Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

Observers of the European legislative strategy which drove the adoption of the European Company statute identified the then competing political projects in accordance with a dichotomy: the desire of harmonization vs. a flexible approach to employee participation. With the definitive adoption of the flexible approach by European institutions, this reading became obsolete. In this paper we propose the adoption of a new analytical framework in order to understand what is at stake in the production of European legal rules on corporate governance by placing the representations of the world of industrial relations actors at the centre of the analysis. We assert that these representations are based on a vision of the world which conceives the social and the economic spheres as embedded or disembedded. Moreover, we argue that these representations can be approached by an analysis of the conception of industrial relations actors based on whether they consider the fields of company law and labour law to be embedded or not. Application of this analytical framework to the examination of the positions of two key European industrial actors – the ETUC and the European Commission – on the regulation of board-level employee representation at European level reveals the extent to which their representations of the world are in conflict. In turn, this finding sheds new light on our understanding of the current legislative difficulties which the proposal for a European Private Company statute is experiencing.