ing part time and white-collar jobs increased number of women in the labour market and worker-involvement work strategies are examples of such developments . Other divergent trends are growing heterogeneity between and within national ER systems and individualization within the work force. The individulisation trend has caused de unionisation in many countries with unions representing smaller proportion of the employees Labour movements caused fragmentation of many firms which tried to maintain organizational unity at the national and sectoral level. Hence, unions faced more pressure to preserve continuity and organizational change along with innovations. Freeman (1989) pointed out the divergent trends in union membership and density among developed market economies (DME). Since the 1980s, union density has increased in the Scandinavian countries while it declined in the UK, Australia and USA, in spite of having similarities in increasing trade, technological transfer and capital flows between them.
The MIT project involving scholars from different countries re-examined ER among developing market economies (DME) and analysed arguments of Kochan, Katz and McKersie (1984) that changes in the American IR from late 1970s had resulted in a key change in the managerial strategic choices con firm-level ER practices. The authors pointed out that only by adding ‘strategic choice’ dimension to Dunlop’s framework, the above change could be identified well. They suggested framework in the form of a matrix that included three levels of decision-making -macro, industrial relations system and the workplace- each level having independent effect on ER, and three parties such as employers, unions and government. The rows of the matrix represented three levels and the columns, the key parties. The MIT project analysed the relevance of strategic choice framework across countries and the effect of competitive strategies on firm-level ER.
The first stage of the project was identification and comparison of developments in different countries. The second stage examined industry- wise ER in these countries. Organizational work practices such as new work rules due to adoption of new technologies and competitive strategies, changes in patterns of skill acquisition and training, new remuneration systems for the employees, new practices on staffing, employment security and recruitment were studied. Data was analysed country-wise and industry-wise to compare two hypotheses- one stressed on the importance of institutional structures that influence ER and the other on the range of strategic choices for international competition and technological changes. The result showed the importance of enterprise and management on strategic decision making in ER, need for flexible workforce and deployment of labour, trends in investments for skills and training development and the restructuring needs for unions.
Following the MIT project studies investigated relevance of convergence and divergence theories, (Katz and Darbishire 2000) and showed difference in of employment patterns across countries such as low wage, HRM, Japanese oriented and joint team – based and many ‘converging on divergence’ patterns. These differences include centralization of bargaining, commonality of processes at a decentralized level and coordination between decentralized bargaining structures. However there is a lack of empirical evidence that the patterns are not mutually exclusive. The convergence and divergence concepts are too limiting to identify the degrees of relationships between globalization and national ER. For example, studies on wage inequality may point out convergence while studies on participation rights may point out divergence.
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