FICTION WORKS: Cultural ideas and the design of industrial relations systems in Britain and Denmark

Abstract

This paper explores how cultural work contributes to differences in coordinated and liberal industrial relations systems. Quantitative text analyses show profound and systematic differences between coordinated Denmark and liberal Britain in depictions of labour, skills, coordination and the role of government in large corpora of fictional works between 1700 and 1920. The analysis expands our notions about how ideas contribute to the employment relationship and to the defense against liberalization in the post-industrial economy.