Beyond Continuity or The Politics of Globalization

Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies

Author: Wolfgang Streeck

Debates surrounding institutional change have become increasingly central to Political Science, Management Studies, and Sociology, opposing the role of globalization in bringing about a convergence of national economies and institutions on one model to theories about 'Varieties of Capitalism'. This book brings together a distinguished set of contributors from a variety to examine current theories of institutional change. The chapters highlight the limitations of these theories, finding them lacking in the analytic tools necessary to identify the changes occurring at a national level, and therefore tend to explain many changes and innovations as simply another version of previous situations. Instead a model emerges of contemporary political economies developing in incremental but cummulatively transformative processes. The contributors shoe that a wide, but not infinite, variety of models of institutional change exist which can meaniingfully distinguished and analytically compared. They offer an empirically grounded typology of modes of institutional change that offer important insights on mechanisms of social and political stability, and evolution generally. Beyond Continuity provides a more complex and fundamental understanding of institutional change, and will be important reading for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Political Science, Management Studies, Sociology and Economics.

Table of Contents:

1	Introduction : institutional change in advanced political economies	1
2	Policy drift : the hidden politics of US welfare state retrenchment	40
3	Changing dominant practice : making use of institutional diversity in Hungary and the United Kingdom	83
4	Redeploying the state : liberalization and social policy in France	103
5	Ambiguous agreement, cumulative change : French social policy in the 1990s	127
6	Routine adjustment and bounded innovation : the changing political economy of Japan	145
7	Change from within : German and Italian finance in the 1990s	169
8	Institutional resettlement : the case of early retirement in Germany	203
9	Contested boundaries : ambiguity and creativity in the evolution of German codetermination	229
10	Adaptation, recombination, and reinforcement : the story of antitrust and competition law in Germany and Europe	255

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The Politics of Globalization: A Reader

Author: Mark Kesselman

The broad range of selections in this reader gives students a foundation for understanding globalization. Each of the four sections—an introduction to the topic; political economy; civil society; and governance—examine the national and intra-national implications of globalization. The readings present views both for and against globalization and include scholarly discussions and a diverse range of selections on emerging topics.

The writing style and format of the readings make them accessible to students at all levels of understanding.