The Role of Social Partners in Managing Europe’s Great Recession

Bernhard Ebbinghaus is Professor of Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, UK. J. Timo Weishaupt is Professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Göttingen, Germany.

Part 1: Concertation during times of crisis 1. Introduction: Studying social concertation in Europe 2. Social concertation in Europe during the Great Recession: Exploring when governments include social partners in crisis management Part 2: Preventing a crisis through pragmatic crisis management 3. Back to the future: Germany’s turn to neo-corporatism in times of crisis 4. Wage autonomy, political reforms and the absence of social pacts in Denmark 5. Crisis management in the Netherlands: Social concertation and constructive opposition 6. Unilateral crisis prevention and crumbling social partnership in Poland Part 3: The perils of concertation in austere crisis contexts 7. The rise and fall of Irish social partnership 8. The decline of social concertation or the crumbling pillars of legitimacy in Spain 9. A biased pendulum: Italy's oscillations between concertation and disintermediation 10. The crisis and the changing nature of political exchange in Slovenia Part 4: Crisis concertation in European perspective 11. Conflict or cooperation? Explaining the European Commission’s and social partners’ preferences for low-level social dialogue 12. Social concertation at a cross-road: crisis corporatism or corporatism in crisis? 13. Postscript: Social partnership facing the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic