Institutional Change in Varieties of Capitalism. Temporary Employment in Germany

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 1,3, University of Bamberg, course: Seminar - Challenges of Economic Policy, language: English, abstract: In the face of globalization many states have been forced to adapt to the new challenges facing them in an ever more open market. The fact that markets increasingly escape the bounds of national economies and interact in international perspectives is apparent for example in the fields of research, development and manufacturing activities. These developments towards internationalization of economic and social policies and institutions lead in many cases to policies that adapt regulation to new international challenges or in other cases deregulate markets in a process of liberalization especially in the fields of labor and financial markets as well as training of workers, wage bargaining and education. Analyzing these processes and the impact of such policy changes on the political economies, societies and institutional frameworks has been the focus of research in both economics and political science - namely the Institutionalist branches. The applicability of the VoC framework to explain institutional change has since come under criticism for oversimplifying the institutional reality and falling short of capturing the complexities of real-world changes in national political economies with their dichotomous separation into LMEs and CMEs. Hall and Thelen (2009) have however proposed an extension to the VoC framework to analyze institutional change in a more meaningful way by outlining modes of change along the assumption of institutional stability in accordance with the VoC framework.