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Begin New Search Political Geography United States Content Type Working Paper Publishing Institution Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies

1. Toward a Discursive Approach to Growth Models Social Blocs in the Politics of Digital Transformation

Author:
Sidney Rothstein
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The growth models perspective analyzes the role of social blocs in crafting countries’ eco- nomic policies, but its treatment of business power as purely structural prevents it from ad- dressing an important question in the politics of digital transformation: How have new sec- tors with miniscule economic footprints been able to influence economic policy? This paper explores how tech and venture capital successfully lobbied for financial deregulation at the beginning of digital transformation in the United States. The paper argues that explaining the role of social blocs in digital transformation requires incorporating discourse analysis and develops a conceptual framework around three discursive components in the dynamics of social blocs: coordination, persuasion, and performativity. This framework contributes to theory development in the growth models perspective and illustrates how the concept of social blocs can help make sense of the politics of digital transformation.
Topic:
Regulation, Digital Economy, Financial Institutions, and Discourse
Political Geography:
United States and North America

2. Innovation and Precarity Workplace Discourse in Twenty-First Century Capitalism

Author:
Sidney Rothstein
Publication Date:
09-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
This paper analyzes discourse in the workplace in order to explain puzzling patterns of pre- carity in twenty-first century capitalism. Tech workers’ central role in digital transformation endows them with labor market power reflected by their high wages, but during economic downturns, when demand for their skills decreases, even they are vulnerable to downsizing. Comparing workers’ responses to downsizing at two sites of an American tech firm, this paper shows how management disempowers workers by framing the employment relation- ship in a financial discourse. Disposing workers to believe that their jobs are threatened by market forces beyond their control, rather than by managers’ decisions, this financial dis- course undermines labor’s established power resources by persuading workers that mobiliz- ing will be ineffective in protecting their jobs. Relying on detailed case study evidence, this paper demonstrates the importance of discourse to explaining variation in worker power. It argues that the workplace should play a larger role in comparative political economy, par- ticularly in explaining labor market outcomes related to digital transformation.
Topic:
Labor Issues, Hegemony, Capitalism, and Discourse
Political Geography:
United States and North America

3. Pragmatismus und wirtschaftliches Handeln

Author:
Jens Beckert
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
What alternatives to rational choice theory do exist to explain economic phenomena? I argue that American pragmatism presents a viable alternative for the explanation of key economic incidences. First I illustrate the foundations of pragmatism using three problems regularly encountered in action theory. Then I show how innovation, institutional change, price formation and actors' preferences can be analyzed based on pragmatist premises. I conclude by reflecting on why pragmatism has found so little recognition in economics.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, Political Economy, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
United States and America

4. Flexible Employment, Flexible Families, and the Socialization of Reproduction

Author:
Wolfgang Streeck
Publication Date:
11-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The progress of markets erodes traditional relations of social solidarity that are essential for the stability and performance of societies. As markets advance, pressures build on the state to replace informal social obligations with formal ones. Regulation may fail, however, which tends to give rise to demands for public services substituting for private reciprocity and compliance with institutionalized normative expectations. As a result, demands on public finances increase. The paper demonstrates this sequence by describing how the pressures and attractions of labor markets undermined the “Fordist family” of the 1960s; how the complex interaction between increasingly more flexible employment and loosening family structures resulted in declining fertility in a variety of modern societies; and how providing for societies' physical reproduction increasingly became a matter of public policy in some countries but not in others. Parallels are drawn to active labor market policy and the recent rescue of the money-making industry by Western governments. Moreover, special attention is paid to differences between countries, especially Sweden on the one hand and the United States on the other, in particular to the conditions under which governments apparently can afford not to heed calls for ever deeper and ever more expensive intervention in social relations. Exploring the increasingly negative relationship between fertility and “familialism,” the paper also shows how advanced commodification of labor and individualization of social life has effectively made it impossible to return to traditional social arrangements, such as the postwar family.
Topic:
Economics, Markets, Labor Issues, Sociology, and Governance
Political Geography:
United States

5. Der kollektive "Buddenbrooks-Effekt"

Author:
Christoph Deutschmann
Publication Date:
05-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The paper views the current financial crisis in light of long-term structural socioeconomic changes in advanced industrial societies. In Western Europe, the United States and Japan, the period of economic prosperity after the Second World War led to a remarkable accumulation of wealth among the middle class that had surprisingly little effect on the substantial fortunes of the wealthiest upper class. This affluence gave rise to pension and investment funds emerging as a new type of collective actor in global financial markets, while the economy was marked by increasing instability, declining growth rates and financial crises. The paper tries to clarify the interconnections between these phenomena using the framework of a multilevel analysis that culminates in a model I call the “collective Buddenbrooks effect” (“Buddenbrooks” being a family saga by Thomas Mann): Structural upward social mobility will lead to an increasing imbalance in capital markets, since the volume of financial assets looking for profitable investment will rise as the social reservoir of solvent debtors and promising investment opportunities decline. Advanced industrial economies are thus characterized by a bias towards capital export and excessive financial liquidity, with the well-known consequences of low economic growth rates and the danger of speculative bubbles on global capital markets. The middle class that originally benefitted from postwar prosperity is negatively affected, too. I argue that the current crisis cannot be understood sufficiently without taking this structural socioeconomic background into account.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, Political Economy, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, and Europe

6. Do Affluent Countries Face an Incomes-Jobs Tradeoff?

Author:
Lane Kenworthy
Publication Date:
10-2001
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
A commonly-held view suggests that affluent nations face a tradeoff between incomes and jobs. According to this view, in the United States pay for workers at the bottom of the earnings distribution (relative to those in the middle) is very low and government unemployment-related benefits (the “replacement rate”) are stingy, but this facilitates the creation of lots of new jobs and encourages such individuals to take those jobs. The result is a high rate of employment and low unemployment. In much of Western Europe relative pay levels are higher for those at the bottom and benefits are more generous, but this is said to discourage job creation and to reduce the willingness of the unemployed to accept low-wage jobs. The consequence is low employment and high unemployment. I undertake a comparative assessment of this tradeoff view, based on pooled cross-section time-series analyses of 14 OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s. The findings suggest that greater pay equality and a higher replacement rate do reduce employment growth in low-productivity private-sector service industries and in the economy as a whole. However, these effects are relatively weak. The results point to a variety of viable options for countries wishing to maintain or move toward a desirable combination of jobs and equality.
Topic:
Economics and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States and Europe

7. Wage Coordination and the Welfare State: Germany and Japan Compared

Author:
Philip Manow
Publication Date:
12-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
Is there a relation between welfare state regimes and national wage setting systems? Peter Swenson in his research on the historical dynamics of the US-American and Swedish welfare state has recently claimed that such a relation does indeed exist. The essay aims to check if this also holds true for the German and Japanese case. In the post-war period both countries have established systems of wage-bargaining that are less centralized than the Swedish system, but in which wages are highly coordinated both within and across sectors, and, subsequently, in which wage compression is relatively high as well. Thus, both countries are confronted with the same problems of wage- and welfare-drift and of firms' exit from the 'solidaristic' or coordinated wage setting that are so typical for Sweden. At the same time the German and Japanese welfare state differ from each other in almost all dimensions. Thus, both cases seem to be ideally suited to provide for a plausibility-check of the Swenson hypothesis. The essay reaches the conclusion that there is indeed ample evidence that both the German and the Japanese welfare state contributed critically to the stability of wage coordination in the era of high growth after World War II. They thus have to be understood as an integral part of the German and Japanese post-war growth model.
Topic:
Economics, Human Welfare, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, America, and Germany

8. The Internet Society and its Struggle for Recognition and Influence

Author:
Raymund Werle and Volker Leib
Publication Date:
11-1999
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
With the formation of a private non–profit corporation providing mainly technical coordination and guidance for the global Internet, a new, as yet uncertain, era of the network's governance began in November 1998. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) assumed the responsibility for functions which previously were guaranteed by the US government. Thus ICANN serves as an example of private governance with global significance, in an industry which can neither be completely left to the market nor exclusively be governed by national public authorities or international intergovernmental organizations.
Topic:
Science and Technology
Political Geography:
United States