Political Economy

This book addresses two important questions: first, why did financial innovation lead to the crisis in the banking sector that developed in 2007–8; and, second, why the political reform of finance has apparently proved so difficult across a variety of political jurisdictions? This ambitious book draws on a team of researchers from different disciplines to develop an innovation and distinctive argument in response to these two critical issues. In the first half of this book our question is about how crisis was generated. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 develop our answer, which is that innovation in and around the financial markets took the form of bricolage which did not consider the risks, uncertainty, and unintended consequences of volume-based business models and complex circuits. The direct implication is that finance needs to be simplified, rather than regulation made more sophisticated. In the second half of the book, our question is about why democratic political control both before and after the crisis has proved so difficult? Chapters 5, 6, and 7 develop our answer, which is that self-serving financial elites are not easily controlled by technocratic elites who are themselves recovering from knowledge failure, or by the rest of the governing classes concerned with political positioning for electoral advantage on issues which are technical, opaque, and illegible to the electorate at large. In Chapter 8, we discuss some of the implications of this analysis for how reform of both banking regulation and democracy is required.

Since the early 1990s, Europe's economies have been facing several new challenges: the 1992 single market programme, the collapse of the Berlin wall and eastward enlargement, and monetary unification. Building on the influential Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) perspective, this book critically analyses these developments in the European political economy and their effects on the continental European economies. The chapters include debate about how VoC can help understand the political-economic challenges that Europe is facing today, and how understanding these new challenges can in turn enrich and enhance the VoC perspective. Thematically, the contributions to this volume are organised in four sections: how the macro-economics of EMU influenced different European models of capitalism; how the Single Market programme was received in the different institutional regimes in European capitalism; how welfare and labour market reforms are debated and implemented; and how European capitalism travelled east after 1989. The book aims to demonstrate that the VoC approach remains — as the editors put it in their introduction — a rich seam to mine, capable of accommodating new developments, and theoretically flexible enough to branch out into new arguments.

Twenty-first century capitalism has been marked by an increasing international economic independence, and considerable differences between dominant economic systems of coordination and control. In this context, national competition and coordination within industries has increased, but the governance of leading firms and the kinds of competences they develop remains quite diverse. This book suggests how we can understand this combination of diversity and integration by developing the comparative business systems framework in three major ways. First, by identifying the particular circumstances in which distinctive business systems and innovation systems become nationally established and reproduced, as well as how changing endogenous and exogenous pressures have affected the major kinds of business systems that developed in many OECD states during the post-war period. Second, by showing how variations in authority sharing with employees and business partners and in the provision of organizational careers lead institutional regimes to affect the nature of organizational capabilities that dominant firms develop and enable them to deal with different kinds of risks and opportunities in particular technologies and markets. Third, by identifying the circumstances in which multinational firms are likely to develop distinctive transnational organizational capabilities through such authority sharing and careers, and so become different kinds of companies from their more domestically focused competitors. In many if not most cases of cross-national managerial coordination, these conditions rarely exist, and so the extent to which multinational firms do indeed constitute distinct organizational forms and strategic actors is much less than is sometimes claimed.

Over the last decade, the neo-institutionalist literature on comparative capitalism has developed into an influential body of work. This book assesses this literature and proposes a major re-orientation of the field. It critiques many aspects of this work and finds a way of modelling how creative actors trying to achieve change — institutional entrepreneurs — tackle these constraints. Central to the account is the concept of governance, as it is by recombining governance mechanisms that these entrepreneurs must achieve their goals. In seeking how to analyse the spaces in which they operate, the book criticises and deconstructs some dominant approaches in socio-political analysis: to typologies, to elective affinity and complementarity, to path dependence. It develops a theory of governance modes, which includes potentially decomposing them into their core components. Finally, it proposes a reorientation of the neo-institutionalist research programme to take more account of detailed diversity and potentiality for change. The book is primarily theoretical, but it makes liberal use of examples, particularly from studies of local economic development and politics.

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. Many books have explored its causes, but this book systematically explores its consequences. The focus is primarily on the policy and political consequences of the GFC. This book asks how governments responded to the challenge and what the political consequences of the combination of the GFC itself and policy responses to it have been. Based on workshops held in the United States and the United Kingdom, it brings together leading academics to consider the divergent ways in which particular countries have responded in different ways to the crisis, including China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Part of what is happening is a structural shift in economic power from east to west, but China has its fragilities while Germany offers an example of a largely successful Western model. The book also assesses attempts to develop global economic governance and to reform financial regulation and looks critically at the role of credit rating agencies. Unlike earlier crises, no new paradigm has emerged to challenge existing ways of thinking, meaning that neoliberalism has emerged relatively unscathed. The crisis has lacked a coherent and innovative intellectual response and has been characterized by remarkable policy stability.

Modern constitutions are relatively recent instruments of rule and are closely associated with the formation of national states from the eighteenth century onwards. So what is this term doing in respect to global business practices and corporate affairs? This question is the one the book sets out to explore. The argument is that with the advent of globalization — where corporate organizations and the commercial relations that accompany them are argued to have become increasingly transnational — the locus of powers, authorities, and responsibilities has shifted to the global level. The nation-state arena is losing its capacity to regulate and control commercial processes and practices as a transformational logic kicks-in, associated with new forms of global rule making and governance. And it is this new arena of global rule making can be considered as a surrogate form of global constitutionalization, or ‘quasi-constitutionalization’. But as might be expected, this surrogate process of constitutionalization is not a coherent program or a set of rounded outcomes but is full of contradictory half-finished currents and projects: an ‘assemblage’ of many disparate advances and often directionless moves — almost an accidental coming together of elements. Thus, the book is about governance, law, and constitutional matters. these are discussed in the context of international corporate constitutional governance. So, the emphasis is upon how and why the business world, commercial relations, and particularly company activities have increasingly become subject to legal and constitutional forms of regulation and governance at the international level. The questions asked is how to characterize the process that has seen the international corporate sphere increasingly subject to juridical and constitutional-like regulatory initiatives and interventions. Does this amount to a new attempt to subject international commercial relations to the ‘rule by law’ and, indeed, to rule the world through these very means?

Amongst intellectuals and activists, neoliberalism has become a potent signifier for the kind of free-market thinking that has dominated politics for the past three decades. Forever associated with the conviction politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the free-market project has since become synonymous with the ‘Washington Consensus’ on international development policy and the phenomenon of corporate globalization, where it has come to mean privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of new markets. But beyond its utility as a protest slogan as a shorthand signifier for the political-economic Zeitgeist, what do we know about where neoliberalism came from and how it spread? Who are the neoliberals, and why do they studiously avoid the label? This book presents a radical critique of the free-market project, from its origins in the first half of the 20th century through to its near-death experience in the recent global economic crisis, from the utopian dreams of Friedrich von Hayek, through the dogmatic theories of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, to the hope and hubris of Obamanomics. The book traces how neoliberalism went from crank science to common sense in the period between the Great Depression and the age of Obama. It is an exploration of the antisocial life of the free-market project, examined in its cradles of invention and in its zones of extension and contestation. In the process, the book elaborates (and puts to work) an understanding of neoliberalism as an adaptive, unevenly developed regulatory project.

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, a strength of the United States economy has been its ability to foster large numbers of small innovative technology companies, a few of which have grown to dominate new industries, such as Microsoft, Genentech, or Google. US technology clusters such as Silicon Valley have become engines of innovation and wealth creation, and the envy of governments around the world. This book examines trajectories by which new technology industries emerge and become sustainable across different types of economies. Governments around the world have poured vast sums of money into policies designed to foster clusters of similar start-up firms in their economies. The book employs empirical studies of the biotechnology and software industries in the US and several European economies to examine the relative success of policies aimed at cultivating the “Silicon Valley Model” of organizing and financing companies in Europe. Research associated with the “varieties of capitalism” literature has argued that countries with liberal market orientations, such as the US and the UK, can more easily design policies to cultivate success in new technology industries compared to countries associated with organized economies, such as Germany and Sweden. The book's empirical findings support the view that national institutional factors strongly condition the success of new technology policies. However, the study also identifies important cases in which radically innovative new technology firms have thrived within organized economy. Through examining cases of both success and failure, this book helps identify constellations of market and governmental activities that can lead to the emergence of sustainable clusters of new technology firms across both organized and liberal market economies.