74 research outputs found
Historical institutionalism and the politics of sustainable energy transitions: a research agenda
Improving the understanding of the politics of sustainable energy transitions has become a major focus for research. This paper builds on recent interest in institutionalist approaches to consider in some depth the agenda arising from a historical institutionalist perspective on such transitions. It is argued that historical institutionalism is a valuable complement to socio-technical systems approaches, offering tools for the explicit analysis of institutional dynamics that are present but implicit in the latter framework, opening up new questions and providing useful empirical material relevant for the study of the wider political contexts within which transitions are emerging. Deploying a number of core concepts including veto players, power, unintended consequences, and positive and negative feedback in a variety of ways, the paper explores research agendas in two broad areas: understanding diversity in transition outcomes in terms of the effects of different institutional arrangements, and the understanding of transitions in terms of institutional development and change. A range of issues are explored, including: the roles of electoral and political institutions, regulatory agencies, the creation of politically credible commitment to transition policies, power and incumbency, institutional systems and varieties of capitalism, sources of regime stability and instability, policy feedback effects, and types of gradual institutional change. The paper concludes with some observations on the potential and limitations of historical institutionalism, and briefly considers the question of whether there may be specific institutional configurations that would facilitate more rapid sustainable energy transitions
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'Open Marxism' against and beyond the 'Great Enclosure'? Reflections on How (Not) to Crack Capitalism
The main purpose of this article is to provide an in-depth discussion of John Holloway’s recent book, Crack Capitalism. To this end, the paper offers a detailed account of the key strengths and weaknesses of Holloway’s version of ‘open Marxism’. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on six significant strengths of Crack Capitalism: (1) its insistence upon the importance of autonomous forms of agenda-setting for both individual and collective emancipation; (2) its emphasis on the ordinary constitution of social struggles; (3) its fine-grained interpretation of the socio-ontological conditions underlying human agency; (4) its processual conception of radical social transformation; (5) its recognition of the elastic, adaptable, and integrative power of capitalism; and (6) its proposal for an alternative critical theory, commonly known as ‘open Marxism’ or ‘autonomous Marxism’. The second part of the study examines the principal weaknesses of Crack Capitalism: (1) the counterproductive implications of the preponderance of negativity, owing to a one-sided concern with critique, cracks, and crises; (2) conceptual vagueness; (3) an overuse of poetic and metaphorical language; (4) the absence of a serious engagement with the question of normativity; (5) a lack of substantive evidence; (6) a residual economic reductionism; (7) a simplistic notion of gender; (8) the continuing presence of various problematic ‘isms’; (9) the misleading distinction between ‘doing’ and ‘labour’; (10) a reductive understanding of capitalism; (11) an unrealistic view of society; and (12) socio-ontological idealis
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
Wage Bargaining and Comparative Advantage in EMU
This chapter examines the effects of shifts in wage-bargaining systems on the organization of firms in EMU member-states, and argues that the move to coordinated wage bargaining induced by the Maastricht criteria has led firms in EMU member-states to align their product market strategies with the existing institutional framework. Where wage bargaining became (or was) centrally coordinated, firms increasingly pursued high-end product market strategies, while firms in countries where wage bargaining followed a decentralised coordination path opted for low-end strategies. This argument is developed in three steps. First it assesses how firms in the most important export industries adjusted their competitive strategies in the course of the 1990s, and finds that companies increasingly pursued product market strategies which are supported by national labour-market institutions. It then examines how several key firm-level indicators of competitiveness and labour market organisation evolve and find that skill profiles, workplace cooperation, and career development were adjusted to reflect the dominant product market strategy. The chapter concludes by comparing the strategies of employers with regard to wage-bargaining in Italy and Spain over the 1990s
Institutional change and the restructuring of service work in the French and German telecommunications industries
This study analyses recent changes in collective bargaining institutions and their implications for employer strategies in the French and German telecommunications industries, drawing on case studies and survey data from call centre workplaces. Findings demonstrate that differences in both formal institutions and past logics of action influenced actor responses to changing markets and ownership structures. French trade unions were more successful in establishing encompassing bargaining structures and reducing pressures for pay differentiation, due to state support for the mandatory extension of agreements and unions’ strategic focus on centralizing bargaining. In contrast, bargaining in Germany has become increasingly fragmented and decentralized as unions and works councils focused on company-level bargaining at major employers. This focus allowed worker representatives to preserve their strong influence over employment practices in core workplaces but has contributed to declining bargaining coverage and growing wage inequality
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