Toward a Comparative Perspective on Corporate Governance and Labour Management

While stakeholder models of corporate governance support long-term employment, recent reforms have promoted shareholder-oriented corporate governance worldwide. Will reform cause employment to converge on a market system? This paper presents a comparison of the linkages between corporate governance and employment patterns in 22 countries using the QCA method (Qualitative Comparative Analysis). Case studies of Germany and Japan also show that firms must now cope with capital market pressures, but do so by creative adaptation of their existing national employment institutions. International differences are thus growing smaller, but convergence will not occur in the foreseeable future.