The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Public Management Reform. A Comparative Analysis

List of Boxes. List of Tables and Figure. Preface. Abbreviations. Introduction. 1. Capitalism and the Capitalist Type of State. 2. The Keynesian Welfare National State. 3. The Schumpeterian Competition State. 4. Social Reproduction and the Workfare State. 5. The Political Economy of State Rescaling. 6. From Mixed Economy to Metagovernance. 7. Towards Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regimes?. Notes. References. Index.

The Future of the Capitalist State.

Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'.

Urban Outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality

Drawing on case studies from the telecommunications and auto industries, the authors argue that the vertical disintegration of major German employers is contributing to the disorganization of Germany’s dual system of in-plant and sectoral negotiations. Subcontractors, subsidiaries and temporary agencies often have no collective bargaining institutions or are covered by different firm-level and sectoral agreements. As core employers move jobs to these firms, they introduce new organizational boundaries across the production chain and disrupt traditional bargaining structures. Worker representatives are developing new campaign approaches and using residual power at large firms to establish representation in new firms and sectors, but these have not been successful at rebuilding co-ordinated bargaining.

http://lubswww.leeds.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/Doellgast_Greer_2007.pdf

Vertical disintegration and the disorganization of German industrial relations.

Transnational politics and labor markets are undermining national industrial relations systems in Europe. This article examines the construction industry, where the internationalization of the labor market has gone especially far. To test hypotheses about differences between '' national systems,'' the authors examine the United Kingdom, Finland, and Germany, alongside European-level policy making. Regardless of overall national institutional framework, employers seek to avoid industrial relations rules, while unions attempt to relocalize labor relations. Both use shop-floor, national, and European power resources. The authors argue that comparative industrial relations should take seriously the connection between action at the national and transnational levels.

/pdf/industrial-relations-migration-and-neoliberal-politics-the-475g3s4gu1.pdf

Industrial Relations, Migration, and Neoliberal Politics: The Case of the European Construction Sector:

This article compares forms of labour transnationalism in three industrial sectors: motor manufacturing, maritime shipping and clothing and textile manufacturing. In each case, unions engage in very different transnational activities to reassert control over labour markets and competition. As institutions of transnational cooperation deepen, unions continue to struggle with competitive tensions (worker to worker and union to union) which vary from one industry to another.

/pdf/the-industrial-determinants-of-transnational-solidarity-ytfb5oxf96.pdf

The Industrial Determinants of Transnational Solidarity: Global Interunion Politics in Three Sectors

While welfare reform matters for workers and workplaces, it is peripheral in English-language sociology of work and industrial relations research. This article’s core proposition is that active labour market policies (ALMPs) are altering the institutional constitution of the labour market by intensifying market discipline within the workforce. This re-commodification effect is specified drawing on Marxism, comparative institutionalism, German-language sociology and English-language social policy analysis. Because of administrative failure and employer discrimination, however, ALMPs may worsen precarity without achieving the stated goal of increasing labour market participation.

/pdf/welfare-reform-precarity-and-the-re-commodification-of-umebt6qx2e.pdf

Welfare Reform, Precarity and the Re-Commodification of Labour

This article examines labour transnationalism within four multinational automakers. In our sample, we find different forms of labour transnationalism, including transnational collective bargaining, mobilization, information exchange and social codes of conduct. We explain the differences through the interaction between management and labour in the context of the company structure; of particular importance are transnational coercive comparisons by management and the orientations of worker representatives as political entrepreneurs or co-managers. We conclude that, although intensified worker-side cross-border co-operation has not prevented wage-based competition in general (due to the lack of between-firm co-ordination), it has reshaped employment relations within these multinational corporations.

http://lubswww.leeds.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/greer_hauptmeier_2008.pdf

Ian Greer

Papers

Vertical disintegration and the disorganization of German industrial relations.

Industrial Relations, Migration, and Neoliberal Politics: The Case of the European Construction Sector:

The Industrial Determinants of Transnational Solidarity: Global Interunion Politics in Three Sectors

Welfare Reform, Precarity and the Re-Commodification of Labour

Political Entrepreneurs and Co‐Managers: Labour Transnationalism at Four Multinational Auto Companies