"Constructing Corporatism? The Academic Legal establishment’s Influence on the Nordic Model, 1890-1915"

At the core of the so-called Nordic Model – the tri partite national coordination of the employees, employers and the state – is the Nordic agreement-based model between employees and employers reaching fullness in the 1930s. While the European norm in labour-relations is “a law-based” model, the Nordic countries have at their core a contract between the respective national organisations representing employers and employees. Given that the Nordic countries are seen – for example in the Varieties of Capitalism literature – as particularly cooperative, this is something of a paradox. Nordic industrial relations were also characterized by antagonistic behaviour and strikes and lockouts well into the 1930s, which underlines that the contract solutions grew out of adversarial situations. The explanation for the emergence of contract solution is usually rather vague, emphasizing traditional Scandinavia traditions of freedom to form organizations (corporations) or freedom of contract. There is also a strong movement for creating voluntary corporations from the mid-1800s onwards that links corporatism to tradition. This paper challenges this gradualist view. It emphasizes strong German influence on the idea of what corporations actually are as legal entities; and what collective organisations represent in an age where asymmetric power relations emerged through the rise of big employers; and how collective organisations could be empowered through law to act as self-organising entities. Corporatism was constructed. The paper aims to draw on Scandinavian experiences because the three Scandinavian countries Denmark, Sweden and Norway had a lot in common and because the Scandinavian legal communities had intimate collaborations, but the story will draw more closely on the particular Norwegian story up to the new 1915 law that became a corner-stone in Norwegian labour law.