Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity

This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.


About the Author
Thelen, Kathleen: - Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Permanent External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. She is the author, among other books, of How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan (Cambridge, 2004), winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, and winner of the Mattei Dogan Award of the Society for Comparative Research. She also writes extensively on historical institutionalism and theories of institutional change, including, most recently, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency and Power (Cambridge, 2010, co-edited with James Mahoney) and Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (2005, co-edited with Wolfgang Streeck). Thelen has held appointments as a research fellow or visiting professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialpolitik, the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), Nuffield College (Oxford), Sciences Po (Paris), and the Copenhagen Business School, among others. She has served as Chair of the Council for European Studies (2002-6) and as President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2008-9). Currently, she is President of the APSA organized section for Comparative Politics. In 2009 Thelen was elected to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Berlin.