This paper discusses the introduction and implementation of ISO 9000 qualitystandards in the German and French car industry. Rather than a transfer of a set ofconcrete, well-understood rules, which are ready to be implemented, the paperargues, the quality standards have to be reconstructed and...

This paper discusses finance problems of small firms. Since small firms and banks belong to different economic worlds, as a result of which information assymetries emerge, credit rationing leads to sub-optimal financing arrangements. The paper analyses institutional solutions to these...

Vertreter einer einflußreichen Argumentationsrichtung in der neueren Forschungüber die industrielle Reorganisation in modernen Industriegesellschaften sehen imAufbau zwischenbetrieblicher Vertrauensstrukturen und im relational contracting mögliche Wege, die betriebliche Organisation an die...

This paper relates the political decision-process which allowed Germany to transform its planned economic system into a Social Market Economy after the Second WorldWar. The central problem of the paper is to understand how the Social MarketEconomy emerged in Germany. Was it primarily an imported...

The central challenge of transferring the dual system of education and training to eastern Germany is to convince companies to bear the in-firm costs of apprenticeship training. Two prominent explanatory variables in the social scientificliterature - national institutions and social capital -...

This paper discusses industrial and economic adjustment in France in the 1980s. Itargues that French industry followed a path of adjustment throughout the decade,which was fundamentally different from both the German-Japanese style organisedcapitalism, and the US-UK type of deregulated...

This paper contributes to research at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, with particular emphasis on domestic explanations ofmultilateral cooperation. It explains why members of the European Union often have strongly diverging institutional preferences with...

In diesem Papier werden Ausbildungszertifikate und Diplome als Industrie-Normenverstanden und analysiert, also als Dokumente mit standardisierten Informationen fürdie Akteure in der Wirtschaft. Im ersten Teil wird der vergleichende Analyserahmenentwickelt und die Hypothese über die...

The goal of this paper is to provide the elements of a unitary analytical framework that incorporates the findings of two bodies of literature which, so far, havedeveloped independently: comparative models of the political economy that distinguish between coordinated and uncoordinated market...

Gegenstand der Analyse dieses Papiers ist der Umfang von Policy-Innovationen innerhalb des italienischen Arbeitsmarkts angesichts der wachsenden Arbeitslosigkeit. Dabei geht es um die Art, wie öffentliche und private Akteure ihr Routinehandeln zu verändern und neue Programme zu entwickeln...