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Seeks to use disaggregated measures of social expenditure derived from the OECD Social Expenditure Database (SOCX) to measure the extent of recent change in the structure of social provision and to identify types and trajectories of welfare state development. The account shows that change in welfare spending priorities in OECD countries has been much more modest than is commonly thought. It also demonstrates that disaggregated expenditure measures can be used to generate a typology of provision that closely mirrors Esping–Andersen’s three regimes model, but in a way that permits more precise measurement of regime change over time.

Uses statistical techniques to model the determinants of aggregate social expenditure change in 21 OECD countries over the period 1980 to 1998. The main focus is on testing hypotheses relating to the impact of economic globalization and the so-called ‘new politics’ of the welfare state. The analysis suggests that neither of these accounts is persuasive. Instead, the main factors shaping recent expenditure change appear to have been programme maturation, economic growth, deindustrialization and left partisan politics.

The dialectical complementarity of liberalism and corporatist governance in provincialized layers has brought forth internationally oriented companies promoting diversified quality production, credit rather than share issue finance, and a stakeholder model of corporate governance rather than shareholder capitalism. Such characteristics have recently been shaken by the impetus of Anglo-American shareholder value orientations in international ‘financialization’. Whereas changes that challenge established practices are indubitable, the pervasive phenomenon of recombination implying reassertion of domestic practices in new forms is also present: credit financing has gone up again; employee representatives have both modified and helped to implement shareholder value orientations; co-determination has, despite shocks, also proved helpful in the fashioning of changes. Financial and strategic-operative internationalization of enterprises are not clearly related to one another. Generally, recombination of opposed tendencies and characteristics again is the rule.

This chapter examines employment practices and adjustment drawing on both survey data and case study materials. While over 80% of Japanese listed firms maintain a commitment to lifetime employment, many firms have abandoned seniority-based wages in favour of merit-based payment systems based on individual performance evaluations. Some corporate governance practices, such as stock options and equity-based performance measures, negatively impact the continued use of seniority-based pay. Meanwhile, the percentage of in-house board members has a negative impact on market employment patterns, which suggests that external market pressures may be less important than the style of insider governance in determining employment patterns. Despite this continued commitment to lifetime employment, the core of employees covered under such arrangements is shrinking through the active use of ‘benevolent’ methods of employment adjustment, such as early retirement schemes. These finds suggest that some elements of Japanese-style HRM may be compatible with changing corporate governance institutions.

This chapter and the previous two look at the structural changes that have resulted from the economy‐wide application of contracting out. The public sector is perhaps the one that has been most profoundly affected by it, and about which controversy concerning the appropriate scope of private and public production continues to smoulder. Chapter 11 takes a forward look at contracting trends, not by gazing at a crystal ball, but by asking whether contracting is a fad. The chapter also examines the downsizing phenomenon and the ongoing confusion between its role and that of contracting out. Lastly, it addresses the matter of where and when the bounds of contracting out will be identified, but finds no definitive answer on the basis of current trends.

The growing demands for financial liquidity, combined with the productive challenges discussed in the previous chapter, created significant pressures on the stability of the post‐war system of managerial control in the USA. In the 1980s and 1990s, the US corporate economy reacted to these combined pressures in what, in historical perspective, were dramatic ways. The most striking dimension of the general corporate response was the growing propensity of US corporations in that period to downsize their workforces and to distribute corporate revenues to stockholders. The strategy to ‘downsize and distribute’ stands in contrast to the historical norm for these corporations of favouring the retention of corporate revenues for reinvestment in plant, equipment, and personnel. This chapter has two main sections that (1) address the factors that underlay the prevalence and persistence of strategies to downsize and distribute among US corporate enterprises, and (2) assess the implications of the strategies to downsize and distribute.

Most people may not recognize that stress has become a major risk for a wide variety of health and mental health problems, although when surveyed most people talk passionately about the stress they confront at work. Nowhere is that more true than in human services. It is impossible to understand the full impact of the last thirty years of changes in human service delivery without understanding the impact of acute and chronic stress on workers at every level of the system. This chapter reviews what is known so far about the magnitude of stress impacting daily existence with a specific focus on workplace stressors. The issue of workplace stress is a public health problem of enormous proportion, not dissimilar to what existed two hundred years ago before we understood that microbes cause disease, only now the infectious agent is violence in all of its forms.

This chapter has a wide focus, covering many of the cognitive problems that are secondary to chronic organizational stress. Stress interferes with organizational learning, organizational memory is lost, organizational amnesia affects function, and service delivery becomes increasingly fragmented. The organization has developed learning disabilities. Decision-making becomes compromised and reactive so that short-sighted policy decisions are made that appear to compound existing problems. Stressed groups are frequently unwilling to perceive and discuss problems that the group denies and are more likely to actively and dangerously silence dissent.

After presenting independent evidence of a weakened working class and a resurgent capitalist class in chapter 2, chapter 3 attempts to link these two up. An aggressive process of concentration in business through ‘downsize and distribute’ involved steps like union busting, labour-displacing technical change, and greater incentive to top executives whose sole focus was on shareholder value maximisation. At the same time, a stronger capitalist class could force the government to keep a tab on the minimum wages to ensure competitiveness in the global markets. These arguments are established by presenting some secondary level data on the possible macroeconomic effects of mergers and acquisitions.

The chapter is set at Fort Myer, Virginia, on September 30, 1997, the day General John Shalikashvili retired from the US military. The chapter overviews the retirement ceremony from Shalikashvili’s perspective as he reviews the honor guard with President William J. Clinton and Secretary of Defense William Cohen and thinks back to that night when he first laid eyes on US soldiers in Pappenheim and the role that luck has played in his attaining the American dream. The chapter also thumbnails his accomplishments as chairman: (1) confronting historic change, especially by realizing Partnership for Peace and NATO expansion, (2) was more supportive of non-traditional military missions (military operations other than war, MOOTW), (3) prepared the US military for the challenges of the twenty-first century, particularly by downsizing the military yet upgrading their capability and readiness, including by emphasizing joint education, joint planning, and joint training, and (4) rebalanced civil-military relations. The chapter ends with Shalikashvili’s closing remarks, emphasizing his love for soldiers and their families.

The dominant reality for office workers from Richmond to Roanoke was insecurity. The possibility of being laid off or simply eliminated as a result of corporate restructuring burrowed deeply into the subconscious of Virginia's workers in the new Gilded Age. It created an atmosphere of profound social anxiety, one that was no less intense because it happened in Virginia. There was nothing peculiarly southern about the economic forces that were transforming career-minded people into temporary, part-time, and contract workers. What happened to middle managers, secretaries, salespeople, and manufacturing supervisors in Virginia happened to those in Michigan, Ohio, and New York. The economic uncertainties of the new era bound the regions together in a collective experience of reduced hopes, limited expectations, and persistent fears. Yet the recession of 1990/1991 generated a depth of anguish in Virginia that set it apart from its southern counterparts.

This chapter discusses the link of Total Quality Management and reengineering to two other features of the 1990s: downsizing and regulatory pressure. These four threads intertwined and reinforced each other throughout the 1990s. Post-cold war fiscal constraints, for example, drove faster-better-cheaper and downsizing, both of which in turn tied into the new management initiatives of that decade. Reengineering responded to NASA's interest in how JPL conducted its business, but at the same time its attempts to trim bureaucracy ran up against increasing demands for accountability. Downsizing produced an environment of fear and mistrust at lower levels of JPL, which affected reception of the management theories as well as faster-better-cheaper. The aerospace industry spooled another thread into this fabric, which was persistent criticism of JPL's preference for building spacecraft itself instead of contracting their development to industry.

This chapter charts and explains the rise of intelligence outsourcing in the post-Cold War era. In the 1990s, the private sector led the information technology revolution and became an indispensable asset for the intelligence community. Meanwhile government policies downsized the government intelligence workforce and a number of experienced officials moved to the private sector. Intelligence contracting boomed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks because the private sector offered a pool of knowledge and capabilities that managers deemed necessary at the time. The government hired thousands of contractors to intensify the national intelligence effort rapidly, and outsourcing diversified to an unprecedented level. In the atmosphere of emergency that characterized the early days of the global war on terrorism, this expansion was not planned, and a variety of contractors related to the intelligence community in ways that were not always harmonious and economically viable.

This chapter discusses the history of good government reforms in the United States. What we can learn from this history is that it is not enough to cut the costs of government. To improve performance and rebuild public trust, it is necessary also to invest in people—to prioritize not just good (read: cheap) government but good governance. If we learn anything by studying the public reputation crisis, it is that quick cost-cutting gains are not always beneficial in the long run; indeed, what is best for short-term efficiency and what is best for long-term efficacy can sometimes conflict, as downsizing can increase some longer-term costs and actually decrease some agencies’ capacity to fulfill their core mission. This suggests that political leaders who are intent on improving government performance must make clear steps to set their efforts up for success, both by getting early buy-in from public employees and by prioritizing long-term goals over short-term fixes.

This chapter examines the changes in Japan’s employment system after 1997 and illustrates how the sensitivity of employment to macroeconomic fluctuations steadily increase in the wake of economic stagnation. Using the latest Employment Status Survey, it analyzes the potential impact of the 1998 revision of the Labor Standards Law that allowed multi-year employment contracts, hence providing an alternative to lifetime employment. This change in the law had an impact on labor retention rates, particularly for female workers and workers in small and medium enterprises. The chapter also discusses other changes in the employment system, employee stock-ownership plans, downsizing, and unemployment in relation to economic growth.

This introductory chapter explains how the US economy has transitioned from the “retain-and-invest” regime to the “downsize-and-distribute” regime, resulting in the growing imbalance between value creation and value extraction. It posits that this corporate-governance regime change was integral to the explosion of the incomes of the richest households and the erosion of middle-class employment opportunities through three major structural changes, “rationalization,” “marketization,” and “globalization.” It also highlights the academic roots of the regime change, that is, the nonsensical theory of the “unproductive firm” in neoclassical economics and the maximizing shareholder (MSV) view of the world that builds on it. The chapter then summarizes the contents of each chapter of the book.

This chapter focuses on the general transformation of senior corporate executives in the United States from industrialist leaders dedicated to value creation into financial engineers intent on value extraction. It argues that, being incentivized by stock-based pay and legitimized by MSV ideology, senior executives of major American corporations began in the 1980s to turn their backs on long-standard practices of resource allocation: Ceasing to retain profits and reinvest them for the future, many executives placed the emphasis on cost-cutting and distributing profits to shareholders in the form of not only dividends but also stock buybacks Some companies’ distributions to shareholders have exceeded 100 percent of net income for years, even decades. This chapter emphasizes the dire consequence of executives turning from value creation to value extraction.

Chapter Eight discusses the damage done by the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) leading to the 2009 financial crisis of the USPS, and concludes by examining connections between that crisis and the 1970 strike. The chapter further argues that the financial crisis of 2009 that became chronic was politically manufactured by the PAEA. It also surveys the postal labor-consumer coalitions formed to rectify attacks on universal postal service, including cutbacks, downsizing, outsourcing, and privatization efforts.