Social Partnership and the Enterprise Lessons from the Irish Experience by PAUL TEAGUE

This paper suggests that the Irish experience of social partnership does not fully overlap with mainstream employment relations literature on the topic. Three features in particular distinguish the Irish case. One is the importance attached to a procedural consensus that allows advances to be made on partnership at work without full agreement between employers and unions about the substantive elements of this employment relations innovation. Another is the stress placed on experimental action in the development of these arrangements: for the most part, enterprise partnership is not seen in terms of a big transformative model of organisational change, involving the immediate diffusion of complementary bundles of high performance work practices. A third characteristic is the use of an essentially non-legalistic public support framework to foster and guide the evolution of enterprise partnerships. This paper develops theoretical arguments to highlight the distinctiveness of the Irish experience and to show why it should be treated as an important departure by the employment relations academy.