Contesting deregulation: debates, practices and developments in the West since the 1970s

Few would dispute that many Western industrial democracies undertook extensive deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet this narrative, in its most familiar form, depends upon several historiographical assumptions that bely the complexities and pitfalls of studying the recent past. Across thirteen case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate this "deregulatory moment" from a variety of historical perspectives, including transnational, comparative, pan-European, and national approaches. Collectively, they challenge an interpretive framework that treats individual decades in isolation and ignores broader trends that extend to the end of the Second World War

Continuities, or : the long second half of the twentieth century. The global spread of export processing zones, and the 1970s as a decade of consolidation / Patrick Neveling -- Continuity and change in Germany's social market economy : a matter of economic style? / Alexander Ebner -- Pioneers of capitalism : the reshaping of the East German planned economy and the managers of the Treuhandanstalt between state, market and society (1990-1994) / Marcus Böick -- Against the deregulatory tide : privacy protection legislation in the federal republic of Germany in the 1970s and 1980s / Larry Frohman -- Changes in business organization : integration in the American workplace in the early 1970s / Enrico Beltramini -- Conceptual transition in (state) regulation from the 1970s to the 1980s. Helmut Schmidt, the 'renewal' of European social democracy, and the roots of neoliberal globalization / Giovanni Bernardini -- The changing corporate tax order of the European community / Hanna Liese -- The European community and the rise of a new educational order (1976-1986) / Simone Paoli -- Project-based learning from the late 1960s to the early 1980s : a case study from Lansing and Bremen / Anna Wellner -- Regulatory transitions in enterprise practices. Technological advance, transatlantic external equilibrium : American financial assistance to the Italian nuclear power programmes from the 1960s through to the first oil crisis / Simone Selva -- Capital hits the road : regulating multinational corporations during the long 1970s / Francesco Petrini -- Marketization of the enterprise : the influence of consultancy in the German fibre industry after the boom / Christian Marx -- From mutual society to public corporation : the case of the Halifax building society / Matthew Hollow.