Beyond Continuity Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies

Debates surrounding institutional change have become increasingly central to Political Science, Management Studies, and Sociology, opposing the role of globalization in bringing about a convergence of national economies and institutions on one model to theories about 'Varieties of Capitalism'.This book brings together a distinguished set of contributors from a variety of disciplines to examine current theories of institutional change. The chapters highlight the limitations of these theories, finding them lacking in the analytic tools necessary to identify the changes occurring at anational level, and therefore tend to explain many changes and innovation as simply another version of previous situations.Instead a model emerges of contemporary political economies developing in incremental but cumulatively transformative processes. The contributors show that a wide, but not infinite, variety of models of institutional change exist which can meaningfully distinguished and analytically compared. Theyoffer an empirically grounded typology of modes of institutional change that offer important insights on mechanisms of social and political stability, and evolution generally.Beyond Continuity provides a more complex and fundamental understanding of institutional change, and will be important reading for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Political Science, Management Studies, Sociology, and Economics.

Wolfgang Streeck is Professor of Sociology and Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. Previously he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. From 1988 to 1995 he was Professor of Sociology and Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has worked on labor relations, political economy, economic policy, European integration and related subjects. He was President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) in 1998-99. Kathleen Thelen is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is the author, most recently, of How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Her work on labor politics and on historical institutionalism has appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, The Annual Review of Political Science, Politics & Society, and Comparative Politics, among others. She is currently Chair of the Council for European Studies, and serves on the Executive Councils of the Organized Sections for Comparative Politics, Qualitative Methods, and European Politics and Society of the American Political Science Association.