CONCLUSION
This overview of current and prospective research on the impact of globalization on patterns of work and employment in advanced capitalist economies
has concentrated particularly on studies of the dissemination and reconfiguration of work systems and employment relations across MNC subsidiaries,
and analyses of the role of national states in sustaining or modifying distinctive institutional frameworks. It has emphasized that globalization is a
contested project with complex implications, colored by cyclical features of
crisis and recovery and producing fresh forms of differentiation as well as
broadly common trends. Finally it has outlined several directions in which
further research may both build upon and go beyond the core of existing
research.
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TONY ELGER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Tony Elger has worked at the Universities of Aberdeen, Birmingham,
and Warwick, and is currently an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at
Warwick, affiliated to the Connecting Research on Employment and Work
(CREW) network and the Centre for Comparative Labour Studies. He has
a long-standing interest in economic sociology and labor process analysis
and, in collaboration with Chris Smith, has conducted extensive research on
Japanese multinationals, including ethnographic case studies of their subsidiary operations in the United Kingdom. He now lives in East Lothian in
Scotland and divides his time between writing, grandchild care, and walking.

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Globalization: Consequences for Work and Employment in Advanced Capitalist Societies