Globalisation versus relations industrielles 'à la belge'?

The article deals with current developments in industrial relation – traditionally organized within a national framework –, in the context of growing globalization. More precisely, it examines what happens to the Belgian system of industrial relations confronted to globalization. The paper first sums up the main challenges that globalization represents for national industrial relations systems. Second, it looks to those systems and refers to recent research to show how they keep their national specificity even though they are not static. They face external pressures but react with their own specific dynamics. Applied to the Belgian case, that means that the industrial relations system does not copy a foreign model nor follows an European standard. On the contrary, it remains characterized by a high level of institutionalisation, a high degree of internal co-ordination and a significant rate of union affiliation. In sum, the industrial relations « à la belge» keep their characteristics, while they integrate cross-national movements. Finally, the paper examines the specific case of multinational companies, in which interdependencies between global trends and local institutional conditions are frequent. Based on exploratory research conducted in Belgian subsidiaries of foreign groups in the chemical industry, it illustrates the complex interactions between local industrial relations and decision-making at the top of the multinational company. As such, multinationals materialize interdependencies between local and global levels. The two levels are intricate and their interactions result in local adjustments under constraints