“Social Dialogue and European Labour: A New Scale of Governance?”

Firstly, I argue that there needs to be more explicit consideration given to the links between competing forms of organisation of production, and their differing implications for the constitution of labour regimes in both the workplace and the labour market. This is not to propose that labour strategy can be somehow read off from production process, but that there needs to be a finer grained analysis of the nature of the linkages between the two. Secondly, I suggest that many accounts of European labour market governance have been implicitly normative in character, and as such have tended to assume rather than demonstrate analytically that Europeanisation-the translation to a European scale of issues and debates previously conducted at national scale-is a key aspect of current developments. In contrast, I argue that there needs to be more consideration given to the process of scaling--the ways in which particular labour market governance issues become associated with, and determined at, one geographical scale or another. That is to say, scale is not pre-given, but is itself socially constituted. Thirdly, I review recent work on trade union strategies as seen from geographical perspective