Social partnership and corporate social responsibility as institutions of labor relations regulation

Social partnership is a social institution regulating labor relations based on the trilateral cooperation of employees, employers, and the state. Although social partnership declares normative orientation toward equal cooperation and mutual interests, the reality is that participants accept this conception instrumentally and this institution can be effective only under some specific conditions. Taking into account widely recognized decline of trade-union movement in many countries, developing new mechanisms of balancing interests of employees and employers becomes increasingly important. It is proposed that corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be considered as one such mechanism. Two social institutions are compared in terms of their ability to regulate social and labor relations. It is argued that, reviewing labor relations in the broader context of stakeholder relations, the CSR has a great capacity to balance interests of companies and employees and enhance the effectiveness of social partnership.