TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sorge, Arndt
A1  - Streeck, Wolfgang
T1  - Diversified quality production revisited
BT  - its contribution to German socio-economic performance over time
JF  - Socio-economic review
N2  - We revisit the concept of Diversified Quality Production (DQP), which we introduced about 30 years ago. Our purpose is to examine the extent to which the concept can still be considered tenable for describing and explaining the development of the interaction between the political economy and concepts of production, notably in Germany. First, we show why and in which ways DQP was more heterogeneous than we had originally understood. Then, on the basis of evidence with respect to political, business, and economic changes in Germany, we show that DQP Mark I, a regime by and large characteristic of the 1980s, turned into DQP Mark II. In the process, major ‘complementarities’ disappeared between the late 1980s and now—mainly the complementarity between production modes on the one hand and industrial relations and economic regulation on the other. While the latter exhibit greater change, business strategies and production organization show more continuity, which helps explain how Germany maintained economic performance after the mid-2000s, more than other countries in Europe. Conceptually, our most important result is that the complementarities emphasized in political economy are historically relative and limited, so that they should not be postulated as stable configurations.
KW  - production concepts
KW  - manufacturing
KW  - diversified quality production
KW  - industrial organization
KW  - industrial relations
KW  - industrial restructuring
KW  - globalization
KW  - skills
KW  - Germany
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwy022
SN  - 1475-1461
SN  - 1475-147X
VL  - 16
IS  - 3
SP  - 587
EP  - 612
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Jackson, Gregory
A1  - Sorge, Arndt
T1  - The trajectory of institutional change in Germany, 1979-2009
JF  - Journal of European public policy
N2  - Over the last three decades, the German political economy can be characterized by both institutional continuity and change. Understanding the dynamics of institutional change therefore requires an examination of the interplay of changes in formal institutional rules and how organizations respond to these changes by strategic attempts to promote or hinder further change in institutions. The macro-level political story of institutional change shows a number of paradoxes resulting in unexpected and often incomplete forms of market liberalization shaped by continued support for some core features of Germany's social market economy. The resulting erosion of Germany's co-ordinated model of economic organization through networks and business associations has gone hand-in-hand with the attempts to preserve these institutions for core workers and sectors of the economy in the face of changing environments. The result is a more varied institutional landscape characterized by international diffusion of liberal policies and the politics of their variable re-embedding within a long-term path of institutional continuity.
KW  - Germany
KW  - institutional change
KW  - varieties of capitalism
Y1  - 2012
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2012.709009
SN  - 1350-1763
SN  - 1466-4429
VL  - 19
IS  - 8
SP  - 1146
EP  - 1167
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -