"This article is concerned with the financialisation of the German chemical and pharmaceutical industry since the 1990s and its impact on industrial relations in these domains. Those relations are analysed as a particularly cooperative variant of the German ‘social partnership' that developed out of Verbundchemie's production and social model and proved highly stable up until the 1990s. Drawing on the restructuring of Germany's traditional ‘Big Three' chemical and pharmaceutical companies – Hoechst, Bayer und BASF – oriented towards the financial markets, it is demonstrated that gearing tactics to the financial market leads individual companies from very similar starting points to highly contrastive lines of development. This fact serves to underline that corporate strategies geared to the financial markets are determined by the companies' management, rather than by institutional investors. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that workforce representatives capable of managing conflicts can exert considerable influence on this development."

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