German Model Of Capitalism Research Articles

Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Ivan Boldyrev's Hegel, institutions and economics: performing the social. London: Routledge, 2014, 264 pp.

Review of Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Ivan Boldyrev's Hegel, institutions and economics: performing the social. London: Routledge, 2014, 264 pp.The most fun an academic can have, at least on the job, comes from encountering a package of ideas one never expected to see that turn out to be deep and interesting. If, before I encountered Carsten HerrmannPillath's and Ivan Boldyrev's (henceforth, HPB) joint work at a conference two years ago, I had been asked to list canonical dead philosophers whose work might inspire fresh insights about current issues in economic methodology, I would have put Hegel near the bottom. Imagine anyone being so muddled about economic reasoning that that they could be set straight(er) by Marx! HPB's new book convinces me that this would have been a completely misjudged expectation.By this comment I do not mean to endorse HPB's view that what both the academy and the policy world need now is a general embrace of Hegelian economics. Nor am I about to repeat the experience, which I recall with a shudder from much younger days, of actually reading Hegel's Philosophy of right. But I will go this far: the authors make a compelling case for the proposition that Hegel is the most important fountainhead for a coherent set of ideas about both economic behavior and political economy that, when expressed in an idiom closer to that of contemporary social science, deserve to be represented in both methodological and policy debates. Furthermore, as I will explain, going beyond anything to which HPB allude, if someone thinks (as I did) that the current German model of capitalism is largely a path-dependent consequence of Bismarck's cunning in designing a welfare state that needed paternalistic oversight by a Junker aristocracy, then HPB's book reveals that that is wrong too, or at least simplistic. German-style capitalism has deep intellectual roots, and they can be found in Hegel.Before I get to economics, I will comment on HPB's basis for putting a convincing 21st-century gloss on Hegel's pure philosophy, which, as someone trained by analytic philosophers, I had previously found utterly archaic. Hegel, famously, goes on constantly about spirit, and, even more off-puttingly, about a kind of spirit he calls objective. This phrase smells like mysticism and, in its 19th-century context, nationalism to boot. Liberal cosmopolitan economists like me can hardly imagine a more repugnant mixture than that. But HPB make a convincing case that objective spirit is in fact Hegel's pre-Darwinian name for an element of the ontological furniture that so-called externalist philosophers of mind, following Tyler Burge (1986), Daniel Dennett (1987), Edwin Hutchins (1995), Ron McClamrock (1995), Andy Clark (1997), Radu Bogdan (1997, 2000, 2009, 2010, 2013), and Tad Zawidzki (2013), have established as central to an adequate science of human behavior: the socially scaffolded but primarily self-narrated person. I have argued repeatedly-but see especially Ross (2005, 2014)- that the standard story economists tell about the philosophical foundations of their most important theoretical concept, economic agency as inferred from revealed preference, snaps in a satisfying gestalt switch from incoherence to rich profundity if only one distinguishes such socially scaffolded but richly individuated people from the neural computers studied by psychologists and neuroscientists. Only then can we understand how preference consistency is stabilized as an achievement that simultaneously embeds normative individualism and identification with points in complex vector spaces of social markers. The relevant concept to replace the mind-as-internal-computer has unfortunately been established in the literature under the label of the 'extended mind' (Menary 2010). Since this suggests that the mind begins as an internal computer that is then accessorized, in terms of connotations the label is not much of an improvement on 'objective spirit'. …

Relaciones laborales, sindicalismo y conflictos sociales en el capitalismo alemán

Ten years ago the German economy was regarded as the “sick man of Europe”. It was during the current financial crises that this view has changed dramatically, since Germany has seemingly performed better than most other European countries since 2008; this is why the German economy is nowadays presented as a role model for reforms. The article analyses the transformations in the system of Industrial Relations in German capitalism since the reunification in 1990. It focuses on the changing structure of employment and the rise of precarious work which is regarded as a result of institutional deregulations by significant labour market reforms in 2003. Precarity is rising since and the German model of capitalism is slowly disintegrating. Trade unions’ actions and their specific integration into German capitalism are now following modified patterns – while the unions are still searching for matching strategic adaptations to the new circumstances.

The German model of capitalism and the persistence of outward foreign direct investment: evidence from German manufacturing industries

Against the backdrop of critique on the German model of capitalism in general, and German public policy in particular as to the ability to successfully adjust to rapid change and exogenous shocks in wake of economic globalisation, this paper investigates the degree of shock persistence in foreign direct investment (FDI) of ten German manufacturing industries for the period 1976 to 2003. Theory on exports and non-FDI investment suggests that FDI should exhibit a considerable degree of shock persistence because they are subject to high sunk costs because of high entry and exit costs associated with the high level of asset specificity that is normally connected to FDI. Persistence in foreign direct investment time series data is established by applying various unit root tests. The results are robust to the potential presence of structural breaks in the data. The empirical analysis shows that German outward FDI in mature manufacturing industries, with one exception, exhibits a high degree of shock persistence. The results suggest, at least for mature German industries, that the sunk costs view on shock persistency is confirmed for outward FDI. The results furnish evidence for a tentative assessment of the relationship between German public policy and FDI strategies of multinational firms.

German crises before the crisis

The article reviews recent writing on the political economy of Germany. Even before the global economic crisis of 2008–2010, scholars of German politics had identified deep fissures in the German model of capitalism and in the policies that sustained this system. Neither Social Democrats nor Christian Democrats seemed capable of initiating and executing the reforms that would tackle the fiscal dilemmas of the state. Though these recent accounts of German troubles agree in their diagnosis of severe strains and inadequate political response, they diverge in their analysis of the source of these problems. Are they endogenous to capitalist societies that try to reconcile free market economics with social welfare policies? Or were they Induced by the disruptive shocks of globalization and European integration? Whether the origins of the crises before the big crisis were exogenous or endogenous, there remains the further question of the national state's capacity to provide solutions. This article considers the German state's responses to the 2008–2010 financial and economic breakdown and concludes that there may be greater resilience and capabilities in national politics than those that the recent literature has identified.

Beyond the German Model of Capitalism: Unorthodox Local Business Development in the Cologne Media Industry

On the basis of a media firm-survey and the measurement of in-town enterprise concentration, this paper explains the extraordinary sub-sectoral specialization and the spatial concentration towards radio and television in a German city: Cologne. A peculiar mix of institutional support, typical of German capitalism and unorthodox deviance from such arrangements is discovered in all matters of collective goods provision, including vocational training, enterprise financing, etc. Using a case study-approach, this article shows how the German model of capitalism can be rearranged for new markets on the local level, successfully overcoming institutional constraints by informal cooperation and institutional entrepreneurship.

The Nordic Model: Does It Exist? Can It Survive?

In 1995, Wolfgang Streeck published an essay on the German model of capitalism, whose to-the-point title I inflect and adopt here.1 Streeck argued that a distinct German model did indeed exist: an ...

Globalization and the German model of capitalism – erosion or survival?

Globalization and the German model of capitalism – erosion or survival?

Globalization and the German model of capitalism – erosion or survival?

The German business system has been regarded as a particularly tightly coupled system, with embeddedness of even multinational companies (MNCs) in their home base as particularly deep. A study of the impact of companies' changing internationalization, if not globalization, strategies is therefore especially suited to test competing claims about their effects on the German business system. Are we experiencing an erosion of this system, an adaptation in a largely path-dependent way, or even a greater specialization and stronger crystallization of the German business system? To investigate these questions, the paper examines a small number of German MNCs in their domestic and international context. More particularly, the work focuses on whether and how their emergent globalization activities affect the reproduction or erosion of the three institutional complexes which shape the factors of production: the financial system; the innovation system; and the industrial relations system. The paper concludes that a new type of transformation--hybridization--is emerging. It is regarded as a consequence of German companies' growing integration into a global economic system.

Globalization and the future of central collective bargaining: the example of the German metal industry

The paper deals with the relationship of the German model of capitalism and the role of centralized collective bargaining within it. It is assumed that the system of central wage bargaining - leading to a relatively egalitarian wage structure and the absence of a non-union wage sector - is one of the major pillars of the national institutional framework of the German economy. Pressures towards the decentralization of collective bargaining will therefore not onlyy affect the distribution of wages and the patterns of social equality, but also have a profound impact on the functioning of the German model of capitalism. The first part of Paper links the system of collective bargaining and industrial relations with the wider macro-economic and political features of German capitalism. It defines three major challengers to the institutional framework of the German economy: structural challenges since the early 1970s, the impact of unification since 1989 and the impact of European integration and globalization since the mid-1980s. It concludes that not globalization as such but a complexity of different pressures might lead to drastic institutional changes. The second part of the paper analyses collective bargaining development in the metal industry in the early 1990s. It looks at the conduct of the bargaining rounds, the institutional set-up and the position of the collective bargaining actors respectively. It will be argued that collective bargaining in the German metal industry has become extremely pressurized in the early 1990s. We argue that pressure on collective bargaining stems from two sides: first, from thhe membership problem of trade unions and employers' associations and, second, from the narrowing scope of flexibility within the give system of wage determination. We will define three ways of achieving wage differentiation within and outside centralized bargaining structures and look at their changing role during that period. Finally, the paper presents two scenarios of collective bargaining in the future and discusses their implications for the German ecnomic model