Colin Crouch

Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: Mapping Convergence and Diversity

Modern capitalism, from neo-liberalism to deregulation, has come to dominate national and international political economy. This major book addresses this convergence and provides a comprehensive overview of the implications for future capitalist diversity. Leading international contributors consider important questions. Is the preference for free markets a well-founded response to intensified global competition? Does this mean that all advanced societies must converge on an imitation of the United States? What are the implications for the institutional diversity of the advanced economies? How do we now evaluate the systems and institutions in East Asia? Political Economy and Modern Capitalism provides a practical and wide-ranging analysis of the public policy choices facing governments and business around the world. It will be invaluable reading for students and researchers of political economy, comparative politics, political science, political sociology, public policy, and administration.

Privatised Keynesianism: an unacknowledged policy regime

There have now been two successive policy regimes since the Second World War that have temporarily succeeded in reconciling the uncertainties and instabilities of a capitalist economy with democracys need for stability for peoples lives and capitalisms own need for confident mass consumers. The first of these was the system of public demand management generally known as Keynesianism. The second was not, as has often been thought, a neo-liberal turn to pure markets, but a system of markets alongside extensive housing and other debt among low- and medium-income people linked to unregulated derivatives markets. It was a form of privatised Keynesianism. This combination reconciled capitalisms problem, but in a way that eventually proved unsustainable. After its collapse there is debate over what will succeed it. Most likely is an attempt to re-create it on a basis of corporate social responsibility.

Breaking the Path of Institutional Development? Alternatives to the New Determinism

The concept of path dependence is being used in highly deterministic ways in neo-institutionalist analysis, so that studies using this framework have dif.culty in accounting for, or predicting, change. However, the original Polya urn model from which pathdependence theory draws predicts that alternative paths will be possible. It can then be argued that actors will be able to use these when they perceive a need to change. This article seeks to capture this possibility through accommodating a Bayesian parametric decision-maker interacting with an environment. This makes it possible to examine how change may involve such processes as: the use of past or redundant institutional repertoires; transfer of experience across action spaces; or from other agents, through networks of structured relationships; the emergence of perceived ‘one best’ solutions. This approach points to the need to change how typologies are used in neo-institutionalist research, so that those features of cases that do not .t the pre-conceived framework of a type are not disregarded as ‘noise’, but properly evaluated as potential resources for change.

Models of Capitalism

Shonfield’s work, 2 which examined the role of various institutions surrounding the economy – various branches of the state, banks, stock exchanges – in a number of Western European countries, the United States and Japan. Although he thought some were more efficient than others – in particular, he was impressed by those that inserted some elements of planning into otherwise free markets – he did not talk in terms of historical transcendence. When more theoretically inclined political scientists and sociologists returned to considering economic questions in the 1980s, they resumed Shonfield’s concern with national politico-economic systems and hence national varieties of capitalism. Occasionally sub-types would be recognised within a national economy (mainly with regard to Italy and Spain), but these sub-types have nearly always been geographically subdivided, so the concept of territorially based economies has been retained. This does not mean that each nation-state has been seen as embodying its own unique form of capitalism; rather, national cases are grouped together under a small number of contrasted types. This literature has many achievements. It has provided an intellectual counterweight to easy arguments about globalisation, which predict an inevitable trend towards similarity among the world’s economies. Neoinstitutionalist accounts of diversity have provided both theoretical arguments and some empirical demonstrations to suggest that these may be great oversimplifications. However, if we are to model the diversity of economic institutions more scientifically, and particularly if we are to study institutional change and innovation, we need to deconstruct

Modelling the Firm in its Market and Organizational Environment: Methodologies for Studying Corporate Social Responsibility

The study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) can best be mainstreamed within the wider social science literature if it is defined as firms voluntarily assuming responsibility for their externalities, thereby setting the puzzle of how this can be reconciled with the maximization of shareholder value as the central challenge of the subject. Means of resolving the puzzle require modelling the firm interacting with its environment as both a market actor and as an organization, and in particular through the interaction between these two. Such an approach has no need of a separate concept of ‘stakeholders’. The analysis develops through the firms relations with actual and potential political action (raising the separate issue of corporate citizenship), and the tastes of consumers, investors and employees—the last raising interesting implications for principal–agent theory.

Regional and sectoral varieties of capitalism

Abstract This study seeks to go beneath the generalizations that constitute characterizations of national economies in order to examine local and sectoral diversity – in particular, forms of capitalist organization at the level of localized sectors. It reports on the findings of research based on detailed case histories of local economies in four different types of production: modernized craft manufacturing (furniture), mass production (motor vehicles), high-technology production (biopharmaceuticals) and high-tech services (television film-making). In each case a local economy in Germany (usually seen counter-factually as an example of a particularly national system) was compared with one elsewhere in Europe: respectively, southern Sweden, Hungary (compared with eastern Germany) and the UK (for two studies). In the analysis, companies act rationally in response to sector-specific challenges, being partly bound by the existing institutional framework that they encounter, but partly acting to alter it. Two possibilities are distinguished and found in the cases. In the first (structurally conservative) case, arrangements of governance in the national innovation and production system prove to be beneficial for the companies and their aim to stand up to international competition. Insofar as national institutions help companies to deal with competition on their markets, they will probably try to preserve these arrangements. In the second (innovative) case, companies turn away from the national context and develop their own local governance structure. If the national institutional structure is seen as not adequate or ‘non-fitting’ to deal with sectorally specific terms of competition, then the internal and external coordination of companies – in reaction to challenges posed by the market – is likely to deviate from the national structure. In some instances evidence of ‘creative incoherence’, where local deviation from the national model provides a creative impulse, is found.

Organized Industrial Relations in Europe: What Future?

Introduction - farewell to Labour Market Associations? Organized versus disorganized decentralization as a map for industrial relations, Franz Traxler. Part I The logic and structure of associational action. Part II The neo-liberal challenge to organized industrial relations - four country studies. Part III The challenge from industrial change - the case of the financial sector. Part IV Associations and public policy. Conclusion - reconstructing corporatism? Organized decentralization and other paradoxes, Colin Crouch.

European industrial relations : the challenge of flexibility

Industrial relations in Europe in the 1980s, Guido Baglioni trade unionism in Belgium - the difficulties of a major renovation, Armand Spineux developments and crisis of the Scandinavian model of labour relations in Denmark, Bruno Amoroso recent changes in France, Denis Segrestin Germany - continuity and structural change, Otto Jacobi and Walther Muller-Jentsch industrial relations in Italy, Serafino Negrelli and Ettore Santi continuity and change in Dutch industrial relations, Jelle Visser trade union action and industrial relations in Portugal, Mario Pinto transition and crisis - the complexity of Spanish industrial relations, Jordi Estivill and Josep M. de la Hoz changes in the Swedish model, Gosta Rehn and Birger Viklund United Kingdom - the rejection of compromise, Colin Crouch.

After the Euro: Shaping Institutions for Governance in the Wake of European Monetary Union

Now that the process of full implementation of European Monetary Union has begun, it is time to shift attention away from the process of introduction to the implications that the common currency will have for a wide range of institutions and policy areas. The wider political and social institutions of the European Union are not well developed there is an institutional deficit which parallels the more widely know democratic deficit. Monetary arrangements of nation states are imbedded in a range of political, cultural, economic and historical factors. Will mechanisms of these kinds eventually develop at the European level? Can national structures adapt to meet the challenge? The contributors to After the Euro tackle these questions and in doing so, take the debate beyond the economic and sovereignty questions which have so far dominated the debate.

Skills-based full employment: the latest philosopher’s stone

The acquisition of knowledge and skills is increasingly seen as both the main challenge and the central opportunity for achieving a return to full employment. It is considered a challenge because it is feared that people without appropriate knowledge and skills will in future be unable to find work. There are two main reasons for this. First, most though by no means all the jobs that have been destroyed through technological progress in recent years have been low-skilled ones, and the educational levels demanded for most occupations seem to be rising; in nearly all societies unemployment is highest among those with low levels of education (OECD, 1994: ch 6). Second, it is generally assumed in the existing advanced countries that the challenges posed by the rise of new low-cost producers in other parts of the world can be met only if labour in the former countries has high levels of skill which will differentiate it from the capacities of workers in the newly industrialising countries.