Flexible Rigidities

Professor Ronald Dore examines how, despite the Japanese 'flagrantly flouting all received principles of capitalist rationality', they are able to adjust so successfully to the challenge of shifting world economic conditions. First published in 1986, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.

How do firms cope with changing environments? Is flexibility really the solution? Based on an Igor Ansoff Award winning study, Building the Flexible Firm shows how flexibility has become the new strategic challenge for contemporary firms. Offering a wealth of insights and based on extensive interviews with practitioners, Henk Volberda provides a strategic framework which explains what types of flexibility are effective under different organizational conditions and environmental characteristics. He also demonstrates an integrated method for diagnosing a firm's flexibility and for guiding the transition to greater flexibility and responsiveness.

As the Clinton administration considers major overhauls in health insurance, welfare, and labor market regulation, it is important for economists and policymakers to understand the impact of social and welfare programs on employment rates. This volume explores how programs such as social security, income transfers, and child care in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan have affected labor market flexibility—the ability of workers to adjust to fast-growing segments of the economy. Does tying health insurance to employment limit job mobility? Do housing policies inhibit workers from moving to new jobs in different areas? What are the effects of daycare and maternity leave policies on working mothers? The authors explore these and many other questions in an effort to understand why European unemployment rates are so high compared with the U.S. rate. Through an examination of diverse data sets across different countries, the authors find that social protection programs do not strongly affect labor market flexibility. A valuable comparison of labor markets and welfare programs, this book demonstrates how social protection policies have affected employment rates around the globe.

In recent decades, there has been many attempts to describe, explore, and explain the new ‘post-modern’ capitalism of the twenty-first century. In this context, this book looks at one of the most exciting strands of this research in the late twentieth century: the flexible specialisation research programme (FSRP). Drawing on the history of ideas, discourse, and literature on capitalism of the last four decades, this book shows that although ‘flexible specialisation’ anticipated some of the ways in which capitalism was being transformed in the late twentieth century, they underestimated and failed to anticipate the forms of ‘creative destruction’ and corporate digital control which were becoming embedded in the global capitalist accumulation dynamic itself. The sudden disappearance of the Soviet Union and the ‘end of history’ failed to open up the pathway for new forms of modern social democracy but gave rise instead to the new digital Behemoths. Today, the classical tendencies of capitalism as anticipated by Marx are all too present and, despite talk of ‘post-capitalism’ and ‘digital/techno-feudalism’, the landscape of monopolyfinance capital has consolidated itself. The book counterposes the FSRP with the various Marxist interpretations of the capitalist transition, together with the wider social and economic theories that emerged in the first decades for the twenty-first century around, for example, the ‘great acceleration’, de-growth, and post-growth. This book will be of interest to all readers concerned with heterodox political economy, critical social theory, intellectual history, and, above all, the prospects for social transformation leading to social justice and an ‘egalitarian enlightenment’.

Presents both theoretical and empirical studies of the current reorganization of economic, political and social relations in Britain, West Germany and Scandinavia. The arguments are illustrated with case studies.

Title first publishedin 2003. This comprehensive book focuses on the prevailing conditions in Asia and Africa under various macroeconomic and sectoral themes in order to provide in depth explanations for the divergent development experiences of the two regions. Seeking to go further than the simple comparison of policies, the book carefully examines the institutional context for policy implementation within which growth and development have proceeded in the regions.

This title represents the most forward thinking and comprehensive review of development economics currently available.