Bringing culture back in: pluralism and societal corporatism as contexts of strategic adaptation

Abstract. The limited literature on offshore industrial relations in Britain and Norway has focused on the deviant nature of such arrangements compared to national traditions. The 'newness' of the sector and the special nature of the oil industry have been used to explain the deviance. This study, instead, controls for such factors and shows how contrasting patterns of adaptation can be related to system properties. Industrial relations in the two countries can be viewed as ideal-type approximations of pluralism and societal corporatism. Within the tradition contrasting pluralism and neocorporatism, the dominant perspective has deliberately excluded cultural aspects, stressing instead structural form. The article argues for the reintroduction of culture and shows how British and Norwegian offshore developments reflect fundamentally different orientations towards industrial relations. Culture is not, however, conceptualized as ideosyncratic characteristics of the two countries. It stems instead from different histories of labour-capital relations.