ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses Chris Brewster's argument, first made in 1995, that Europe presented a very different institutional environment for Human Resource Management (HRM) from the USA and ask how far it holds good two decades later. It presents a very broad and brief estimate of continuity and change in European employment relations in workplaces and how they have affected managerial prerogative since 1995. The chapter explores with a sketch of the situation in 1995, and examines the evolution of national-level institutions across subsequent decades. It examines collective bargaining and social pacts at national level, following this with an assessment of the evolution of European-level institutions. Social pacts and tripartite structures have played a considerable role in national employment policy and wage setting in several EU countries since the mid-1990s, outside of the liberal market economy of Britain where tripartism no longer exists. There is a considerable degree of national path dependence' in institutional employment relations in the countries of Europe.