Suchergebnisse

Governments around the world have turned to higher education to sustain economic development and social welfare. This article uses the concept of the regulatory welfare state (RWS) to examine how state authorities in the United States and Germany have sought to spur structural changes in the education sector. I argue that policy-makers in both countries have pursued the goal of organizing competition among universities by combining fiscal and regulatory policies that strengthen universities' self-reliance, rivalry, and decentralized decision-making. The analysis shows that understanding cross-national patterns of institutional transformation requires putting countries' evolving regimes of state-university relations into historical perspective, and that states' shifting governance strategies are important drivers of higher education's contemporary reimagination. It also clarifies how regulatory approaches to welfare provision have fostered the re-composition of public infrastructures, raising pressing questions about the quality and scope of the welfare that regulatory approaches promote.

The German model of labor relations is once again attracting significant
attention, even if assessments of its health and economic consequences
diverge. This review article clarifies debates about German labor relations and
illuminates their significance for theorizing the political economy of wealthy
democracies. It demonstrates how four different narratives about German
practices from the late twentieth century continue to shape contemporary disagreements.
While these older interpretations of the German model have been
updated, their original assumptions about particular structural effects remain at
the heart of current disputes, sometimes hiding as much as they reveal. This
article argues that it is time to move beyond inherited abstractions and focus
more on the contemporary agency of labor relations actors.

In the quest for economic growth, rich democracies' governments have embraced the goal of creating labor market flexibility. To that end, they have pursued simultaneous changes in the three main institutional realms structuring modern welfare capitalism – the industrial relations system, the set of labor market regulations and the welfare state. While commonly framed as the removal of workers' social protections, the politics of labor market adjustment continue to differ in unexpected ways across diverse national contexts. This paper introduces the analytical tools for a comparative analysis of the quest for labor market flexibility in the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark. Among a set of alternative perspectives on national variation during the last three decades, the paper stresses the importance of inherited institutional arrangements for social protection. Systems built around occupational status preservation tend to block measures that could increase labor market flexibility, while those offering universal provisions based on citizenship can help achieve flexibility in the labor market. This perspective puts into question the dominant frame of associating the achievement of labor flexibility with the removal of social protections. It indicates that – even in today's post-Keynesian world – social protection does not have to be economically harmful. If substantiated by further research, these findings have obvious implications for the United States, another rich democracy.

Despite recognizing that institutionalized cooperation is central to both business and politics in many advanced, industrialized economies, scholars remain divided over the origins, character, and future of "non-liberal" capitalism. This article seeks to clarify these debates by arguing that different processes of cooperation are governed by distinct logics of collective action and associated with different dynamics of collaboration. For example, coordination, or cooperation in production, is harder to create but more likely to facilitate companies' upmarket movement. By contrast, concertation, or cooperation in policy making, is more amenable to state intervention but less durable. The analysis is based on detailed case studies of Germany and Ireland, which vary in their relative reliance on concertation and coordination. Selected references to shadow cases—displaying neither or both forms of cooperation—complement the analysis.

Revaluing work(ers) for democracy and sustainability / Tobias Schulze-Cleven and Todd E. Vachon -- Beyond market fundamentalism: a labor studies perspective on the future of work / Tobias Schulze-Cleven -- Deus est machina: historical amnesia, methodological myopia, and the future of work / Michael Merrill and Dorothy Sue Cobble -- "Negotiate the algorithm": labor unions, scale, and industry 4.0 experimentation / Tod D. Rutherford -- Climate change and the future of workers: toward a just transition / J. Mijin Cha and Todd E. Vachon -- Worker mobilization and political engagement: a historical perspective / Naomi R. Williams and Sheri Davis-Faulkner -- Worker voice in technological change: the potential of recrafting / Joel S. Yudken and David C. Jacobs -- Both broadening and deepening: toward sectoral bargaining for the common good / Joseph A. McCartin, Erica Smiley, and Marilyn Sneiderman -- The role of labor education in revaluing workers: historical, current, and future / Victor G. Devinatz and Robert Bruno -- The future of work for domestic workers in the United States: innovations in technology, organizing, and laws / Elaine Zundl and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers -- Graduate student employee unionization in the second gilded age / William A. Herbert and Joseph van der Naald -- The future of US public school reform: elevating teacher voice / Saul A. Rubenstein and John E. McCarthy -- Empowering workers: education and training in the changing labor market / Alysa Hannon, Heather McKay, and Michelle Van Noy -- In the age of crises: enlisting universities in support of change / Tobias Schulze-Cleven.

Europe's affluent democracies adopted different policy strategies to buffer their labor markets from the effects of the worldwide recession that followed the financial crisis in 2007. This article offers a sociologically anchored historical institutionalist explanation to account for this divergence. Reviewing the politics of employment policymaking before, during, and after the crisis in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Denmark, the article traces partisan actors' tactics of maneuvering within the constraints of institutionally embedded mass preferences to legitimate their policies and improve their electoral performance. The analysis moves beyond contemporary treatments of path-dependent institutional evolution in two important ways. Rather than focusing on how arrangements at the work-welfare nexus provide actors with particular functional benefits and differential power resources, it examines institutions' ideational effects on the construction of electorates' interests. Moreover, it illuminates partisan politicians' room for strategic agency, breaking with interpretations that view government responses as the product of particular producer group coalitions.