Sources of Diversity in Internal Labour Markets

Abstract

This paper sets out to examine the assumption made by radical economists that internal labour markets formed by large scale corporate employers provide a source of labour market dichotomization between `core' and `peripheral' employment. It criticizes the assumption that internal labour markets can be treated as a culturally neutral phenomenon emerging from the demands of technical rationality. Since, by definition, the boundaries of internal labour markets are institutionally defined, their forms and rationales display a cross-national diversity which indicates a difference in employer strategies and employee responses to the historical course of technological innovation. In particular it suggests that the struggle for task control over the mode of production represented in the creation of new occupations has, in the Anglo Saxon culture, been more likely to take place at the point of production, whereas in France it has been expressed in overtly class terms and in modern Germany in the bureaucratic control systems adopted by a corporate pluralistic state.