ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with the production and the diffusion of labour relations norms and practices within and across regional space. It rejects a widespread assumption that the economic can effectively be regulated at the regional governance level without addressing the social. It recognizes that accommodating the social has been a critical part of economic bargains of the industrial era in western market economies, and contends that fi nding a suitable mediation should be part of globalization’s future. Rather than turning directly to the prospect of constructing a cosmopolitan multilateralism, however, the focus on social regionalism in this book suggests that a mélange of intermediate spaces at or through the regional level may offer fertile loci for the kind of experimentation that the social in the economic requires. Social regionalism seeks to comprehend the dialectical process of a deepened regional integration that acknowledges and addresses-rather than denying and undermining-the social as an intimate part of the economic. This book engages conceptual and theoretical approaches to understanding the social in regional integration drawn from the intersection of industrial relations, labour and trade law, international political economy and labour and management studies. It moves beyond textual analyses of regional agreements to offer alternative accounts of regional integration that recognize the social to be intimately linked to the economic.
