Chiara Benassi’s research while affiliated with University of Bologna and other places

This article contributes to the Comparative Political Economy discourse on countries’ export specialization transitions. While current growth model literature often highlights producer coalitions’ influence, we present a complementary perspective emphasizing industrial policies. These policies, we argue, are not solely shaped by politics but are also deeply influenced by sectoral technological capabilities. By strategically engaging in both demand and supply-side sectoral innovation processes, industrial policies deepen existing technological capabilities with spillover effects into new sectors or foster new sector-specific capabilities. Our empirical analysis comprises two main steps. First, we create export profiles for eight European nations, using OECD TiVA data from 1995 to 2018. These profiles are categorized based on their technological and innovation content. Second, we identify significant shifts in export structures within Ireland, Sweden and Spain. Through thorough case studies, we illustrate the role of industrial policies in cultivating sector-specific technological capabilities.

Across the world, many workers have experienced prolonged wage stagnation and insecure working conditions. At the same time, employers face challenges with staff shortages and low productivity. Sectoral and multi employer bargaining that covers broad segments of the workforce can help to solve these challenges and can bring positive outcomes to workers, firms and wider society. This King’s Business School Research Impact Paper examines different types of institutions to support high collective bargaining coverage. It reviews systems with high union density and employer density, different types of state intervention that extend the agreements to all workers within a sector and instruments that allow unions to establish multi employer agreements to safeguard against outsourcing.

This article combines insights from the organizational institutionalist (OI) literature on the complexity of transnational institutional streams and the power-based approach of the comparative employment relations (CER) literature to better explain diversity in human resource (HR) practices across organizations embedded in different societal contexts. Building on the insights from both literature strands, the article argues that societal institutions, by providing power resources to labour vis-à-vis management, influence the settlement of contradictions in HR practices in the workplace, with implications for the internal consistency of HR systems. The findings are based on the comparative case study of three metal companies in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom that implemented lean management systems. They suggest that labour-supporting institutions at the sectoral and organizational levels in the German metal company contribute to a more ‘balanced’ settlement of the tensions between the (ideo)logics of empowerment, cost-cutting, and Taylorism, which characterize lean management systems, compared to the Italian and British companies. The article contributes to cross-fertilization between the OI and CER literature because it demonstrates the value of integrating the power resource perspective in (comparative) OI studies, and of taking into greater consideration the role of transnational (ideo)logics in CER research.