Introduction

Although the industrial society has been overtaken by the so-called ‘post-industrial’ society, collective bargaining still remains the institutional reference for the construction of Social Europe in the twenty-first century. Policy labels such as ‘social dialogue’ integrated into EU official language and the Treaty, refer mainly to this paradigm. Nevertheless it is obvious that we now have to tackle the challenge of rethinking the scope and the meaning of collective bargaining. The socialist inspiration which served as a theoretical backdrop for collective bargaining throughout the industrial era has lost its persuasive strength. Economic liberalism, however, is equally unlikely to offer an alternative intellectual framework to capture the essence of an institution which it regards merely – at best – as aggregating individual interests. A new conceptual framework is required to grasp the future relevance this institution in our post-industrial economies.

In order to meet this objective, we propose to cast an ‘institutionalist’ glance at collective bargaining and the attendant collective rights. This very general formulation is intended to indicate that we take account, in our socio-economic analysis, of (institutional) norms which cannot be reduced to strategic interests or systemic functions. Social action is infused, made possible and limited by such norms. The question we wish to address is: how can an ‘institutionalist’ theory of collective bargaining be renewed by means of an approach which focuses on the question of capabilities?