New Patterns of Recruitment and Trainingin German, UK and French Banks

In this paper we examine debates concerned with national models of industrialorganisation. One school of thought has argued that distinct national models, orbusiness systems are a prevelent and enduring paradigm. Critiques of such anapproach argue that common global competitive pressures will encourage greaterconvergence in organisation, so that national models will become outdated. We haveargued that a sectoral approach to understanding the affect of contemporarysupranational pressures on national regimes can provide a useful empirical analysisof these debates. Actors at the sectoral level represent a primary force for adaptationprocesses in national production systems because they are seeking concretesolutions to problems generated from global competitive pressures.To examine these debates we focus on competition and developments in therecruitment and training practices of the retail banking sector in Germany, Britain andFrance. The comparison reveals that market pressures have actually led toconsiderable changes in each of the national banking sectors, but that the outcomesare rather different. Between countries, there is considerable variation in the relativesignificance of price-, quality- and innovation-led competition in different marketsegments. This is also true for recruitment and training practices with which German,British and French banks have responded to changes in market competition.Furthermore the analysis shows that banks' recruitment and training strategiesare not only shaped by national educational and training institutions, but that nationaleducational and training institutions themselves have undergone changes which inturn have influenced labour supply in the banking sector. The explanation ofdifferences between countries and changes over time, however, would remainfragmentary without specific training institutions and regulations at the level of thesector. These sectoral arrangements have not only significantly influencedrecruitment and training practices at the company level. In all thre