Business and Management

Government information systems are big business (costing over 1% of GDP a year). They are critical to all aspects of public policy and governmental operations. Governments spend billions on them — for instance, the United Kingdom alone commits £14 billion a year to public sector information technology (IT) operations. Yet governments do not generally develop or run their own systems, instead relying on private sector computer services providers to run large, long-run contracts to provide IT. Some of the biggest companies in the world (IBM, EDS, Lockheed Martin, etc.) have made this a core market. This book shows how governments in some countries (the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands) have maintained much more effective policies than others (in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia). It shows how public managers need to retain and develop their own IT expertise and to carefully maintain well-contested markets if they are to deliver value for money in their dealings with the very powerful global IT industry. This book describes how a critical aspect of the modern state is managed, or in some cases mismanaged.

This book brings together conceptual and empirical analyses of the evolving patterns of East Asian capitalism against the backdrop of global market integration and periodic economic crises since the 1980s. More specifically, it seeks to provide an interdisciplinary account of variations, continuities, or changes in institutional structures that govern financial systems, industrial relations, and product markets and shape the evolution of national political economies. The geographical focus of the volume is China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Thailand. In line with this analytical focus, the volume has three different yet interrelated objectives. First, building on extant comparative institutional analyses, it develops a typology of East Asian capitalism that can identify key institutional domains to be included in cross-national comparisons and establish the guiding principles for categorizing political economies across the region. Second, it provides an analytical framework to elucidate the nature and mode of institutional changes in East Asian countries over the past two decades. Finally, the volume advances theoretical propositions concerning the potential causes of these institutional changes. While particular chapters emphasize different causal variables, collectively they constitute a coherent effort to theorize the changing varieties of East Asian capitalism.

Much has been said about the re-emergence of China to its historical position of eminence in the world economy, yet little is understood about the kind of economic system China is evolving. What are the rules of the game of business in today's China, and how are they likely to change over the next decades? This book sheds much-needed light on these questions. Building on recent conceptual and empirical advances, and rich in concrete examples, it offers a comprehensive and systematic exploration of present-day Chinese capitalism, its component parts, and their interdependencies. It suggests that Chinese capitalism, as practiced today, in many respects represents a development from traditional business practices, whose revival has been greatly aided by the influx of investments and managerial talent from the Regional Ethnic Chinese. On the basis of present trends in the Chinese economy as well as through comparison with five major types of capitalism — those of France, Germany, Japan, Korea, and the United States — the book derives a prediction of the probable development paths of Chinese capitalism and its likely competitive strengths and weaknesses.

This book emphasizes the centrality of cities in China's ongoing transformation. Based on fieldwork in twenty-four Chinese cities between 1996 and 2007, the author forwards an analysis of the relations between the city, the state, and society through two novel concepts: urbanization of the local state and civic territoriality. Urbanization of the local state is a process of state power restructuring entailing an accumulation regime based on the commodification of state-owned land, the consolidation of territorial authority through construction projects, and a policy discourse dominated by notions of urban modernity. Civic territoriality encompasses the politics of distribution engendered by urban expansionism, and social actors' territorial strategies toward self-protection. Findings are based on observations in three types of places. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized; their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined.

Economic globalization has led to intense debates about the competitiveness of nations. Prosperity, social justice, and welfare are now seen to depend on the creation of a ‘high-skilled’ workforce. This international consensus around high skills has led recent American presidents to claim themselves ‘education presidents’ and in Britain, Tony Blair announced that ‘talent is twenty-first-century wealth’. This view of knowledge-driven capitalism has led all the developed economies to increase numbers of highly-trained people in preparation for technical, professional, and managerial employment. But it also harbours the view that what we regard as a ‘skilled’ worker is being transformed. The pace of technological innovation, corporate restructuring, and the changing nature of work require a new configuration of skills described in the language of creativity, teamwork, employability, self-management, and lifelong learning. But is this optimistic account of a future of high-skilled work for all justified? This book draws on the findings of a major international comparative study of national routes to a ‘high-skills’ economy in Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States, and includes data from interviews with over 250 key stakeholders. It offers a comparative examination of ‘high-skill’ policies — a topic of major public debate that is destined to become of even greater importance in all the developed economies in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

The study of varieties of capitalism is moving on from the analysis of static national types to embrace local and sectoral diversity and the study of systems in the process of major change. This book addresses the issue by examining four localised sectors, comparing a German case with one in another European country. The general changes taking place in Germany itself and the other countries (Hungary, Sweden, and the UK) form the context of the studies. The case studies concern the following: furniture making in North-Rhine Westphalia and southern Sweden; automotive manufacture in east Germany and northern Hungary; biotechnology around Munich and Cambridge; and TV programme and film-making in Cologne and central London. The studies find a complex pattern of conformity with, and deviation from, national types, but only occasional examples of where divergence takes the form of a direct confrontation with a national model. This is partly because national models are themselves changing; partly because they are often capable of accommodating more diversity than is often assumed by national studies; and partly because firms are increasingly able to reach outside their national boundaries for institutional resources.

The Nordic welfare states have been at the top of the lists of national competitiveness throughout the 2000s. The Nordic welfare model is deemed able to combine equality, welfare and economic efficiency. Among the Nordic countries, Finland has been considered as an epitome of information society, of high-quality education and systemic innovation policy. In order to make sense of the Finnish development, this book puts political economy, innovation studies, welfare state research, organizational institutionalism and cultural-historical psychology into dialogue with each other. It develops an approach of studying institutional change and learning based on cultural-historical activity theory. This approach is used to analyze the emergence and development of the Finnish comprehensive school system. The steadfast success of Finnish students in the PISA studies shows, against neoliberal principles, that a public school system inspired by educational equality can achieve excellent results with moderate costs. The book outlines a model of an enabling welfare state which develops further the capability cultivating universal services created by the welfare state in the 1960s–1980s. In future these services — produced by multi-professional collaboration — will be increasingly tailored to meet the needs of different individuals and specific life situations. They enable citizens to cope with risks and to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing labour market. An enabling democratic welfare state fosters local experimentation as well as learning in collaborative communities and developmental associations. It mobilizes well-educated professionals and practitioners to innovate in all spheres of society and in this way deepens democracy within the society.

Innovation is often associated with high-technology industries, such as information and communication technologies, scientific research in large-scale facilities in firms or universities, and professionals working in highly urbanized environments. Norway, however, has no major international firms in high-tech industries. Its share of R&D in GDP and population density are among the lowest in Europe and exports consist mainly of natural resource based products. Still productivity, measured as GDP per capita, is among the highest in the world in Norway and this holds even if rents from its oil and gas production are adjusted for. This book focuses on the relationship between Norway's pattern of economic specialization and its innovation system. The Introduction to the book outlines the ‘national systems of innovation’ approach, considers its application to the Norwegian context, and compares the Norwegian evidence to that of other developed countries. The first section of the book then provides an analysis of the development of the Norwegian national innovation system, with particular emphasis on the public research infrastructure and government policies affecting innovation. The second section contains detailed studies of innovation within important sectors of the Norwegian economy, including aluminium, aquaculture, the oil and gas industry, and the ICT sector. The third and final section analyses the current structure and performance of Norway's knowledge infrastructure (public research institutes and universities) and policies for financial support of innovation-related activities in industry.