Contemporary Capitalism The Embeddedness of Institutions

This book argues there is no single best institutional arrangement for organizing modern societies.

This book argues that there is no single best institutional arrangement for organizing modern societies. Therefore, the market should not be considered the "ideal and universal" arrangement for coordinating economic activity. Instead, the editors argue, the economic institutions of capitalism exhibit a large variety of objectives and tools that complement each other and cannot work in isolation. The various chapters of the book explore challenging issues in the analysis of differing institutional arrangements for coordinating economic activity, asking what logics and functions they follow and why they emerge, mature and persist in the forms they do. They conclude that any institutional arrangement has its strengths and weaknesses and that such institutions evolve according to a logic specific to each society. They also note that institutions continuously respond to changing circumstances, and are not static entities.

Part I: 1. Coordination of economic actors and social systems of production Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer; Part II: Introduction: the variety of institutional arrangements and their complementarity in modern economics Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer; 2. The variety and unequal performance of markets Robert Boyer; 3. A typology of cooperative interorganizational relationships and networks Jerald Hage and Catherine Alter; 4. Weathering the storm: associational governance in a globalizing era William Coleman; 5. Constitutional orders: trust building and response to change Charles F. Sabel; Part III: Introduction: how and why do social systems of production change? Robert Boyer and Rogers Hollingsworth; 6. Beneficial constraints: on the economic limits of rational voluntarism Wolfgang Streeck; 7. Flexible specialization: theory and evidence in the analysis of industrial change; 8. Globalization, variety and mass production: the metamorphosis of mass production in the new competitive age Benjamin Coriat; 9. Continuities and changes in social systems of production: the cases of Japan, Germany, and the United States Rogers Hollingsworth; Part IV: Introduction: levels of spatial coordination and the embeddedness of institutions Philippe Schmitter; 10. Perspectives on globalization and economic coordination Wyn Grant; 11. Globalization in question: international economic relations and forms of public governance Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson; 12. The formation of international regimes in the absence of a Hegemon: clubs are trump Lorraine Eden and Fen Osler Hampson; 13. The emerging Euro-polity and its impact upon national systems of production Philippe Schmitter; Part V: Conclusion: from national embeddness to spatial and institutional nestedness Robert Boyer and Rogers Hollingsworth.

This book argues that there is no single best institutional arrangement for organizing modern societies. Therefore, the market should not be considered the ideal and universal arrangement for coordinating economic activity.