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Problems with partnership at work: lessons from an Irish case study
Author(s) -
Teague Paul,
Hann Deborah
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
human resource management journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.44
H-Index - 77
eISSN - 1748-8583
pISSN - 0954-5395
DOI - 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2009.00105.x
Subject(s) - general partnership , argument (complex analysis) , work (physics) , agency (philosophy) , irish , business , process (computing) , limited partnership , collective bargaining , public relations , economics , law and economics , operations management , political science , sociology , labour economics , finance , engineering , computer science , mechanical engineering , social science , biochemistry , chemistry , linguistics , philosophy , operating system
This article uses a case study of a celebrated enterprise partnership in Ireland that broke down to get an insight into why such arrangements are hard to sustain. The argument of the article is that meaningful enterprise partnerships require trade unions and management to accept agency costs, which in practice involves management modifying their right to manage and unions accepting that issues normally addressed by the collective bargaining process may have to be delegated to the partnership arrangement. The evidence of the case study is that neither management nor unions were prepared to incur such costs. The case study suggests that the following trinity – meaningful partnership, full‐blown collective bargaining and management's right to manage is exceptionally difficult to operate at the same time.