Pressures, Challenges and Changes

Abstract

Leaving the broader context we have to go back to the varieties of capitalism and the change that in recent decades has taken place in the empirical cases considered here. Politico-economic change of, e.g. the labour market, welfare system and corporate governance is largely a process of adapting — in Thelen’s language: layering and drift with conversion also involved — to a changing context. This context is the next topic of analysis. Main contextual changes have been globalization, particularly the intensification of global competition, Europeanization, social-structural change, the related emergence of new interest constellations and relatively autonomous ideological processes. The latter notably points to neo-liberalism that in the late 1970s started to become the dominant strand in economic thinking, received a push during the Thatcher and Reagan years, and since the 1990s did not tire of repeating time and again that globalization forced advanced economies to liberalize their markets and cut down social expenditures. Did globalization exert this pressure? Generally the answer is no; social affairs are not that determined! Let’s first look at contextual changes, however.