Jonathan Zeitlin

Learning from Difference: The New Architecture of Experimentalist Governance in the EU

This paper argues that current widespread characterizations of EU governance as multi-level and networked overlook the emergent architecture of the Union’s public rule making. In this architecture, framework goals (such as full employment, social inclusion, “good water status”, a unified energy grid) and measures for gauging their achievement are established by joint action of the member states and EU institutions. Lower-level units (such as national ministries or regulatory authorities and the actors with whom they collaborate) are given the freedom to advance these ends as they see fit. But in return for this autonomy, they must report regularly on their performance and participate in a peer review in which their results are compared with those pursuing other means to the same general ends. Finally, the framework goals, performance measures, and decision-making procedures themselves are periodically revised by the actors, including new participants whose views come to be seen as indispensable to full and fair deliberation. Though this architecture cannot be read off from neither Treaty provisions nor textbook accounts of the formal competences of EU institutions, the paper traces its emergence and diffusion across a wide range of policy domains, including telecommunications, energy, drug authorization, occupational health and safety, employment promotion, social inclusion, pensions, health care, environmental protection, food safety, maritime safety, financial services, competition policy, state aid, anti-discrimination policy and fundamental rights.

The Oxford handbook of business history

This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of research in business history. Business historians study the historical evolution of business systems, entrepreneurs and firms, as well as their interaction with their political, economic, and social environment. They address issues of central concern to researchers in management studies and business administration, as well as economics, sociology and political science, and to historians. They employ a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, but all share a belief in the importance of understanding change over time. The Oxford Handbook of Business History has brought together leading scholars to provide a comprehensive, critical, and interdisciplinary examination of business history, organized into four parts: Approaches and Debates; Forms of Business Organization; Functions of Enterprise; and Enterprise and Society. The Handbook shows that business history is a wide-ranging and dynamic area of study, generating compelling empirical data, which has sometimes confirmed and sometimes contested widely-held views in management and the social sciences. The Oxford Handbook of Business History is a key reference work for scholars and advanced students of Business History, and a fascinating resource for social scientists in general. Contributors to this volume - Rolv Petter Amdam, Professor of Business History, BI Norwegian School of Management, Trevor Boyns, Professor of Accounting and Business History, Cardiff Business School at Cardiff, United Kingdom, Youssef Cassis, Professor of Economic and Social History, University of Geneva, Switzerland, Andrea Colli, Associate Professor in Economic History, Bocconi University, Italy, Jeffrey Fear, Associate Professor, University of Redlands in California, United States, Robert Fitzgerald, Reader in Business History and International Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom, Patrick Fridenson, Professor of International Business History, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, W. Mark Fruin, Professor of Corporate and Global Strategy, College of Business at San Jose State University, United States, Howard Gospel, Professor of Management, Kings College, University of London, United Kingdom, Margaret B.W. Graham, Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization, Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Canada, Gary Herrigel, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago, United States, Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School, United States, Matthias Kipping, Professor of Strategic Management and Chair in Business History, Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada, Wolfgang Konig, Professor of the History of Technology, Technical University of Berlin, Germany, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Professor of Economics and History, University of California, Los Angeles, United States, Luca Lanzalaco, lecturer in Political Science and Public Policy, University of Macerata, Italy, William Lazonick, University Professor, University of Massachusetts Lowell, United States, Michel Lescure, Professor of Economic and Social History, University of Paris X-Nanterre, France, Kenneth J. Lipartito, Professor of History, Florida International University, United States, Robert Millward, Professor of Economic History, University of Manchester, United Kingdom, Daniel Raff, Associate Professor of Management, Wharton School, and Associate Professor of History, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, United States, Mary Rose, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development, Management School, Lancaster University, United Kingdom, Peter Temin, Elisha Gray II Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States, Kathleen Thelen, Behlul Usdiken, Professor of Management and Organization, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey, R. Daniel Wadhwani, Assistant Professor of Management and Fletcher Jones Professor of Entrepreneurship, University of the Pacific, California, United States, Jonathan Zeitlin, Professor of Sociology, Public Affairs, Political Science, and History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States.

The Open Method of Co‐ordination and the Governance of the Lisbon Strategy

Plan of the talk: •I. Revising the Lisbon Strategy: What was at stake? •II. Where’s the evidence? The OMC in action •III. What’s left of Lisbon and the OMC? –Closing the implementation gap through better governance? –Reorienting the relaunch? Towards Lisbon III

The Power to Manage? : Employers and Industrial Relations in Comparative Historical Perspective

Contributors: Giovanni Contini, Superintendancy of Archives for Tuscany, Florence Mowell Harris, University of Durham Bryn Jones, University of Bath Werner Plumpe, Ruhr University of Bochum, Alastair Reed, University of Cambridge Keith Sisson University of Warwick

Socializing the European Semester: EU social and economic policy co-ordination in crisis and beyond

ABSTRACT This contribution analyses how EU social objectives and policy co-ordination have been integrated into the Union’s post-crisis governance architecture. It argues that between 2011 and 2016, there was a partial but progressive ‘socialization’ of the ‘European Semester’ of policy co-ordination, in terms of increasing emphasis on social objectives in its priorities and key messages, including the Country-Specific Recommendations; intensified social monitoring and review of national reforms; and an enhanced decision-making role for EU social and employment actors. In explaining these developments, the contribution highlights the contribution of strategic agency, reflexive learning and creative adaptation by social and employment actors to the new institutional conditions of the Semester, building on recent theoretical work on ‘actor-centred constructivism’ and the ‘usages of Europe’.

Is the Open Method of Coordination an alternative to the Community Method

The Open Method of Coordination (OMC) was launched at the extraordinary European Council in March 2000 as a broadly applicable new governance instrument designed to assist the Union in achieving the ambitious goals of the Lisbon Strategy through iterative benchmarking of national progress towards common European objectives and organised mutual learning. This new method built directly on the experience of new Treaty-based processes introduced for the coordination of member state policies during the 1990s, notably the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (BEPGs), created to coordinate macro-economic policies, and the European Employment Strategy (EES), launched in the wake of the Amsterdam Treaty.1

EU Experimentalist Governance in Times of Crisis

Abstract This paper analyses the evolution of EU governance since the financial and eurozone crisis from an experimentalist perspective. It argues that EU governance in many key policy domains continues to take the form of an experimentalist decision-making architecture, based on a recursive process of framework goal-setting and revision through comparative review of implementation experience in diverse local contexts, which is well adapted to the Union’s turbulent and polyarchic environment. The first part of the paper presents a synoptic theoretical account of the characteristics of experimentalist governance, and summarises the empirical evidence on its incidence and operation within the EU before the crisis. The second part of the paper examines two ‘hard cases’ from an experimentalist perspective, namely financial regulation and the European Semester of socio-economic policy coordination. The paper concludes that both cases illustrate the limits of centralised hierarchical governance under the diverse and polyarchic conditions of the EU, together with the continuing attraction of experimentalist approaches for tackling complex, uncertain problems like financial regulation and reform of national employment and welfare systems.

Introduction: the European Semester as a new architecture of EU socioeconomic governance in theory and practice

ABSTRACT The ‘European Semester’, a new framework for policy co-ordination across European Union (EU) member states, represents a major step in EU governance. Created in 2010 in the wake of the financial and sovereign debt crises and revamped in 2015, it was intended to provide a new socioeconomic governance architecture to co-ordinate national policies without transferring full sovereignty to the EU level. This introduction offers a brief overview and assessment of the European Semester, examining its implications along three critical axes, running respectively between the economic and the social, the supranational and the intergovernmental, and the technocratic and democratic poles of EU governance. We introduce and briefly summarize the seven other contributions that make up this collection. Our conclusions are that the European Semester challenges established theoretical understandings of EU governance, as it is a prime example of the complexity that supersedes simple polar oppositions.

Social theory and the history of work

David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (1982), xii + 288 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £20.00, Paperback £6.95). Craig R. Littler, The Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies (1982), x + 226 (Heinemann Educational Books £14.50, paperback £6.50). Charles F. Sabel, Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (1982), xiii + 304 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £17.50).

Institutional design and national influence of EU social policy coordination: Advancing a contradictory debate

Since the early 1990s, the European Union (EU) and its Member States have been committed to promoting social inclusion and to sustaining and modernizing Europe’s social protection systems. The recent global financial and sovereign debt crises have once again demonstrated — both positively and negatively — not only the critical importance of modern welfare states, but also the need for the EU to play an active role in coordinating and supporting national responses aimed at both economic recovery and social equity (Hemerijck 2013).