Between Market & Institutions

Under international market pressure, companies increasingly tend to restructure their operations. The diverse outcomes of such restructurings have important employment implications, as Illustrated by recent examples from Belgium such as Opel, Carrefour, Arcelor-Mittal, Beckaert and AB-InBev. Comparative research has mainly studied the influence of different industrial relations systems on restructuring processes.

This institutional literature has, however, been criticised for being overly deterministic. This article aims to accommodate such criticism by illustrating how market matters to the way restructuring is conducted.

Although institutional settings restrain social actors' behaviour towards restructuring, they do not determine it. Social actors can use institutions with a view to pursue their interests and to shape restructuring within the context of the market in which they are embedded, which involves their exposure to international and global forces. The study is based on a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 12 case studies in seven countries. Data were gathered as part of a European research project supported by the social partners.