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Globalization has led to growing labour fragmentation and widening of gaps in social protection. Although the enterprise is increasingly expected to be socially responsible, in actuality extreme worker inequalities and social dumping have become ubiquitous worldwide. This volume – the first to focus attention on the ‘theory of the firm’ as it reveals itself in today’s world from a multidisciplinary perspective – underscores the necessity to rebuild a new scientifically controlled paradigm that acknowledges and regulates the dimension of power in the functioning of the organization.

In their contributed essays, nineteen renowned scholars in labour law and industrial relations rethink the firm, its conception, its value, and its regulation, analysing such aspects as the following:

• – labour-management relations issues that arise when companies go global but workers remain local;
• – the firm as a social construction;
• – the continuing necessity for collective bargaining;
• – concealment of the employment relationship under the guise of self-employment;
• – concealment of the real employer behind figureheads and shell companies;
• – social welfare effects of outsourcing;
• – the company’s interaction with the network of suppliers and with local education processes;
• – determining who actually carries responsibility towards workers;
• – overcoming companies’ drive to enter the global market in response to national regulation;
• – realizing the notion of ‘duty of care’;
• – mechanisms of participation of workers in the management of the enterprise; and
• – the persistent limitations that women face in the workplace, even when worker participation is advocated.

With attention to innovative developments in Germany, Italy, Japan, and other countries, analyses include case studies of specific companies as well as case law, in particular the European Court of Justice’s jurisprudence in matters of collective dismissals, seconded workers, and public contracts.

In their head-on tackling of the fragmentation and blurring of social responsibility in enterprise organization, these important essays propose a view of the enterprise as a factor in a new ‘constitutionalisation’ of labour that shifts employment protection from single legal entities to the network’s economic activity, thus realigning the legal boundaries of the enterprise with its economic reality. As a compelling investigation of how a satisfactory implementation of labour standards in the fragmented enterprise can be guaranteed, this book will be studied by entrepreneurs, managers, consultants, corporate lawyers, judges, human rights experts, and trade unionists, and will be welcomed by academics and researchers in industrial relations and labour law.

Enterprise and Social Rights