Book Reviews: Collective Skill Formation in the Knowledge Economy. Edited by Giuliano Bonoli and Patrick Emmenegger

Abstract

The authors are surprisingly optimistic, emphasizing the agency of bureaucrats and offering policy proposals at the end. These prescriptions, however, refer back to many of the difficulties of achieving social policy goals through procurement. For example, they call on unions and employer associations to be more involved in public procurement and to take advantage of the opportunities that exist for re-regulating work and improving some truly bad jobs. Unfortunately, German unions in most low-wage sectors have few members or resources to become involved in these complex administrative dynamics. The authors also call for innovative forms of enforcement, even though Germany already has some quite well-resourced enforcement entities (such as Finanzkontrolle Schwarzarbeit) that have faced severe documented difficulties monitoring standards in other low-wage sectors. They also recommend that municipalities consider insourcing, which would shift the task of social and ecological protection out of the market (i.e., the procurement function) and into the internal management of public-sector entities. Whether the public sector is willing and able to take up this task in Germany is a question beyond the scope of this book. Jaehrling and Stiehm show how public procurement professionals can become engaged in an institutional experiment for better work. But to what extent can the problems of lowwage work really be solved by managing the market better? Or in the context of German capitalism, with its strong tendencies toward marketization and liberalization, will social protection always be playing catch-up? Polanyi himself wrote that liberal economic order of 19thcentury Europe had been centrally planned, while social protection had come as an ad hoc response. In the 21st century this asymmetry is as important as ever.