When the period of rapid social change that included the transformation of the political system got under way in Czechoslovakia after the "velvet revolution" of November 1989, there emerged a certain institutional vacuum in social and economic activity. The newly, and often rapidly, created political parties and other organisations sought to fill this vacuum and to take the place of hitherto non-existent intermediary structures. It is in this context that an institution of social partnership at the macro-level — the so-called tripartite — was established. In the five years following the start of that process, some of these intermediary structures crystallised, and the actors mediating group interests in society also defined themselves.