ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates a number of key aspects of industrial relations at the level of the employing organisation as a means of evaluating developments in the nature and conduct of industrial relations. It examines: levels of trade union membership in organisations across Europe, the extent and nature of trade union recognition, and the locus of policy determination in industrial relations. Furthermore, although in general two-thirds of all European organisations retain HR responsibility for industrial relations, it is the service and public sectors which are more likely to have a significant HR department involvement: the production sector is most likely to give more responsibility to line management. The new empirical data presented in the chapter leads us to give tentative support to the notion that European industrial relations is not yet, at least, converging. These differing connotations simply serve to reinforce the importance of country level distinctions and the distance that we remain from any convergence of European industrial relations.
