SPERI Papers

Paper No.1

The British Growth Crisis: a Crisis of and for Growth

Professor Colin Hay, Director of SPERI

Abstract

The global financial crisis which first began to make itself apparent in 2007 and then broke with full force in the autumn of 2008 has generated an intense debate in academic, business, journalistic and political circles alike about what went wrong and how operational faults in the prevailing Western model of political economy might best be repaired. More importantly, it has at last also begun to stimulate a deeper, albeit slower moving, consideration of whether the Anglo-American world in particular was working with the right model of political economy in the first place. It is the view I seek to defend here that if we are to address properly the former set of concerns – with what went wrong and how we might start to put it right – it is with the latter that we must start. For it is only by acknowledging the complicity and culpability of a decidedly and distinctly Anglo-American conception of capitalism in the inflation and then bursting of the bubble, that we can begin to see the full extent of what is broken and what now must be fixed. It is to this agenda that the present paper speaks. It draws on a now substantial body of empirical research, but it seeks to do so in a rather novel way – to argue that the crisis is best seen as a crisis of and indeed for growth and not as a crisis of debt. It is, moreover, a crisis of and for an excessively liberalised Anglo-American form of capitalism and the Anglo-liberal growth model (as I will call it) to which it gave rise. This is a form of capitalism and a growth model that was inherently unstable and threatened the entire world economy – its excesses cannot be tolerated again.

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SPERI Paper No. 1 – The British Growth Crisis (740KB)

 

Paper No.2

Capitalist Diversity, Work and Employment Relations

Christel Lane (Professor Emeritus of Economic Sociology, University of Cambridge) & Geoffrey Wood (Professor of International Business, University of Warwick)

Abstract

The great value of the literature on comparative capitalism is its emphasis on the persistent viability of alternative models to market liberalism. Central to the viability of more heavily coordinated markets are specific production regimes, supported through cooperative work and employment relations, encompassing significant participation and involvement, strong industry and firm skills sets, and bargaining centralisation. In contrast, the liberal market model is distinguished by less strong unions, decentralised bargaining, weaker worker rights, insecure tenure and flexible labour markets. As such, this approach has considerable value as a theoretical starting point both for categorising different national industrial relations regimes and in explaining the spatial concentration of specific sets of industrial relations practices. At the same time, whilst the nation-state remains an important level of analysis, there is considerable variety in practice both within nations and capitalist archetypes. This would reflect the fact that institutions are rarely closely coupled, with distinct regional and sectoral dynamics. Moreover, supra-national forces may not only erode national distinctiveness, but also reinforce difference between nations.

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SPERI Paper No.2 – Capitalist Diversity, Work and Employment Relations