ABSTRACT
In the Netherlands there is not much tradition of representative democratic participation in the information and communications technology industry. An evaluation of the state of democratic participation in the information and communications industry tends to turn quickly into a matter of ideological positions. Employers claim that unions have no right to demand collective bargaining since only a few workers are unionized. An initial benefit of the type of analysis which Bourdieu proposes is that organizational views on democratic participation and workers’ interests which were sketched in the introduction to this chapter can be understood as the result of social forces. In the context of the Dutch industrial relations system, these respective cognitive frameworks conceive of democratic participation and workers’ interests in different. Industrial unionism and sectoral collective agreements thereby formed the bedrock of the Dutch system. It is precisely this system, however, which is undermined by the views of information and communications technology employees.
