European Union Enlargement and the Foreign Direct Investment Channel of Industrial Relations Transfer

Abstract

Inward investment by multinational companies represents a vital channel for entrenching the company-level industrial relations dimension of Europe's social model in the post-socialist New Member States. Surveying a wide range of existing analysis and evidence, this article concludes that the prospects for diffusion through inward investment are highly contingent. The motive for inward investment, factor composition, host country institutions and the existence of transnational industrial relations structures are all found to be influential contingencies, but not country-of-origin or mode of entry.