Varieties of Capitalism
Abstract
Applying the new economics of organization and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross‐national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterize the ‘varieties of capitalism’ found among the developed economies. Building on a distinction between ‘liberal market economies’ and ‘coordinated market economies’, it explores the impact of these variations on economic performance and many spheres of policy‐making, including macroeconomic policy, social policy, vocational training, legal decision‐making, and international economic negotiations. The volume examines the institutional complementarities across spheres of the political economy, including labour markets, markets for corporate finance, the system of skill formation, and inter‐firm collaboration on research and development that reinforce national equilibria and give rise to comparative institutional advantages, notably in the sphere of innovation where LMEs are better placed to sponsor radical innovation and CMEs to sponsor incremental innovation. By linking managerial strategy to national institutions, the volume builds a firm‐centred comparative political economy that can be used to assess the response of firms and governments to the pressures associated with globalization. Its new perspectives on the welfare state emphasize the role of business interests and of economic systems built on general or specific skills in the development of social policy. It explores the relationship between national legal systems, as well as systems of standards setting, and the political economy. The analysis has many implications for economic policy‐making, at national and international levels, in the global age.
... Despite decades of globalization efforts aimed at harmonizing economic practices, both formal and informal institutions continue to shape the heterogeneity in workplace and workforce (Hall & Soskice, 2001). In many developed nations, there has been a noticeable reduction in working hours (Lautsch & Scully, 2007). ...
... First, the scope of our research, which is contextualized within China, inherently carries limitations regarding its generalizability (Chan, 2015;Zheng & Qiu, 2023). The findings may not be directly applicable to other national contexts, where cultural aspects, economic conditions, and regulatory environments can significantly vary (Hall & Soskice, 2001). Future studies can take a step to check the robustness of our findings in other countries. ...
We examine the influence of human resource (HR) slack, specifically that accrued through employee overtime, on firm innovation in China. Leveraging textual analysis to gauge overtime levels, our findings reveal that although overtime increases innovation output, it does not enhance its quality. These results remain consistent even in firms with research and development personnel slack or those offering higher salaries. Additionally, no significant differences are observed between state-owned and non-state-owned firms in terms of overtime’s impact on innovation. Furthermore, the effect of employee overtime on innovation output is less pronounced in the manufacturing and labor-intensive industries. Our study suggests that governmental leniency towards corporate infringement of employee rights does not sufficiently boost firm competitiveness. This research contributes to the understanding of the economic implications of widespread employee overtime in emerging economies, offering valuable business ethics and policy insights for managers and regulators addressing the fundamental working hour practices.
... Together, these four categories account for almost every capitalist country in the world (Guillén, 2004). Some authors have argued that countries with an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition have favored a shareholder-centered model of corporate governance, whereas countries with a German law tradition are defined in general as following a stakeholder-centered mode of governance (Aguilera & Jackson, 2003;Hall & Soskice, 2001). The remaining countries, Scandinavian countries and countries within a French law tradition, are somehow more difficult to classify purely as stakeholder or shareholder economies Note: Standardized regression coefficients are shown; T statistics are in parentheses. ...
This article makes two related contributions to stakeholder theory and corporate governance theory. First, the authors seek to advance firm-level characterization of the emerging stakeholder model of corporate governance by analyzing two relevant dimensions of this model: the corporate social responsibility (CSR) function at the board level and stakeholder engagement. Second, the authors intend to examine the relationship between conformance to the stakeholder model of corporate governance and firm financial performance, taking into account the differences between countries, by using an international sample of large companies. The findings suggest that the traditional distinction between shareholder-centered and stakeholder-centered corporate governance systems also has importance for the CSR strategy.
... While capitalism manifests itself in a variety of ways across time and place (Hall and Soskice, 2001), there are several fundamental aspects that lie at the heart of its problematic nature. In capitalist societies, societal wealth manifests itself as an accumulation of commodities, and production is oriented towards profit rather than societal needs. ...
CEO compensation has expanded dramatically over the past half-century, with network processes playing a pivotal role. We advance research on these processes by focusing on which CEOs are more likely to get pay premiums and how this shapes income going to other actors within the firm. Using Danish registry data and a weighted k-core measure of elite connections, our analyses highlight that CEOs embedded in the corporate elite can extract a substantial wage premium. These premiums are then followed by reductions in wages going back to workers over the next three years. However, the more of a firm’s board of directors who are similarly connected to the corporate elite, the less effective are those connections in generating a premium. These findings extend the role of social networks beyond just the diffusion of increasing compensation for CEOs to the creation of inequalities among CEOs and between CEOs and workers.
While it is widely believed that the ongoing transformation of the global economy and the accompanying fragmentation of capitalist production is undermining solidarity, cohesion and trust among workers, this article presents a contrasting perspective: my main argument is that conflicts between capital and labor are complex processes that can serve as catalysts for fostering both solidaristic trust among workers as well as antagonistic trust between capital and labor representatives. While these varieties of trust are in a certain political tension with each other, they both point to the fact that conflicts play a crucial role in politicizing workers and revitalizing their collective power at local, regional, national, transnational, and global levels of the production process. What is at stake in these conflicts is not only collective bargaining, but also how the “political” of labor is constituted under conditions of the global capitalist production, namely via the (re)construction of political consciousness and common identities among workers in daily practices. I develop this argument theoretically by drawing on organizational, industrial, and conflict sociology as well as social movement studies and underpin it empirically with reference to three qualitative and ethnographic research projects on trust and capital–labor conflicts at national and transnational levels. As I show, trust and (class) conflict are not mutually exclusive, but can reinforce each other dialectically, true to the motto: In conflict, we trust!
I argue that David Marsden, lauded in Employment Relations (ER) and Human Resource Management, deserves recognition as an organization theorist. Viewing his works as a unified theory, I demonstrate how his focus on the interaction between individual actions, institutions and organizational structures aligns with the fields core concerns. Further, I apply an organizational dialectics approach to his analysis of organizational tensions like managerial authority and diffusion of employment systems. This reinterpretation offers new insights into organizational structure and design and the importance of ER‐specific factors and processes in shaping them. It highlights the enduring value of Marsden's framework for understanding organizations.
This article complements company-level approaches on the explicitization of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), zooming out to the national institutional level. We draw on qualitative data collected during several research stays in Japan, a case with a recent uptake of “explicit” CSR, where, historically, companies focused on “implicit” CSR. We present an empirically grounded framework for CSR explicitization at the national institutional level, involving three dimensions of changes: (a) ideas around CSR, (b) modes of evaluation of CSR, and (c) structures of control over CSR. In Japan, this process has been driven by the government, orchestrating these changes. Our framework contextualizes earlier understandings of CSR explicitization, allowing critical examination in relation to socio-political developments and providing the grounds for future comparative analysis of CSR explicitization. Furthermore, we add to the literature on the government-CSR nexus, introducing the notion of ideational steering as a new mode of government orchestration and shedding light on the role of financial market actors as co-regulators of CSR.
Previous literature has explored how the penetration of platforms into the news sector influences the organization, production, and dissemination of journalism. However, it has overlooked the platformization within the backstage of journalism - how journalism scholarship intersects with practice. Utilizing the concept of relevance gap, this study explores whether the platformization of journalism scholarship can meaningfully contribute to journalistic practices. Focusing on the case study of China’s WeChat Public Accounts (WPAs), and drawing from in-depth interviews with 26 Chinese journalists, our findings reveal four perceptions that journalists hold towards various journalism research on the quadrants of readability and relevance, as well as three different ways these perceptions influence their subsequent journalistic practices. We argue that platformization, as a driving force, improves the access gap on the technological level between journalism research and its potential audience. However, increased visibility struggles to bridge the content gap at the socio-political level and may exacerbate the discord and debates between academic work and journalistic practice.
Guided by an institutionally embedded resource-based view, this paper addresses two under-researched questions. First, what effects do flexible strategies for labor-cost retrenchment (e.g., wage-based and functional flexibility) have on market value as compared with rigid strategies (such as pure downsizing)? Second, what effects do flexible strategies have, compared to rigid strategies, when firm have a high level of knowledge assets? We answer these questions by focusing on firms in the research context of a stakeholder-capitalism environment. The dearth of studies on flexible strategies is surprising when one considers that firms in many advanced economies deploy them widely to reduce labor costs during times of crisis. We address this research gap with a novel data set of 220 retrenchment announcements by Japanese firms. We find that announcing the adoption of flexible strategies is significantly and positively associated with a greater likelihood of the firm’s market value increasing. Further, flexible strategies are evaluated more positively if they protect knowledge assets. We attribute these effects to flexible strategies being perceived not only as a capability but also as a signal of legitimacy – that is, as an effort to maintain capabilities in an environment characterized by long-term in-house employment and to align with the norms of a broader institutional landscape.
Plain English Summary
The neo-Schumpeterian growth models, introduced in the early 1990s, aimed to integrate creative destruction into mainstream economic theories of growth. However, the models fall short because they do not account for genuine uncertainty, instead assuming that profits can be predicted based on known probabilities. This oversight effectively sidelines the entrepreneur's unique role and does not satisfactorily explain economic phenomena critical to economic growth such as innovation, ownership, profits, and the role of financial markets. These limitations could lead to flawed or narrow policy recommendations, especially those that overemphasize the importance of research and development (R&D) investments. To address these issues, economic policies should focus more on enhancing the commercialization and dissemination of innovations. This includes providing incentives not just for entrepreneurs, but also for intrapreneurs and financiers who actively engage in and support the entrepreneurial ventures, bearing uncertainty and contributing to their governance and growth. In this context, tax policy is of major importance as it greatly influences incentives to uncertainty-bearing, not only for entrepreneurs, but also for intrapreneurs and financiers taking an active part in the governance and development of firms based on innovations characterized by genuine uncertainty. Furthermore, an inappropriately designed tax code will distort the evolutionary selection of innovations and firms, for example, by taxing owners and firms differently.
Liberal republican justice requires adequate, reasonably equal protection against domination while giving everybody a reasonably equal opportunity to live their lives as they see fit. This article investigates which central policy follows from it for workplace non-domination, under realistic assumptions about the nature of our working lives and some structural characteristics of advanced economies (especially the presence of large firms). It argues for a legal default of workplace democracy, understood as any arrangement that gives workers equal individual control rights over the management of their firm, and, as a body, more control rights than any other groups of enfranchised stakeholders, taken together. The argument has two steps. The first demonstrates where the most promising alternative liberal strategy – that of enhancing all individuals’ power to exit from their job through granting unconditional resources – fails. The second shows how this failure leads to the specific conception of default workplace democracy outlined.
What explains changes in the economic structures, institutions and policies of Advanced Capitalist Democracies (ACDs)? In this article, we suggest that the various answers to this question in the field of Comparative Political Economy (CPE) are essentially linked to two main approaches. The first approach emphasizes the role of electorates and political parties, their transformations, and their competition in shaping the evolution of ACDs. The second approach highlights the primacy of producer groups as the most powerful actors influencing the trajectory of ACDs. This review article introduces the debate between these two approaches and underscores its enduring relevance. It then discusses four recent important contributions that provide renewed perspectives on what remains a structuring cleavage in CPE, with implications for neighbouring fields in political science research. Through a systematic comparison of their analytical structure accross various dimensions, we show that their conception of the economy critically shapes their understanding of politics.
This chapter explains the political mechanism of the Finnish welfare state adapted to a post-industrial society as one of the Nordic welfare states (Esping-Andersen, The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Polity Press, 1990) and countries with a coordinated market economy (Katzenstein, Small states in world markets industrial policy in Europe. Cornell University Press, 1985). Steinmo (The evolution of modern states: Sweden, Japan, and the United States. Cambridge University Press, 2010) argues that Sweden has several adaptive advantages that enable the coevolution of politics, economics, and social policy. However, Finland has many differences from Sweden in its conditions, which raises the question of how Finland achieves the current position. When strong presidential power ended in the 1980s, parliamentarianism began to function. Since 1983, stable 4-year governments of majority coalitions out of a multiparty system have been in power. Diverse coalition governments with no dominant party and different parties’ combination are one of the characteristics of Finnish politics that bring resilience to its policies in a rapidly changing society. Higher education, and economic policies, especially science and technology, and information and communications technology policies developed since the 1960s, have been strongly integrated into the program of post-industrial welfare state since the 1980s. As Lijphart (Patterns of democracy. Yale University Press, 1999) argues for the possibility of a consensus model as a form of democracy in opposition to the Westminster model, the case of Finnish political mechanism provides policy flexibility in post-industrial society.
Przemówienie prezydenta Emmanuela Macrona na Sorbonie w 2017 roku zostało zinterpretowane jako nowa jakość w integracji europejskiej. Jednak w swoim kluczowym elemencie, jakim jest strefa euro, Francja Macrona jest raczej kontynuacją niż zmianą poprzedniej linii, na którą wpływają głównie: historyczne doświadczenia Francji w zakresie integracji walutowej, instytucji państwowych i gospodarczych, specyfiki i wyzwań własnej gospodarki. Wyzwania stojące przed francuską gospodarką i pogarszające się perspektywy gospodarcze będą ciążyły na stabilności strefy euro podczas drugiej kadencji Macrona. Brak większości w Zgromadzeniu Narodowym postawi pod znakiem zapytania możliwość kontynuacji kursu reform, ale także perspektywę wyboru proeuropejskiego następcy w 2027 roku.
Research Question/Issue: In the Japanese context of shareholder voting in director elections, this study examines how regulatory signals differently influence shareholder dissent depending on their resource dependence relationship with regulatory bodies.
Research Findings/Insights: We find that the effect of a regulatory change in the disclosure of voting records on shareholder dissent is strengthened as shareholdings by domestic institutional investors increase, while it is mitigated as shareholdings by
foreign institutional investors increase. Moreover, we find that this effect is pronounced under conditions where directors seemingly fail to fulfill or to qualify for their role.
Theoretical/Academic Implications: This study develops a resource dependence perspective of shareholder dissent and argues that shareholder dissent can be shaped by regulatory signals from regulatory bodies who provide them with legitimacy. This study enriches the existing insights on corporate governance role of institutional investors by focusing on their resource dependence on regulatory bodies.
Practitioner/Policy Implications: This study sheds light on the dynamic nature of shareholder behavior and suggests that shareholder preferences are not only heterogeneous but also mutable over time in response to regulatory signals. This implies that managers need to pay attention not only to current shareholder preferences but also to future anticipated shareholder preferences to successfully manage their relationships with shareholders.
Under what conditions has corporatist policymaking become institutionalized in newly transitioned democracies? I argue that transitions have provided temporary opportunities for unions to push for laws they can later use to protect their place in economic councils. The relevant sets of legal rules, which I call compulsory deliberation, enable non-‘State official’ members to resist governmental disruption of such councils despite them composing the Executive’s structure. I compare South Africa and Brazil, two ‘most similar’ cases that featured sequences of chronically unstable labor-excluding councils under authoritarian regimes. I argue that the former broke out of this trajectory while the latter did not because South African unions developed aspirations for durable policy influence before the transition, whereas Brazilian ones only did so afterward and thus mobilized too late. Although Brazilian governments have enacted dozens of regulations covering as many councils, these have only served as short-term instruments for marketing policies.
During the 1690s, both the English and Ottoman states developed new institutions for longer-term borrowing and reformed their imperial monetary systems. These synchronous but divergent developments present a puzzle that has not been answered by rigidly separate English and Ottoman historiographies. “Empires of Obligation” follows merchants trading between England and the Ottoman Empire to understand how both states responded differently to the challenges of global trade and fiscal crisis. At this time, English merchants were the most powerful European traders in the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire represented England’s greatest single market for its woolen textiles, its largest industry. As Levant Company merchants swapped woolens for silk, they also blended international private credit with domestic public finance. They were the largest merchant investors relative to the size of their trade in the Bank of England and helped facilitate Ottoman longer-term public borrowing through the mālikāne system. From within England’s bureaucracy, they also worked to ease global trade through an “intrinsic value” theory of money, the idea that coins represented a government commitment to provide a fixed amount of precious metal. At the same time, the Ottoman state sought to redefine money as an instrument of the state, not a tool of trade. Following merchants who themselves bridged two empires that are rarely compared shows interconnected but divergent responses to the challenges of making money work both within and between states at the end of the seventeenth century.
This study contributes to the literature on political business cycles by assessing the effect of elections on growth expectations based on expert survey data instead of using actual performance data. We analyze the different roles opportunistic and partisan politics play in varieties of capitalistic systems as a source of heterogeneity. Our results show that expectations differ remarkably between Liberal and Coordinated Market Economies (LME vs. CME) even independent of election outcomes.
Are unequal societies prone to the abuse of economic power to influence political decisions for private gains? We investigate how changes in inequality affect changes in corruption, controlling for comparative political economy factors. Our varieties of capitalism (VoC) approach explains corruption trends from an institutional viewpoint: liberal market economies (LMEs) exhibit lower corruption despite having high inequality. Coordinated market economies exhibit lower inequality but higher corruption, while state‐led non‐liberal economies have low inequality despite showing a range of degrees of corruption. Resource exporting economies show high corruption as well as inequality, akin to developing countries despite having higher national incomes. The relationship between changes in inequality and corruption diverges between the different VoC: strongly positive in coordinated and state‐led market economies, of an unclear sign in resource‐exporting economies, weak in resource‐poor developing countries, and downright negative in LMEs. Institutions are thus critical mediators of the socioeconomics of corruption.
Work experiences and political participation outside work are intrinsically linked. Management scholars have acknowledged the role that organizations play in shaping political behavior from a firm-level perspective, but the specific working conditions and how they translate into employee political participation and attitudes outside work remain poorly understood. This paper offers an interdisciplinary review of the empirical literature from the past 25 years across the management and political science disciplines. It examines how individual work-related experiences (broadly categorized into job content, working environment, employment characteristics, and social relations at work) relate to political engagement outside of work: political participation, political attitudes, political trust, and political values. The results show that enabling work experiences (e.g., more skill use, autonomy, higher income, more social interactions) and experiences that caused grievances (e.g., more job or financial insecurity) were both related to more political participation but differed in their effect on political trust and regarding political attitudes on economic and cultural issues. We also review the main theoretical explanations and consolidate contradictions. Finally, we propose a future research agenda, calling for the expansion of theoretical lenses, a focus on individual-level explanatory mechanisms, and more multilevel research.
La Formación Profesional (FP) dual se ha implantado o se encuentra en proceso de implantación en un amplio espectro de países del sur y del este de Europa, con tradiciones y modalidades de FP ajenas a la tradición dual, originaria de ciertos países Nord-europeos. En el contexto español, el objetivo político europeo de la exportación norte-sur de la FP dual ha sido objeto de diversas investigaciones que han ilustrado las contradicciones y dificultades inherentes a dicho proceso. Sin embargo, la cuestión de la integración de los agentes sociales, pese a ser un aspecto capital de los modelos referentes de la FP dual, no ha sido objeto específico de investigación. El presente artículo, basado en un proyecto de investigación europeo, pretende cubrir este vació en la investigación española de la FP dual. Su objetivo es analizar, en primer lugar, la participación de los agentes sociales en las principales instituciones estatales de gobernanza de la FP dual y, en segundo lugar, comparar la participación de los agentes sociales dentro de las estructuras de gobernanza existentes en tres Comunidades Autónomas (Andalucía, Cataluña y País Vasco). Para abordar este objetivo, el artículo se sustenta en el enfoque conceptual de la gobernanza sistémica y una aproximación metodológica cualitativa que combina una revisión documental con un trabajo de campo que recurre a entrevistas semi-estructuradas y a un procedimiento de análisis fundamentado en la codificación. Los resultados revelan diferencias en el tipo de integración de los agentes sociales entre las tres CCAA estudiadas y en función de los distintos niveles de gobernanza
The labour market dualisation thesis posits a clear division between low-skill, nonstandard jobs and high-skill, standard jobs, largely driven by firm demands for skill-based quality production. This study interrogates this assumed linkage by analysing firm-level employment patterns in South Korea. Using establishment-based surveys and workplace interviews, the findings largely support the dualisation thesis but reveal a deviation: high-skill jobs can also be assigned to nonstandard employment forms. Notably, ‘core work’ is frequently outsourced to subcontractors, reflecting the enduring influence of institutions initially structured for a low-cost export strategy. This study suggests that South Korea’s latecomer institutions, including hierarchical interfirm relationships dominated by conglomerates ( Chaebols) and a history of adversarial industrial relations, complicate the dualisation scenarios observed in other advanced coordinated economies. This study highlights how South Korea’s latecomer institutions shape skill-based employment inclusivity, ultimately demonstrating limited labour market inclusiveness in a country known for its remarkable industrial growth.
Economic inequality has been rising for a half-century in most countries, in some cases to levels not seen since the eighteenth century. It has severe negative consequences for many aspects of social life: interpersonal trust, status competition, happiness, participation in civic and political life, crime and corruption, and health. It is shaped by the actions of organizations because they are the most powerful forces in modern societies: ubiquitous, often quite large and well-resourced, and highly institutionalized. While there is a large literature on the impact of organizations on inequality within organizations, that work mostly focuses on demographic categories like gender and race. Far less has been done to study how organizations shape economic inequality at the societal or global level. Here, I discuss three ways organizations that shape economic inequality: as employers, as policy-setters, and as buyers/sellers. I review the scant organizational literature on societal and global inequality, and offer several suggestions for future research on this critical topic.
This article conceptualizes the community’s role in the provision of welfare by introducing the concept of a community welfare regime that varies globally across time and space. Four global community welfare regime ideal types, effective formal, effective informal, ineffective formal, and ineffective informal, are identified based on the dual dimensions of effectiveness and formality community welfare provision. Using this conceptualization, the article presents a typology that stipulates the interplay between the four theorized types of the community welfare regime and various global welfare regimes (Gough et al., 2004). The conceptualization of the community welfare regime holds the potential for conducting meaningful comparisons between different community welfare regimes within individual countries and across multiple welfare geographies. These comparative analyses can provide policymakers with valuable insights about the (in)effectiveness of community welfare provision, allowing them to develop policies that are firmly grounded in successful practices adopted by communities to effectively support vulnerable members of society and foster improved overall welfare outcomes, and can also serve as an avenue for Global South–North learning.
This paper advances the theory of Configurational Field Analysis (CFA) as a reconfiguration of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, aiming to address the limitations of Global Field Theory in analyzing the complexities of global and transnational phenomena. While the concept of the Global Field extended Bourdieu’s ideas to transnational and global arenas, it has been critiqued for its structural determinism, Eurocentrism, and its inability to fully capture the fluid, indeterminate, and contingent nature of global social dynamics. In response, this paper introduces social configurations as dynamic, relational constructs that emerge from specific historical and contextual conditions, rather than as fixed and universal structures. By integrating the concept of social configurations into field theory, CFA reconceptualizes social spaces as fluid and contested arenas where power, capital, and influence are continually negotiated. The paper proceeds by revisiting the foundations and critiques of Global Field Theory, followed by the introduction of social configurations and their theoretical advantages. Finally, it presents Configurational Field Analysis as a comprehensive framework, detailing its analytical steps and demonstrating its applicability to contemporary global issues. This framework not only addresses the methodological and analytical gaps in Global Field Theory but also offers a more adaptable and context-sensitive approach for understanding the complexities of global interactions.
Business membership organizations (BMOs) are essential for the growth and success of businesses in the private sector. They offer space for collaboration, advocacy, and access to resources that can drive businesses forward. These organizations, such as chambers of commerce, trade associations, and industry groups, unite companies from different sectors to tackle challenges and pursue common objectives. This chapter delves into the significance of business membership organizations in private sector development and their crucial roles in fostering business growth and economic advancement. This study aims to assess the BMOs in the KRI, and the objective is to assist them in developing business advisory services that will foster private sector growth and employment in the region. To achieve the stated objectives, 10 KRI BMOs were assessed across the region. Seven design principles in terms of dimensions (indicators) were used to assess the associations: overall organizational capacity, advocacy capacity, other BMOs offered services capacity, staff capacity, and professionalism, alignment with the Private sector development (PSD) goals and approach, BMOs’ reputation among their affiliates, and the level of the indecency of BMOs from political influence and government structure. Unfortunately, BMOs in KRI have not historically performed a good job in promoting a better business environment. The majority of the BMOs in KRI offer basic and mostly administrative services only, and they lack an understanding of the basics of advocacy. However, only a few have dedicated advocacy managers; possibly, the head of the BMO is acting as an advocacy manager. Five BMOs stood out for having the highest final score: KIU, IKEU, DCCI, KAHR, and SKPI. These BMOs demonstrated strong organizational and administrative capacity, adequate level of advocacy understanding, and have experienced advocacy activities with their members, have positive impressions among their affiliates, and are enjoying a sort of independence from political and governmental influences.
In recent decades, reforms of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) systems have mostly focused on the needs of employers to produce graduates ready for the labour market. The academic literature has extensively criticised the narrow focus on the performance of work tasks at the expense of other types of knowledge in the curriculum. In our paper, we reflect on the evidence that a curriculum that delivers the appropriate development of expertise can be associated with colleges that incorporate certain social characteristics. These characteristics were found in the way colleges deliberately build collaborative relationships internally through teamwork, conflict resolution among their disciplinary experts, and externally through partnerships with employers. In addition, those colleges externally mediated employer’s skills expectations of students and internally translated the curriculum. Our analysis is based on a study of well-resourced vocational colleges in South Africa, two of which emerged as successful, in contrast to one college that failed to contribute to the appropriate professional development of its students which differed in that the latter lacked these social characteristics. Thus, in addition to resources as an appropriate precondition, we argue that the development of expertise is strongly related to how vocational colleges manifest their social characteristics.
Being considered a driver of economic growth as well as social participation and inclusion, skill development and vocational education and training (VET) policies constitute possible solutions to present challenges and ongoing problems. Therefore, VET has been the distinct subject of attempts toward development and improvement over time. For more than two decades, VET reforms have been a specific focus of Indian educational governance. However, in the subcontinent, reform initiatives have only partially succeeded in terms of their successful and sustainable implementation. This paper investigates promoting and inhibiting factors for vocational education and training policy implementation in Indian skill ecosystems. Taking the example of bottom-up policy implementation in the form of the Mahatma Gandhi National Fellowship (MGNF) programme, factors that affect the VET policy initiative are identified, based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Through a comprehensive questionnaire administered to a sample of 63 graduates of the programme, their perceptions on key implementation challenges regarding the local policy context, stakeholder cooperation, and institutional as well as implementer capacity were identified. The findings point to areas of further focus for policymakers for the effective implementation of VET initiatives while at the same time adding theoretical contributions to understanding and evaluating VET initiatives.
This article challenges the idea of platform capitalism, that digital platforms implement a uniform model based on a self-employed labor force. Expanding on empirical evidence of a diversity of platform models, we theorize expectations about platform diversity from competition and comparative capitalism research. Using a unique cross-national dataset of leading food delivery platforms in 32 countries across North America and Europe, we compare platform models and competitive relations across national institutional regimes. Our analyses uncover a considerable diversity of platform models across Europe, in contrast to a clear uniformity in North America. We also find that the use of self-employment varies across and within large multinational corporations and is most prevalent in countries of the lightly regulated regime type. Our results call for an economic sociology perspective on the platform economy that integrates a general concept of platforms but allows for diversity stemming from competition and different national regimes.
The global financial crisis in 2007 and, more recently, the Covid‐19 pandemic renewed interest in capitalist divergence and the evolution of growth models in the Eurozone. The varieties of capitalism (VoC) approach and more recently post‐Keynesian research, especially the growth model (GM) perspective, have made important contributions to comparative political economy. However, the focus on either the ‘supply‐side’ or ‘demand‐side’ aspects of modern models of capitalism has offered a limited framework to explain capitalist diversity in the global economy. This article brings insights from both the VoC and GM perspectives and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the growth models in Greece and Portugal. The argument is that although both countries implemented internal devaluation and contractionary policies to curtail domestic demand and transform their economies into export‐led ones, they have been stuck in a suppressed demand‐led growth model since the global financial crisis.
This study investigates the heterogeneous impacts of housing wealth on political outcomes in OECD countries, with a particular focus on how different forms of homeownership interact with house price-to-income ratios. The analysis explores the relationship between these factors and their influence on electoral democracy. The findings reveal that as house price-to-income ratios rise, electoral democracy tends to decline in contexts with a higher proportion of outright homeowners, while it is strengthened in contexts with a growing proportion of mortgaged homeowners. By examining the dual role of housing assets, this study underscores their potential to both stabilize and destabilize democratic processes, depending on the type of ownership. This research highlights the crucial connection between economic conditions and political stability, calling for informed policy interventions to preserve and enhance democratic institutions.
In recent decades there has been a perceptible rise in employment precarity across professions, industries, institutions and economies, including for managerial grades. In this article the authors contend that this emanates from an implicit neoliberal governance agenda promoting deepening career uncertainty amidst transformative digital innovation and radical corporate restructuring. Among the effects of such changes have been managers experiencing longer working hours, greater work intensification and worsening work–life balance. The authors argue such effects have been particularly acute for women and notably under the institutional (economic, political and social) constraints of the coronavirus pandemic. Presenting quasi-longitudinal information from three qualitative studies (based on data collected variously in Japan, the UK and USA in 2002–2006, 2015–2019 and 2020–2021) the article considers not only women managers’ experiences of work since the millennium, but also their occupational prospects for the future. The authors conclude that under neoliberalism the enduring interaction of organizational restructuring, precarious employment and work intensification will continue to affect adversely the equilibrium between women managers’ personal lives and their professional work, given many confront increasing demands of corporate availability and work-related connectivity whilst simultaneously dealing with significant parenting and care responsibilities.
The institutional perspective on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has discussed two diametri-cally opposed hypotheses about how institutional context influences CSR. Whereas the mirror hypothesis suggests that CSR is stronger in institutional contexts with stringent CSR-related regulations , the substitute hypothesis posits that CSR is stronger in weakly regulated contexts. Drawing on the micro-CSR literature, we propose that examining individual CSR motivation can help to better understand the effect of institutional context on CSR because it makes focusing on substantively motivated CSR possible, and it can shed light on the hitherto neglected psychological mod-erators in this relationship. We conducted three studies, obtaining results indicating that institutional trust is an important moderator of the institutional effect on individual CSR motivation. Overall, we found the highest individual CSR motivation when regulatory stringency and institutional trust were high, supporting the mirror hypothesis. However, in contexts of low institutional trust, this positive effect of a strong institutional context was reduced or even reversed. Our study contributes to the literature on the institutional perspective on CSR, micro-CSR, and institutional theory, and it has important practical implications for CSR management.
The chapter focuses on highlighting the entrepreneurial challenges and opportunities for the Armenian wine industry during the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on events after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Theoretically, the study departs from the assumption that to understand long-term industrial change it is necessary to apply a long-term view. In this case with inspiration from the French Annales School, which argues that long-term development occurs through periods of economic prosperity alternated with periods of economic crisis. Institutions are used as theoretical concepts to analyse industrial development and the consequences of institutional change on the spatial distribution and spatially differentiated impact of institutions on the wine industry and on single firms in various periods. Results indicate that despite the rich ancient history and heritage related to the wine industry, central decisions made by the Soviets led to the marginalization of Armenian wine production. This led to a loss of both cultural and biological heritage. From being one of the territories in which wine was invented, Armenian wine production became decimated. The impact of legislative frameworks and ideologically driven campaigns also led to the assassination and deportation of wine industrialists during the dekulakization campaigns. The re-emerging wine industry after 1991 had no experience nor know-how to fall back on; however, this also enabled companies to start fresh and adjust production to state-of-the-art knowledge.
This article explores the differential liberalization of capital controls in advanced market economies. It shows that although finance-led economies abolished controls by the 1980s, export-led economies retained significant restrictions into the 1990s, contributing to differential financial market development. A historical comparison of Germany and the UK (1961–1985) finds that differential control use resulted from central bankers’ varying expectations of controls’ monetary functions in the domestic economic context. As capital became mobile in the 1960s, sudden capital in- and outflows jeopardized price and currency stability. In the German context of macroeconomic stability, controls effectively limited capital inflows and arrested destabilizing inflationary and exchange rate pressures. However, in the British context of macroeconomic instability and capital outflows, controls could not sufficiently restore stability: as loose fiscal and monetary choices persisted, monetary conditions deteriorated. Thus, Bank of England officials became fervent advocates for control liberalization to enforce restrictive fiscal and monetary choices via market pressures.
In recent years, the concepts of rentiership and intellectual monopoly have gained prominence in discussions about the weakening link between corporate profitability and capital investment in high income countries. However, there have been few if any attempts to construct measures for rentiership and intellectual monopoly using firm-level financial data. The absence of such work, we argue, is symptomatic of challenges in delineating what qualifies as rent—whether it be intangible rent or otherwise. In place of static conceptions of rent and intellectual monopoly, we develop a framework for analyzing rentierization and intellectual monopolization as dynamic and variegated processes that are closely related to financialization. We apply the framework to the analysis of the transformation of non-financial firms in the USA since the mid-twentieth century and show how it helps clarify the linkages between firm-level dynamics and trends associated with household inequality, corporate stratification and secular stagnation.
Patient capital (PC) has gained traction in discussions about how finance can better serve society. While PC is a central concept in comparative political economy (CPE), this literature has focused on advanced economies in conceptualizing PC and we know little about the conditions under which PC leads to positive outcomes. We extend the conceptualization of PC to enhance its relevance for developing and emerging economies (DEEs) and examine who provides it, when and how it leads to improvements in employment studying the case of Kenya. We find that the PC landscape in DEEs differs from the one in advanced economies and that institutions shape the extent to which capital is patient and has a positive impact on employment. Our analysis contributes to filling a gap in CPE on the role of PC in DEEs and speaks to broader debates about how to enhance the contribution of finance to society.
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