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Given the prominence of the varieties of capitalism debate and its imprint from the turn of the twenty-first century onwards, this chapter is dedicated to introducing, reviewing, critiquing, and expanding Peter Hall and David Soskice’s paradigm of ‘Varieties of Capitalism’. We explore the impact the turn towards ‘varieties’ has had, examine how the discussion has reshaped the subfield as a whole, and propose fresh ways pointing forward. Recent strides made suggest taking ideas and discourse more seriously. The cultural turn, however, deserves much more serious consideration than it has received so far. Disassembling the building blocks of the various models and exploring the glue that keeps them attached is another research avenue.

This chapter digs deeper into the widely held belief that “institutions rule!” It first asks whether there exists some special combination of institutions and policies that explains Cardwell’s Law. It therefore examines research on how a country’s institutions and policies fit together to form a National Innovation System. It then looks at the “Why Nations Fail” thesis that currently dominates explanations of innovative economies. It explores the effects of democracy, political decentralization, and “Varieties of Capitalism” on innovation. The overwhelming evidence is that none of these theories adequately explains national success in S&T. Theories that put specific institutions or policies at their core, as causal forces behind sustained S&T progress, have been overstated and oversimplified and need to be re-examined. In other words, we are missing something. To find that missing something, we must go beyond the vague platitude that “institutions and policies matter.”

This chapter argues that cronyism is a key component of a broader system of insider–outsider divisions in Arab political economies that also extends to labor markets. While economic dualism and insider privileges exist all over the developing world, the division is particularly deep and rigid in Arab countries. It results from a legacy of deep state involvement in the Arab economies under which states’ ambitions have increasingly outstripped their resources. Scarce resources have led to a de facto restriction of material privileges to insider groups, abetted by a legacy of deep bureaucratic intervention that lends itself to the creation of regulatory rents. Insider protection results in low levels of cooperation and trust between state, business, and workers, and creates an equilibrium of low skills and low productivity that hampers private-driven growth in the region. This argument is developed mostly on the basis of descriptive, cross-country data.

The chapter provides an overview of the findings of the research presented in the individual chapters. It considers first the general effects of the economic crisis for the quality of work in Europe and then examines variations in experiences between the different regions. Finally it considers the usefulness of the major theories of institutional variation within capitalism in accounting for these differences.

In the conclusion it is argued that the 2004 and 2007 enlargements have had a profound impact on the clash of capitalisms surrounding the ESD. With few exceptions the CEE states joined the liberal coalition during the three case study negotiations. The outcome has been a strengthening of the liberal coalition, which has made policy outcomes of a more substantive nature for EU employment and social policy more difficult to achieve. The second section considers why the CEE states are supportive of the liberal coalition and the final part of the chapter explores the future of the ESD in the context of enlargement and the EU’s current political climate.

This chapter presents the theoretical framework of social learning. Given the changes financial sectors underwent in the decades before the crisis, it begins with a brief overview of how the research on financial sectors has developed in comparative and international political economy. It summarizes key insights, synthesizes the progress that has been made, and highlights remaining conceptual difficulties. The subsequent sections spell out the ontological foundations and the theoretical building blocks that inform the book’s analytic prism of social learning, which is the answer provided to the difficulties identified in the first part. The chapter closes with the causal chain that underlies the mechanism of social learning, which structures the subsequent empirical chapters.