Employment Relations in Europe: a Comparative and Critical Review

Abstract

In former elite systems of European higher education, usually university systems, the legal and social relationships in the workplace between those teaching in them and the institutions where they worked were characterised by relative stability, a high degree of social consensus and classical paternalism. Individual university teachers, or collectively the ‘academic estate’, were servants, either of the state or of a corporate body, typically embodied in the person of the ‘rector’, ‘master’ or ‘principal’. Work relationships (rather than ‘employment’ relationships) were relatively stable because university teachers worked in often small closed communities of scholars typically underpinned by a culture of collegiality and internal self-government, where most scholars had security of tenure (see Neave in this volume). Formal conflict was largely absent from these work relationships because they were based on a social consensus within the academic elite, comprising mixtures of legal and personal obligations, rooted in contract, the law, convention and high social standing. Informally, such relationships also encompassed the values and norms of traditional academic life associated with the pursuit of ‘objective truth’, new knowledge and intellectual understanding, to which most scholars subscribed, and these transcended different academic disciplines (Becher 1989).