Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies

This book brings together a distinguished set of contributors from a variety of disciplines to examine current theories of institutional change. The chapters highlight the limitations of these theories, finding them lacking in the analytic tools necessary to identify the changes occurring at a national level, and therefore tend to explain many changes and innovations as simply another version pr previous situations. Instead, a model emerges of contemporary political economies developing in incremental but cumulatively transformative processes. The contributors show that a wide, but not infinite , variety of models of institutional change exist which can meaningfully distinguished and analytically compared. They offer an empirically grounded typology of modes of institutional change that offer important insights on mechanisms of social and political stability and evolution generally.

Wolfgang Streeck is Professor of Sociology and Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. Previously he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. From 1988 to 1995 he was Professor of Sociology and Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has worked on labor relations, political economy, economic policy, European integration and related subjects. He was President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) in 1998-99. Kathleen Thelen is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is the author, most recently, of How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Her work on labor politics and on historical institutionalism has appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, The Annual Review of Political Science, Politics & Society, and Comparative Politics, among others. She is currently Chair of the Council for European Studies, and serves on the Executive Councils of the Organized Sections for Comparative Politics, Qualitative Methods, and European Politics and Society of the American Political Science Association.