ABSTRACT
Most industrial-relations scholars regard conflict and cooperation as important constructs that are central to the debate on workplace governance because capital and labour have conflicting interests. This chapter follows that the concerns of capital embrace the operation and expansion of an enterprise, responding to competition, and establishing processes within the workplace ensuring that workers turn up for work regularly and put in some acceptable level of effort and commitment. Labour has interests in the level of wages and the nature of working conditions, the ability to participate in decision-making, the continued survival of the firms for which they work. Due to particular historical circumstances in general and the involvement of the Solidarity trade union in the collapse of communism in particular conflict and confrontation, cooperation and compromise, social capital and political capital, being all inextricably intertwined, Eastern Europe manifested themselves with extraordinary intensity.
