In recent years, scholars in a variety of disciplines have become interested in why there is variation in the institutional arrangements for coordination and control of economic activities in capitalist economies. Some have attempted to explain why transactions occur among actors within a...

This paper presents a new agenda for analyzing the consequences from investments in human capital by suggesting that sociological research should focus on particular sectors of society, that performances other than economic growth and productivity should be considered, and that the role of the...

The “financial crisis” and its sequel, the current sovereign debt crisis, appear to be the latest permutations of an old conflict between capitalism and democracy that forcefully reasserted itself after the end of the postwar growth period. Today’s calamities were preceded by high...

Rising public debt has been widespread in democratic-capitalist political economies since the 1970s, generally accompanied among other things by weak economic growth, rising unemployment, increasing inequality, growing tax resistance, and declining political participation. Following an initial...

Die Internationalisierung der Weltwirtschaft entzieht die Volkswirtschaften dem Zugriff nationaler Regulierung. Diese Entwicklung führt für den Nationalstaat, immer noch der wichtigste Ort demokratischer Politik und sozialer Solidarität, zu Legitimationsproblemen und zur Notwendigkeit einer...

Skills and skill formation have become central topics in contemporary political economy. This essay traces a key concept in the current debate – the distinction between general and specific skills – back to its diverse origins in American postwar labor economics, comparative industrial...