Coffee and cigarettes in industrial relations: A comparative network analysis of the role of informality

Literature commonly links the role of informality in collective bargaining to industrial relations systems based on voluntarism and decentralized negotiation settings. According to this view, informal processes won’t exist or at best play a marginal role in institutionally strong industrial relations systems, where formal rules define the roles, rights and duties of actors in the system. Yet, even in highly regulated contexts, formal and informal mechanisms very often co-exist and complement each other to help reach agreements or solve conflicts among actors. A relational approach and social network analysis applied to the study of the retail sector in Italy, Netherlands and Spain allows to understand the role of informality in countries with different industrial relations regimes. The analysis shows the importance of informal interactions and events in all countries, irrespectively of the industrial relations regime, and confirms the positive contribution of relational approaches to the study of collective bargaining linking with the literature on the embeddedness theory and structural holes.