Social partnership

Employing the critical juncture theory (CJT), a discursive institutionalist approach, this paper examines the nature of the changes to social partnership policy at the end of the decade of the 2000s.  Did these changes constitute a transformation in social partnership policy, or were they a continuation of a previously established policy pathway?  The CJT consists of three elements – economic crisis, ideational change, and the nature of the policy change – that must be identified for us to be able to declare with some certainty if the changes to social partnership policy constituted a critical juncture.  In this context, ideational change is very important, constituting the intermediating factor between a crisis and the subsequent nature of the policy change.  Our findings will help explain the nature of the changes to social partnership policy at this time.

This paper improves our understanding of critical junctures, a concept employed in historical institutionalism for exploring change. However, the concept lacks rigour, weakening our ability to define critical junctures. Of late, academics have utilized other mechanisms to identify change in historical institutionalism. Thus, it is within this context that the critical junctures approach is remoulded through the specification of standards, hence reducing uncertainty as to what constitutes a critical juncture. The remoulded approach is employed here in examining change in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions’ ~ICTU! influence over public policy in 1987