{"title":"Skill-Biased Liberalization: Germany’s Transition to the Knowledge Economy","authors":"Sebastian Diessner, Niccolo Durazzi, D. Hope","doi":"10.1177/00323292211006563","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article conceptualizes the evolution of the German political economy as the codevelopment of technological and institutional change. The notion of skill-biased liberalization is introduced to capture this process and contrasted with the two dominant theoretical frameworks employed in contemporary comparative political economy scholarship—dualization and liberalization. Integrating theories from labor economics, the article argues that the increasing centrality of high skills complementary in production to information and communications technology has weakened the traditional complementarity among specific skills, regulated industrial relations, and generous social protection in core sectors. The liberalization of industrial relations and social protection is shown in fact to be instrumental for high-end exporting firms to concentrate wages and benefits on increasingly important high-skilled workers. Strong evidence based on descriptive statistics, union and industry documents, and twenty-one elite interviews is found in support of the article’s alternative perspective.","PeriodicalId":47847,"journal":{"name":"Politics & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.1000,"publicationDate":"2021-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/00323292211006563","citationCount":"16","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Politics & Society","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211006563","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 16
Abstract
This article conceptualizes the evolution of the German political economy as the codevelopment of technological and institutional change. The notion of skill-biased liberalization is introduced to capture this process and contrasted with the two dominant theoretical frameworks employed in contemporary comparative political economy scholarship—dualization and liberalization. Integrating theories from labor economics, the article argues that the increasing centrality of high skills complementary in production to information and communications technology has weakened the traditional complementarity among specific skills, regulated industrial relations, and generous social protection in core sectors. The liberalization of industrial relations and social protection is shown in fact to be instrumental for high-end exporting firms to concentrate wages and benefits on increasingly important high-skilled workers. Strong evidence based on descriptive statistics, union and industry documents, and twenty-one elite interviews is found in support of the article’s alternative perspective.
期刊介绍:
Politics & Society is a peer-reviewed journal. All submitted papers are read by a rotating editorial board member. If a paper is deemed potentially publishable, it is sent to another board member, who, if agreeing that it is potentially publishable, sends it to a third board member. If and only if all three agree, the paper is sent to the entire editorial board for consideration at board meetings. The editorial board meets three times a year, and the board members who are present (usually between 9 and 14) make decisions through a deliberative process that also considers written reports from absent members. Unlike many journals which rely on 1–3 individual blind referee reports and a single editor with final say, the peers who decide whether to accept submitted work are thus the full editorial board of the journal, comprised of scholars from various disciplines, who discuss papers openly, with author names known, at meetings. Editors are required to disclose potential conflicts of interest when evaluating manuscripts and to recuse themselves from voting if such a potential exists.