The Varieties of Capitalism Revisited - Japan and the United Kingdom since the 1990s

One of the central debates in the business literature centres on the issue of convergence or non-convergence of business and management practices across countries. According to the proponents of the convergence school, increasing global competition forces companies to adopt best practices that are universally valid and applicable. This development contributes to a cross-national convergence of practices, an erosion of institutional differences among different national economies, and a trend towards more market-oriented institutions. In contrast, proponents of the non-convergence school stress the embeddedness of national management practices in their cultural and institutional context, with the comparative capitalism (CC) literature elucidating the institutional foundations of diverse national ‘varieties’ of business organization. According to this school, existing complementarities among institutional elements of national economies tend to thwart international convergence. In the CC literature, Japan has been characterized as a coordinated market economy as opposed to liberal market economies such as the United States of America and the United Kingdom.

 

The CC literature has unquestionably advanced our understanding of the embeddedness of practices in their national contexts, but it has tended to focus on the stable relationships and complementarities between the various actors and institutions in their respective national business systems. However, both Japan and the United Kingdom have undergone major transformations since the 1990s. How we can explain the dynamics of these changes with reference to the CC literature will be the central focus of this workshop. Questions to be addressed include: How and why have inter-firm and employment relations changed? What explains recent reforms in corporate governance? How have discourse coalitions shaped outcomes? How have FDI or supranational and transnational factors influenced national business systems? Is it (still) appropriate to theorize primarily about national differences or do we need other models of explanation?

 

Speakers and Discussants:

Glenn HOOK (University of Sheffield)
Harald CONRAD (University of Sheffield)
Hideaki MIYAJIMA (Waseda University)
Andrew TYLECOTE (University of Sheffield)
Sierk HORN (University of Leeds)
Jun IMAI (Tohoku University)
Norifumi KAWAI (University Duisburg-Essen)
Hiroaki Richard WATANABE (University of Sheffield)
Cornelia STORZ (Goethe-University Frankfurt)
Andrew GAMBLE (University of Cambridge)

Kay SHIMIZU (Columbia University)
Hiroko TAKEDA (University of Sheffield)
Kenji E. KUSHIDA (Stanford University)
Geoffrey WOOD (University of Sheffield)
Sebastien LECHEVALIER (EHESS, Paris)
Leo McCANN (University of Manchester)

 

Participation in the workshop is free, but please register with the organizer at h.conrad@sheffield.ac.uk.   Supported by: The Japanese Embassy, London The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, London The White Rose East Asia Centre, Leeds & Sheffield