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This chapter adds to the ‘varieties of capitalism’ literature by demonstrating that economic practices of countries are not converging on a one‐size‐fits‐all neo‐liberal model of capitalism, despite the fact that all have become more market‐oriented. Instead, they continue to be differentiable into not just two varieties of capitalism, conforming to liberal or coordinated market economies, but three, along lines of development from the original three postwar models of capitalism. The chapter contrasts the three varieties of capitalism in terms of interfirm relations, business‐government relations, and management‐labour relations; outlines the differential national pathways of adjustment of the countries conforming to the three varieties; highlights their continuing differences using indicators related to the financial markets and production systems; and considers their comparative advantages and disadvantages. It concludes that while British market capitalism has gone farther in its traditional market‐oriented direction, German managed capitalism is under strain, while French state capitalism has been transformed but has become neither market nor managed capitalist.

This chapter details the different dynamics of economic adjustment in Britain, Germany, and France from the postwar period until today. For Britain, it describes the problems of business in the postwar period and the impact of the radical therapy of the Thatcher years that brought the country closer to the market capitalist ideal by making business relations more distant, government relations more arm's length, and labour relations more market‐reliant. For Germany, it outlines the minimal change from the postwar period until the 1990s, followed by efforts to make the managed capitalist system more competitive, which have left the system under strain, as interfirm relations have loosened, labour‐management relations have become less cooperative, and government has sought to facilitate adjustment, often unsuccessfully. For France, finally, the chapter examines the major transformation in state capitalism since the mid‐1980s with the move away from state‐led capitalism to a more state‐enhanced variety, where business is more autonomous and labour more market‐reliant, but the state still has a role to play.

International convergence has been identified as a recent trend in corporate governance. However, current trends in German corporate governance point to an enhanced stakeholder form of corporate governance, rather than to shareholder value. The continuing strength of employee representation on supervisory boards and other factors colour the interpretation of shareholder value, even in companies regarded as shareholder-oriented. The case of The Bayer Group — one of the exemplars of shareholder value in Germany — illustrates both this continuity and change. The chapter concludes by arguing that the adoption of shareholder value depends upon institutional complementarity between specific corporate governance arrangements and the wider business system of which they are a part.

Explores the gap between rhetoric and practice in the American policy of promoting democracy. It attributes it to the US, promoting two inconsistent goals at the same time: democratization and free market capitalism. This is not because the US responds only to corporate interests. Instead, this policy mix stems from America's image of its own success: at the time of its foundation, democratic development was compatible with economic individualism due to extraordinary socio–economic circumstances. However, given the contemporary socio–economic circumstances of new democracies, it would be more appropriate to promote social democracy rather than liberal democracy.

This chapter considers the responsibilities of corporate managers in thin political markets. The standard assumption in a capitalist system is that corporate managers’ responsibilities are to increase shareholder profits. But, in their efforts to increase profits, is it acceptable for managers to manipulate the very definition of profit (by gaming accounting rules)? Arguing from the ethical principles that legitimize market capitalism, this chapter concludes that corporate managers have a responsibility to the system as a whole when lobbying in thin political markets. This responsibility trumps their duty to increase shareholder profits – a duty that only applies in competitive processes, which thin political markets are not. The chapter then offers ways in which corporate managers can be brought to act on their responsibilities to the system. These include tangible approaches such as developing accountability metrics for managerial leadership in political processes and intangible approaches such as changing norms around what constitutes acceptable managerial behaviour when lobbying.

For Central and Eastern European elites, the objective of economic transformation was the achievement of First World living standards through marketization, without losing control. Political transition had ideological legitimation, capitalism no ideological legitimation outside elites. Socialism left an economic legacy of physical assets, institutional arrangements, and business cultures very different from the requirements of capitalist transformation. Post-socialist capitalisms possessed conditions leading to market failure: information asymmetries, monopoly, and externalities. By 2005, the four capitalisms—Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian—were within the range of European norms in institutional arrangements and economic performance, but with low levels of system integration and continuing managerial influence—overall structures more similar to Italy than to liberal market capitalisms. The United States was the major international influence on institutionalization during the initial period of capitalism, but German influence and changing patterns of international investment reduced the attractiveness of liberal market capitalism.

This concluding chapter reviews how neoliberalism transformed British, American, and global politics. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the triumph of the free market was almost universally accepted by mainstream politicians, public officials, and civil servants. More importantly, the distinctive neoliberal brand of free market individualism had prevailed over alternative forms of managed market-based capitalism. Transatlantic neoliberal politics successfully transformed the commonsense assumptions of policymakers in Great Britain and the United States when confronted with social and economic problems, especially in the years after Margaret Thatcher left office. Value for money is effectively delivered through the discipline of the market to satisfy consumer wants. An equilibrium is achieved through the price mechanism, guiding the activities of disparate sellers and producers.

Points out the remarkable progress in Poland in its transition to market capitalism and liberal democracy was due in part to support from Western governments and international institutions as well as to Poland's historical compatibility with the Euro‐Atlantic liberal‐democratic political and economic order. In order to assess the role of international factors in the development of democratic consolidation, this chapter examines four areas of change in the years following the breakthrough of 1989: (1) the economic stabilization programme known as ‘Balcerowicz Programme’; (2) Poland's foreign policy reorientation; (3) civilian control over the military; and (4) the reorganization of the Polish State. The chapter also examines the determinants of domestic responses to external factors, including the limited number of such actors, a well defined set of expectations, good understanding of the problems faced by internal political actors, and a willingness of internal policy makers to adopt, and the support of domestic public opinion.

This chapter presents an overview of market capitalism and the business sector in Japan. It explores the network of alliances among the major corporations that make up the Japanese economy, and provides a schematic representation of strategic alliances and intermarket keiretsu. The chapter also suggests that the proliferation of complex new forms of strategic alliances elsewhere has raised the issue of how different Japanese patterns of intercorporate relations really are. The analysis indicates that intercorporate alliance structures are a core feature of Japanese market capitalism and that they also represent a form of rational economic organization.

This concluding chapter summarizes the arguments developed in this book concerning alliance capitalism and the Japanese economy. It discusses the belief that intercorporate alliances have set the framework within which other institutional characteristics of Japanese market capitalism operate and describes the three broad characteristics of the Japanese economy. These include a high-degree of resilience, impressive rates of long-term corporate investment, and a market structure with substantial barriers to entry to newcomers. The chapter also considers the implications of Japan's economic system for its relationships with its major trading partners.

This book discusses the concept of social market economy, ‘socialism with a human face’, a form of liberalized collectivism. It cites examples from former Communist countries, specifically, the case of the social market economy in West and East Germany. It also highlights problems encountered with the introduction of free-market capitalism. The book elaborates various socio-economic theories and emphasizes that the issues of mass unemployment and working-class alienation are present even today as they were during the Great Depression. The concept of corporatism and its impact on Germany's economic society is also discussed.

This chapter focuses on the reconfiguration of state–society relations in Poland and Russia, with particular emphasis on the role played by taxation in the redistribution of power resources between state and society. It begins by comparing taxation and state coercive power before discussing how state coercion in Poland was subsumed into a system of legal-administrative checks that promoted the rule of law, the institutional embodiment of “legalistic consent.” It then considers how Russia's legal system abetted the rule by law, the institutional embodiment of “bureaucratic coercion.” It also examines Poland and Russia's divergent paths to very different types of postcommunist capitalism. In Poland, the tax system contributed directly to the consolidation of “social-market capitalism”; in Russia, the tax system led directly to the consolidation of “concessions capitalism.”

The capitalist market embodies and accentuates key elements of modern culture: it endorses human exceptionalism, treats people as autonomous individuals, discounts the future, fragments and commodifies nature’s parts, overlooking ecological interconnections and most life forms; denies human ignorance and sensory limits, strips market participants of moral responsibility, and equates normative goodness with the satisfaction of individual preferences, By rewarding aggression and risk-taking the market provides incentives to misuse nature and by dividing people into their individual roles saps the community as such of power. This system needs reform, not because markets are inherently destructive, but because of the ways today’s market capitalism entrenches these cultural attitudes. Reform of the economy is thus not rightly thought about as a separate undertaking (as a push for a new economy); it must be part of a larger campaign of cultural change. The chapter ends by noting how the campaign for such cultural reform will bear little resemblance to the ongoing push for gay rights or marriage equality—a typical civil right campaign that sought change in one aspect of modern culture while leaving the vast bulk of it unaltered, including all elements relating to humans and nature.

This chapter considers market-based banking in the United States and United Kingdom, the two archetypal liberal market economies. We demonstrate both the extent of recent change in the two systems, and their clear differences. In the United States, market-based banking takes place largely in the parallel banking markets, while the United Kingdom is the clearest example of market-based banks. Using the United States and United Kingdom as examples of high levels of market-based banking, we explore the consequences of such developments. We examine the nature of exchange, information flows, liquidity and the locus of risk, to conclude that market-based banking demonstrates weaknesses of the two generally seen systems, market based and bank based, particularly in a tendency to opacity and the concentration of risk on a smaller number of financial institutions, without the strengths of either.

This introductory chapter begins with a reading of “The Right to Privacy,” an 1890 legal essay by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in response to the perceived threats of gossip journalism and the degraded public culture it promoted. Considered the first attempt at codifying privacy as a U.S. legal category, the essay has since come to stand as a point of origin for the ambiguous and contested status of “privacy” in U.S. political culture. Here, it also introduces the figure of “imperiled privacy,” whose emergence subsequent chapters trace from the 1840s onward: an endangered space of individual and national wholeness, aligned with whiteness and femininity, and incessantly reproduced through panic narratives such as that devised by Warren and Brandeis. The chapter outlines the historical contexts of 19^th-century privacy discourse, giving special emphasis to its formation with and against conceptions of property, its gendered and racialized logic, and its connections to an emerging life writing print culture.

This chapter provides substantive consideration of where choice in its modern ideological and institutional form comes from, and the place of choice in a consumer society. It discusses how industrialisation has paved the way for constant development of technology, thus producing an economy, and a society based upon it, in which change is seen as inevitable, continuous, and beneficial. It also explores the political consequences of industrialisation and the complications that arose with industrial market capitalism. It explains the two strategies that could remedy the defects in the market based industrial economy, capitalism — the socialist and the social democratic. It examines the importance of the new Right which lies in its capacity to recognise the direction of change, and to be seen to be capitalising on its advantages. It evaluates the politics of consumerist choice and describes credit as an institution central to the continued growth of consumer society.