Professionalism, Golf Coaching and a Master of Science Degree: A commentary

As a point of reference I congratulate Simon Jenkins on tackling the issue of professionalism in coaching. As he points out coaching is not a profession, but this does not mean that coaching would not benefit from going through a professionalization process. As things stand I find that the stimulus article unpacks some critically important issues of professionalism, broadly within the context of golf coaching. However, I am not sure enough is made of understanding what professional (golf) coaching actually is nor how the development of a professional golf coach can be facilitated by a Master of Science Degree (M.Sc.). I will focus my commentary on these two issues

Globalization, multinationals and institutional diversity

This article aims to explore the impact of globalization and in particular multinationals on diversity within national varieties of capitalism. Do the actions of multinationals create more diversity within national systems, do they reduce diversity or do they have relatively little impact on diversity within national systems? The article argues that there are distinctive structures of institutional diversity across different national systems. Therefore, the question is not how do MNCs impact on institutional diversity per se but how do they impact on these different structures of diversity? In order to develop this argument, the paper also differentiates types of multinational. The article uses distinction between market-seeking, resource-seeking, efficiency-seeking and strategic asset-seeking in order to identify a range of different MNC activity across manufacturing, professional and financial sectors. These different sorts of MNC activity vary across time and contexts in terms of their significance. The article looks in detail at four different models of capitalism and examines how the entry of different sorts of multinationals with distinctive objectives impacts on the relationships between key social actors which underpin and reinforce these models. In this way, it suggests how institutional diversity within different types of capitalism may evolve under the impact of MNCs and globalization

Beyond ‘geo-economics’: advanced unevenness and the anatomy of German austerity

This article aims to shed new light on Germany’s domineering role in the eurocrisis. I argue that the realist-inspired depiction of Germany as a ‘geo-economic power’, locked into zero-sum competition with its European partners, is built around an empty core: unable to theorise how anarchy shapes the calculus of states where security competition has receded, it cannot explain why German state managers have insisted on an austerity response to the crisis despite its significant risks and costs even for Germany itself. To unlock this puzzle, this article outlines a version of uneven and combined development (UCD) that is better able to capture the international pressures and opportunities faced by policy elites in advanced capitalist states that no longer encounter one another as direct security rivals. Applied to Germany, this lens reveals a twofold unevenness in the historical structures and growth cycles of capitalist economies that shape its contradictory choice for austerity. In the long run, the reorientation of the export-dependent German economy from Europe towards Asian and Latin American late industrialisers renders the structural adjustment of the eurozone an opportunity—from the cost-saving view of German manufacturers producing in the European home market for export abroad, as well as for German state officials keen to sustain a crumbling class compromise centred on Germany’s world market success. In the short term, however, its exposed position between the divergent post-crisis trajectories of the US and Europe accelerates pressures for austerity beyond what German state and corporate elites would otherwise consider feasible

Cultural antecedents of sustainability and regional economic development - a study of SME ‘Mittelstand’ firms in Baden-Württemberg (Germany)

This paper examines behavioural and regional/geographic cultural antecedents of sustainability in SME contexts. The study identifies prevailing macro-representations of sustainability in the literature and highlights an over-focus on large firms constituting the predominant unit of analysis. Moreover, there is a propensity in the literature to view sustainability primarily in terms of ‘environmental’ – closely linked to a corporate strategic imperative narrative of economic competitiveness and profitability. Overall, this perspective tends to generate accounts which are acultural, apolitical and ahistorical in terms of innovative actions and sustainability practices. In response, using a conceptual framework of moral identity, the paper develops a more micro-foundational insight to sustainability (developing notions of ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’) and examines regional economic development attitudes at individual owner-manager/managing director level in small-to-medium-sized firms. Methodologically, an inductively framed interview schedule was employed with owner-managers and managing directors (n = 30) of manufacturing SMEs in the Baden-Württemberg region (Germany). The study identified a range of micro-foundational behavioural antecedents operating in the sample companies. In particular, it underlined that many of the SME owner-managers/managing directors expressed views informed by a particular moral identity connected with a perspective rooted in regionally bound, longstanding and ‘expected’ behaviours of trust, fairness, honesty and community responsibility

How expectations became governable: institutional change and the performative power of central banks

Central banks have accumulated unparalleled power over the conduct of macroeconomic policy. Key for this development was the articulation and differentiation of monetary policy as a distinct policy domain. While political economists emphasize the foundational institutional changes that enabled this development, recent performativity-studies focus on central bankers’ invention of expectation management techniques. In line with a few other works, this article aims to bring these two aspects together. The key argument is that, over the last few decades, central banks have identified different strategies to assume authority over “expectational politics” and reinforced dominant institutional forces within them. I introduce a comparative scheme to distinguish two different expectational governance regimes. My own empirical investigation focuses on a monetarist regime that emerged from corporatist contexts, where central banks enjoyed “embedded autonomy” and where commercial banks maintained conservative reserve management routines. I further argue that innovations towards inflation targeting took place in countries with non-existent or disintegrating corporatist structures and where central banks turned to finance to establish a different version of expectation coordination. A widespread adoption of this “financialized” expectational governance has been made possible by broader processes of institutional convergence that were supported by central bankers themselves

How Many Varieties of Capitalism? Comparing the Comparative Institutional Analyses of Capitalist Diversity

This essay reviews the development of approaches within the comparative capitalisms (CC) literature and points to three theoretical innovations which, taken together, define and distinguish these approaches as a group. First, national economies are characterized by distinct institutional configurations that generate a particular systemic 'logic' of economic action. Second, the CC literature suggests a theory of comparative institutional advantage in which different institutional arrangements have distinct strengths and weaknesses for different kinds of economic activity. Third, the literature has been interpreted to imply a theory of institutional path dependence. Behind these unifying characteristics of the literature, however, lie a variety of analytical frameworks and typologies of capitalism. This paper reviews and compares these different frameworks by highlighting the fundamental distinctions among them and drawing out their respective contributions and limitations in explaining economic performance and institutional dynamics. The paper concludes that the way forward for this literature lies in developing a more dynamic view of individual institutions, the linkages between domains, and the role of politics and power.In diesem Discussion Paper werden Ansätze der Comparative-Capitalism-Diskussion vorgestellt. Sie haben drei theoretische Innovationen gemein. Erstens: Nationale Ökonomien werden durch institutionelle Konfigurationen geprägt, die auf jeweils eigene "systemische Logiken" wirtschaftlichen Handelns hinwirken. Zweitens: Die Comparative-Capitalism-Literatur beinhaltet eine Theorie der komparativen institutionellen Vorteile, der zufolge institutionellen Konfigurationen spezifische Wettbewerbsvorteile zugeordnet werden können. Zudem, drittens, beinhaltet die Comparative-Capitalism-Literatur auch eine implizite Theorie der Pfadabhängigkeit. Trotz dieser Gemeinsamkeiten unterscheiden sich die Ansätze hinsichtlich analytischer Zugriffe und Vorschläge zur Typologisierung nationaler Kapitalismen. Beim Vergleich dieser Ansätze werden besonders deren Stärken und Schwächen bei der Analyse wirtschaftlicher Performanz und institutioneller Entwicklungsdynamiken hervorgehoben. Der Aufsatz kommt zu dem Schluss, dass die Comparative-Capitalism-Literatur in dreierlei Hinsicht der Weiterentwicklung bedarf: hinsichtlich einer dynamischeren Modellierung von Institutionen, einem besseren Verständnis der Interaktion institutioneller Domänen und der Berücksichtigung von Macht und Politik in der Analyse von Produktionsregimen