ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, ideologies and societal visions have become increasingly intertwined. The dividing lines between institutions and between societies are more often drawn on pragmatic grounds than on the basis of ideological differences. The sociologist Kees Schuyt, refers to this as the ‘multi-individual society’ where everything is negotiable: ‘Parents and children, trade unions and companies, liberals and social democrats have become skilled negotiators, but with fading convictions. Strategic behaviour is characteristic of negotiating politicians and calculating citizens’ (Vk, 19 June 2002). The original concept of a ‘bargaining society’ developed in European smaller and open economies, where it became part of the constitutional framework in which institutionalized and collective bargaining, for instance, was used to set wages (Chapters 2 and 4). Studies from political sciences and sociology not only stressed the benefits of this particular type of collective bargaining (Hedström, 1986), but also pointed at the inefficiency (Johansen, 1979) and fragmentation (Wallerstein and Golden, 1997) that resulted from this particular type of institutionalized bargaining. A ‘bargaining society’ would fall victim to a self-defeating dynamic stemming from the ‘inefficiency of bargaining’ as a mode of policy making: ‘bargaining has an inherent tendency to eliminate the potential gain which is the object of the bargaining’ (Johansen, 1979:520).
