German Industrial Policy: An Overview

The German political economy and its comparative advantage in the production of high quality, internationally competitive manufactured goods has long been an object of study. Yet a remarkable lack of consensus exists as to the key institutional features of the German model, particularly regarding the role of the national state in industrial policy. This paper argues, in the face of widespread calls for withdrawal of German state institutional frameworks governing the labour market in particular, that the German framework is not as rigid as claimed, and that the innovative capabilities of German industry would be best served by incremental changes rather than wholesale dismantling of existing structures.

Heroes, villains and ‘honourable merchants’: Narrative change in the German media discourse on corporate governance

Drawing on data from recent media discourse about corporate governance in Germany, this article primarily seeks to explore the changing nature of narratives in the mass media about both organizations and their managers. Based on Greimas’ narrative approach and his adaptation of Propp’s morphology of the folktale, the article reconstructs two different narratives of corporate governance and the transformation process between them. To improve our understanding of narrative change, we extend the Greimasian approach in two respects. First, we highlight the two-way relationship between narrative change and the wider economic context. Second, we point to structural conditions of the narrative(s) in relation to narrative change and identify typical semantic figures as indicators of change