For more than a century of development, the industrial relations systems of Western European countries grew in very diverse and changing ways. The forms they adopted can be mapped against a set of basic types, and this study moves between historical detail and theoretical typology in order to capture the complexity of that mapping. The book traces the development of trade unions, organized employers, the state's role, and patterns of industrial conflict in 15 countries. It concludes by linking contemporary industrial relations systems to a longue durŽe of relations between states and societies reaching back to the Reformation.
The concept of path dependence is being used in highly deterministic ways in neo-institutionalist analysis, so that studies using this framework have dif.culty in accounting for, or predicting, change. However, the original Polya urn model from which pathdependence theory draws predicts that alternative paths will be possible. It can then be argued that actors will be able to use these when they perceive a need to change. This article seeks to capture this possibility through accommodating a Bayesian parametric decision-maker interacting with an environment. This makes it possible to examine how change may involve such processes as: the use of past or redundant institutional repertoires; transfer of experience across action spaces; or from other agents, through networks of structured relationships; the emergence of perceived ‘one best’ solutions. This approach points to the need to change how typologies are used in neo-institutionalist research, so that those features of cases that do not .t the pre-conceived framework of a type are not disregarded as ‘noise’, but properly evaluated as potential resources for change
The study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) can best be mainstreamed within the wider social science literature if it is defined as firms voluntarily assuming responsibility for their externalities, thereby setting the puzzle of how this can be reconciled with the maximization of shareholder value as the central challenge of the subject. Means of resolving the puzzle require modelling the firm interacting with its environment as both a market actor and as an organization, and in particular through the interaction between these two. Such an approach has no need of a separate concept of 'stakeholders'. The analysis develops through the firm's relations with actual and potential political action (raising the separate issue of corporate citizenship), and the tastes of consumers, investors and employees-the last raising interesting implications for principal-agent theory.
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