Members of the Research Group Social Partnership are concerned with the study of the historical and current developments of Austrian social partnership from different disciplinary perspectives (political science, law and sociology). We follow a broad understanding of social partnership that includes beside the peak organisations, the Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber of Labour, the Austrian Trade Union Federation and the Chamber of Agriculture, also their individual affiliations and the state as well as actors in the field of co-determination and other subfields such as collective bargaining, the self-administration of social security or the Public Employment Service as well as the regulation of working time, where common ground is found through negotiations of organised interests.

We define social partnership as a cooperative and compromise-orientated relationship between representatives of employee and employers (and owners) with or without the participation of the state. Instead of a hierarchical logic (state) and competitive logic (market), a commitment to solve conflict of interest through negotiation is prevalent.

We assume that the reproduction of norms, culture and practices linked to social partnership (ideally) enable negotiations on an equal footing to reach compromise, in spite of unequal power relations between capital and labour. At the same time social partnership structures and practices can perpetuate current power relations. For instance, the one-sided allocation of scarce resources into CO2-intensive economic growth at the expense of ecologically sustainable investment or the perpetuation of social inequalities through collective agreements with their unequal classification of work done by women or migrants can become self-sustaining or even intensify.