The research in this article addresses the policy determination and transposition of the
I&C Directive within liberal market economies (LMEs). It asks what impact the directive
has had in encouraging employers to share decision-making powers with employees
(unions) through new or revised consultation mechanisms. Existing evidence reports that
the transposition of I&C regulations favour direct communications rather than collective
systems of worker voice, as the original directive proposed (Hall et al., 2011). The contribution
in this article, however, is to show how actors dominated the regulatory space
for I&C regulation by integrating and linking both macro and micro contexts. The evidence
illustrates how employer tactics for ‘neo-voluntarism’ and the politics of ‘common
knowledge formation’ (Culpepper, 2008) shaped the parameters on which statutory
rights are formulated and enacted across different governance levels. In short, macrolevel
regulation reinforces, ironically, a micro-level voluntarist dynamic by legitimizing
subjective meanings among social actors as objective fact. The I&C regulations did not
prompt a new politic of common knowledge formation around shared social dialogue
diffused from the macro policy to micro workplace level. The research further adds to
knowledge by integrating Lukes’ three ‘faces’ of power (1974, 2005) to the concept of
regulatory space. In so doing, the article advances a multi-level, multi-dimensional analytical
framework on which ‘occupancy’ of regulatory space can be evaluated in comparative
national contexts