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Many societies use labor market coordination to maximize economic growth and equality, yet employers' willing cooperation with government and labor is something of a mystery. The Political Construction of Business Interests recounts employers' struggles to define their collective social identities at turning points in capitalist development. Employers are most likely to support social investments in countries with strong peak business associations, that help members form collective preferences and realize policy goals in labor market negotiations. Politicians, with incentives shaped by governmental structures, took the initiative in association-building and those that created the strongest associations were motivated to evade labor radicalism and to preempt parliamentary democratization. Sweeping in its historical and cross-national reach, the book builds on original archival data, interviews and cross-national quantitative analyses. The research has important implications for the construction of business as a social class and powerful ramifications for equality, welfare state restructuring and social solidarity.
"This book offers a unique look at historical policymaking to explore how nineteenth-century fiction writers influenced the creation of public-school systems in Denmark and Great Britain. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details"--
According to conventional wisdom, big business wields enormous influence over America's political agenda and is responsible for the relatively limited scale of the country's social policies. In Stuck in Neutral, however, Cathie Jo Martin challenges that view, arguing that big business has limited involvement in social policy and in many instances desires broader social interventions. Combining hundreds of in-depth interviews with careful quantitative analysis, Martin shows that there is strong support among managers for government-sponsored training, health, work, and family initiatives to enhance workers' skills and productivity. This support does not translate into political action, surpri...
The United States was once seen as a land of broad consensus and pragmatic politics. Sharp ideological differences were largely absent. But today politics in America is dominated by intense party polarization and limited agreement among legislative representatives on policy problems and solutions. Americans pride themselves on their community spirit, civic engagement, and dynamic society. Yet, as the editors of this volume argue, we are handicapped by our national political institutions, which often— but not always—stifle the popular desire for policy innovation and political reforms. Political Negotiation: A Handbook explores both the domestic and foreign political arenas to understand the problems of political negotiation. The editors and contributors share lessons from success stories and offer practical advice for overcoming polarization. In deliberative negotiation, the parties share information, link issues, and engage in joint problem solving. Only in this way can they discover and create possibilities, and use their collective intelligence for the good of citizens of both parties and for the country.
This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one...
Why have neo-liberal economic ideas been so resilient since the 1980s, despite major intellectual challenges, crippling financial and political crises, and failure to deliver on their promises? Why do they repeatedly return, not only to survive but to thrive? This groundbreaking book proposes five lines of analysis to explain the dynamics of both continuity and change in neo-liberal ideas: the flexibility of neo-liberalism's core principles; the gaps between neo-liberal rhetoric and reality; the strength of neo-liberal discourse in debates; the power of interests in the strategic use of ideas; and the force of institutions in the embedding of neo-liberal ideas. The book's highly distinguished group of authors shows how these possible explanations apply across the most important domains - fiscal policy, the role of the state, welfare and labour markets, regulation of competition and financial markets, management of the Euro, and corporate governance - in the European Union and across European countries.
Interviews are a frequent and important part of empirical research in political science, but graduate programs rarely offer discipline-specific training in selecting interviewees, conducting interviews, and using the data thus collected. Interview Research in Political Science addresses this vital need, offering hard-won advice for both graduate students and faculty members. The contributors to this book have worked in a variety of field locations and settings and have interviewed a wide array of informants, from government officials to members of rebel movements and victims of wartime violence, from lobbyists and corporate executives to workers and trade unionists. The authors encourage sch...
This new textbook is a wide-ranging, contemporary and accessible analysis of familiar myths about mass education in the United Kingdom. Offering knowledge from various disciplines, it is an essential resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses on the sociology of education, culture and education, and the philosophy of education.
This book provides new evidence on teachers unions and their political activities across nations, and offers a foundation for a comparative politics of education.
This book presents a model based on the varieties of capitalism literature that accomplished two things: (1) it describes the state and unique characteristics of Latin American capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s -- what the author called "hierarchical capitalism"; and (2) it explains the political conditions and actor incentives that make hierarchical capitalisms persist over time.