Martin B Carstensen
Biographic Data
| ID | 4375029 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin B Carstensen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin B |
| FAMILY NAME | Carstensen |
| SIGNATURE | CARSTENSEN M B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Copenhagen Business School |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0432-1632 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 751 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Jeremy Richardson Best Paper Prize 2025
We asked two esteemed colleagues, Julian Garritzmann and Wiebke Junk, to act as jury and select what they considered to be the best article published in JEPP in 2025. They have now made their selec
What skills for the future? The knowledge economy as a coalition magnet
Enhancing economic competitiveness in the knowledge economy requires policies that align workforce skills with emerging demands. This paper examines the discursive battle over the skills of the future and argues that the idea of the knowledge economy works as a ‘coalition magnet’. Policymakers use the ‘knowledge economy’ flexibly together with ideas about skill needs and social inclusion to assemble political coalitions that support distinct inte…
Foundations for a green economy
Policymakers, companies, trade unions, and civil society actors increasingly recognize the urgent need to facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy. This Perspective highlights the critical role of “green skills” in this transition. Our article identifies avenues for future research, grounded in the institutional foundations of skill formation processes. We emphasize the global nature of this challenge and the diverse institutional contex…
Mapping Green Skills in Collective Skill Formation Systems
Vocational education plays a vital role in fostering green skills that are central for achieving climate goals, sustaining economic competitiveness, and promoting social inclusion. Expectations are especially high for collective vocational education systems, in which both employers and the state are deeply involved in governance and funding. However, little is known about the extent to which collective systems have adapted to the skill demands of…
Push, ignore or surrender? Party responses to the ideational momentum of foreign events
Jepp Best Paper Prize 2024
Meeting the Twin Challenge in Times of Labor Shortage
The twin transition to a digital and green economy has placed skill formation at the center of efforts to sustain competitiveness. Reforming skill formation systems poses enduring dilemmas on how to balance concerns about economic efficiency with social inclusion while securing employer commitment. The context of significant uncertainty brought on by the twin transition—placed at all levels, from individuals to firms to the state—amplifies the ch…
Problems and Solutions in the Knowledge Economy
Societies are grappling with uncertainty about how to adapt to the emerging knowledge economy. Drawing on the public policy literature, we propose a new approach to studying the politics of ideas during long‐term structural changes. We depart from existing scholarship that focuses on the politics of ideas during episodic crises, and instead focus on ideas that develop gradually in the context of “slow‐burning” crises, using the example of the kno…
Using bricolage and robustness theory to explain the dynamism of collaborative governance
Collaborative governance has developed into a well-established strand of public administration research. An impressive number of empirical studies document how collaborative governance processes can be relatively volatile, multi-vocal, distributed and heterogeneous. Hence, it is commonly observed that the actor composition changes over time, actors’ reasons for participating differ, the collaboration consists of multiple sub-projects, and there a…
Working with ideas
Literatures on institutional, ideational and policy change have made great strides in dynamically conceptualizing agency within structure. What continues to be insufficiently understood, however, is how actors actually work with ideas, that is, how broad policy ideas become concrete and implementable. One concept that has gained some traction in understanding actors' application of ideas is bricolage, understood as the stabilization or changing o…
Integrating ecosocial policies through polycentric governance
How can polycentric governance promote the development of ecosocial policies within existing policy systems? Through a study of green reforms of Danish vocational education, the paper argues that polycentric governance institutions are particularly useful at engaging constituent actors in innovation and constructive collaboration over reforming education programs to integrate ecological goals into vocational education. Combining significant auton…
Ideational robustness of economic ideas in action
Is it possible to develop a robust crisis management response in a system where governance is characterized by coercive power and adversarial bargaining rather than the diversity, inclusion, and openness highlighted by extant scholarship as conducive factors for robustness? Using two instances of crisis in the European Union—the Eurozone crisis (2010‒2015) and COVID-19 pandemic (2020‒2022)—the paper argues that how actors reinterpret existing rul…
Ideational robustness in turbulent times
The concept of robustness has received increasing scholarly attention regarding public policy and governance, where it has enhanced our understanding of how policies and governance are adapted and innovated in response to disruptive events, challenges, and demands associated with heightened societal turbulence. Yet, we know little about the robustness of the ideas undergirding the efforts to foster robust policymaking and public governance. Based…
What kind of political agency can foster radical transformation towards ecological sustainability
What kind of political agency is necessary to foster radical political-economic transformations towards ecological sustainability? Focusing on the radical ecopolitical project of degrowth, this article starts from the observation that a prerequisite for degrowth policies to materialise is political agency that is bold and visionary yet pragmatic; agency that seeks radical change yet does so based on what is already in existence. To capture the na…
Education as social policy
Education has long played an important role in social policy as a means for strengthening labour market integration and increasing social mobility. The shift towards a knowledge economy has placed education policy even more centrally in efforts to provide the institutional preconditions for making economic efficiency compatible with social inclusion. To provide conceptual and theoretical context to the special issue, this paper first explores the…
Orchestrators of coordination
Liberalization poses significant challenges for the continued provision of collective goods within coordinated market economies (CME). Extant scholarship suggests two dominant sets of responses. Either CMEs continue to rely on employer coordination, but only for a privileged core, leading to dualization. Or, in cases where the state enjoys high capacity, the state instead compensates for liberalization but ends up crowding out employer coordinati…
Ideas and power in employment relations studies
Motivated by the efforts to understand shifting dynamics of change and stability in employment relations—not least ones brought on by a decade of crisis in what was a neoliberal consensus—scholars increasingly focus on the role of ideas, discourses, and identities. This paper argues for the potential of continuing down this path of employing ideational explanations in employment relations. First, it highlights four key weaknesses of employing mor…
Why we need bricoleurs to foster robust governance solutions in turbulent times
The public sector frequently confronts a heightened societal turbulence triggered by an increasing number of unpredictable and disruptive economic, political, and environmental crises. How can the public sector respond to this challenge? This article argues, first, that to continue to provide relevant solutions, public governance must be robust in the sense of adapting and innovating policies, programs, and services in ways that facilitate the ac…
The other side of agency
Agency has received much attention in recent historical institutionalist theorizing of change processes, but remains largely disconnected from questions about mechanisms that stabilize institutions. To help fill this lacuna, the paper presents bricolage as one key mechanism through which actors stabilize an institutional setup. It suggests that institutions may be defended by keeping intact the institutional logic on which the incumbent coalition…
Setting the terms of state intervention
How do coalitional dynamics matter for the capacity of states to maintain social inclusion in coordinated models of capitalism? Taking its departure in scholarship emphasizing the influence of employers on the extent of state intervention in post-industrial economies, this paper argues that employer influence depends on which actors they team up with – unions or parties. If unions depend on employers for their organizational influence in a policy…
Between power and powerlessness in the euro zone crisis and thereafter
Employing a multidimensional conception of power shows how interaction between EU institutional actors is structured by different kinds of power – coercive, institutional and ideational – and that none of these are sufficient on their own for actors to successfully drive the reform process. We ask not just who leads the euro zone, but how interactions between actors enable the polity to achieve (or not) its goals. This requires thinking of power …
Three dimensions of institutional contention
This article develops a new analytical framework to account for institutional change in vocational education and training (VET) systems. Trajectories of institutional change are typically explained using one of two perspectives on institutional contention. First, the Varieties of Capitalism-approach highlights positive efficiency effects from coordination between companies on skill formation. Second, a historical institutionalist approach focuses…
Legitimation as justification
In accounts of institutional change, discursive institutionalists point to the role of economic and political ideas in upending institutional stability and providing the raw material for the establishment of a new institutional setup. This approach has typically entailed a conceptualisation of ideas as coherent and monolithic and actors as almost automatically following the precepts of the ideas they hold and support. Recent theorising stresses h…
Invasion From Within
How do institutional logics travel within a political economy? Employing insights from historical and ideational institutionalist theory, this article offers a novel understanding of change dynamics as driven by actors’ creation of institutional interlinkages. It develops the causal mechanism of “invasion from within,” consisting of a three-stage process: the progressive weakening of a policy paradigm within one institutional site coinciding with…
Ideational power and pathways to legitimation in the euro crisis
How have European Union institutional actors sought to build, defend or undermine the legitimacy of crisis management during the euro crisis? Scholars have tended to investigate the euro crisis from either a pragmatic and prescriptive perspective – asking which reforms are necessary to build legitimacy in the governance structure of the Eurozone – or an analytical perspective focused on the power wielding of actors useful for understanding what a…
Power through, over and in ideas
Owing to the tendency of discursive institutionalists to conflate the notion that ‘ideas matter' for policy-making with the ‘power of ideas’, little has been done to explicitly theorize ideational power. To fill this lacuna, the contribution defines ideational power as the capacity of actors (whether individual or collective) to influence other actors’ normative and cognitive beliefs through the use of ideational elements, and – based on insights…
Ideas are Not as Stable as Political Scientists Want Them to Be
Most theories about ideas in politics implicitly conceptualise ideas as relatively stable entities that act as a catalyst for political change in times of crisis. In these theories political change is usually brought on by the full and sudden replacement of old ideas with new ones. This article's main charge against the mainstream view of ideas is that it is based on a simplified conception of ideas which in turn creates a bias within the theorie…
Paradigm man vs. the bricoleur
The status of ideational explanations in political science has been strengthened by the argument that institutionalized ideas structure actors’ identification of their interests as well as the interests of their political adversaries. Despite its utility, the focus on the institutionalization of ideas has had the unfortunate consequence that actors are often, implicitly or explicitly, believed to internalize ideas, making it difficult to understa…
Of paradigms and power
How do ruling policy paradigms persist over time and why do they often undergo significant internal ideational changes? While the impact of Peter Hall's approach to policy paradigms on the study of governance has been immense, there is a burgeoning consensus that a “Kuhnian” understanding of paradigms makes punctuated equilibrium style shifts the only game in town. While Hall's approach can account for inter‐paradigm change with reference to exog…
Power and changing modes of governance in the euro crisis
Which European Union actors are most powerful in the governance of the euro crisis? The euro crisis has reignited the classic debate between intergovernmentalists, who tend to stress the coercive power of dominant member states in the European Council, and supranationalists, who maintain that through the use of institutional power, the Commission, and the European Central Bank turned out the “winners” of the crisis. This article argues that euro …
Why we need bricoleurs to foster robust governance solutions in turbulent times
The public sector frequently confronts a heightened societal turbulence triggered by an increasing number of unpredictable and disruptive economic, political, and environmental crises. How can the public sector respond to this challenge? This article argues, first, that to continue to provide relevant solutions, public governance must be robust in the sense of adapting and innovating policies, programs, and services in ways that facilitate the ac…
Institutional bricolage in times of crisis
How may we understand the occurrence of gradual but significant change following economic crisis? Theories of gradual institutional transformation offer important insights to analyses of long-term institutional change, but have so far shied away from dealing with institutional change during and following crisis, leaving the issue to more traditional critical juncture models. Instead of seeing gradual institutional change originating only in the e…
Three dimensions of institutional contention
This article develops a new analytical framework to account for institutional change in vocational education and training (VET) systems. Trajectories of institutional change are typically explained using one of two perspectives on institutional contention. First, the Varieties of Capitalism-approach highlights positive efficiency effects from coordination between companies on skill formation. Second, a historical institutionalist approach focuses…
Ideational power and pathways to legitimation in the euro crisis
How have European Union institutional actors sought to build, defend or undermine the legitimacy of crisis management during the euro crisis? Scholars have tended to investigate the euro crisis from either a pragmatic and prescriptive perspective – asking which reforms are necessary to build legitimacy in the governance structure of the Eurozone – or an analytical perspective focused on the power wielding of actors useful for understanding what a…
Ideas, Political Power and Public Policy
Throughout the last couple of decades, scholars have increasingly emphasized the importance of political ideas in understanding processes of change and stability in politics and public policy. The
Legitimation as justification
In accounts of institutional change, discursive institutionalists point to the role of economic and political ideas in upending institutional stability and providing the raw material for the establishment of a new institutional setup. This approach has typically entailed a conceptualisation of ideas as coherent and monolithic and actors as almost automatically following the precepts of the ideas they hold and support. Recent theorising stresses h…
Conceptualising Ideational Novelty
Research Highlights and Abstract This article Gives clearer conceptualisation of what an idea is. Provides clearer conceptualisation of how ideas may change over time. Uses central arguments from relational sociology and conceptual analysis in discursive institutionalism. Provides new theoretical perspectives on ideational change in wake of the recent financial- and economic crisis. How can we conceptualise the emergence of new political ideas? D…
The Nature of Ideas, and Why Political Scientists Should Care
Research on the role of ideas has contributed greatly to our understanding of processes of policy change. The article suggests that theories that deal with interest-driven reform processes might also benefit in important ways from including ideas as a variable in their models. Arguing that ideas are useful to power-seeking actors, the article develops a theory about the nature of ideas that emphasises the dynamic and open-ended relation between a…
Projecting from a Fiction
Institutional and ideational crises are characterised by fundamental uncertainty about the world, and at the same time require swift action on part of decision makers. How do political actors overcome uncertainty to enable collective action? The paper argues that actors use the ideas of the pre-crisis regime and through processes of bricolage seek to fit them to radically different circumstances. This enables action, but it also privileges the ac…
The other side of agency
Agency has received much attention in recent historical institutionalist theorizing of change processes, but remains largely disconnected from questions about mechanisms that stabilize institutions. To help fill this lacuna, the paper presents bricolage as one key mechanism through which actors stabilize an institutional setup. It suggests that institutions may be defended by keeping intact the institutional logic on which the incumbent coalition…
Education as social policy
Education has long played an important role in social policy as a means for strengthening labour market integration and increasing social mobility. The shift towards a knowledge economy has placed education policy even more centrally in efforts to provide the institutional preconditions for making economic efficiency compatible with social inclusion. To provide conceptual and theoretical context to the special issue, this paper first explores the…
Setting the terms of state intervention
How do coalitional dynamics matter for the capacity of states to maintain social inclusion in coordinated models of capitalism? Taking its departure in scholarship emphasizing the influence of employers on the extent of state intervention in post-industrial economies, this paper argues that employer influence depends on which actors they team up with – unions or parties. If unions depend on employers for their organizational influence in a policy…
Invasion From Within
How do institutional logics travel within a political economy? Employing insights from historical and ideational institutionalist theory, this article offers a novel understanding of change dynamics as driven by actors’ creation of institutional interlinkages. It develops the causal mechanism of “invasion from within,” consisting of a three-stage process: the progressive weakening of a policy paradigm within one institutional site coinciding with…
Between power and powerlessness in the euro zone crisis and thereafter
Employing a multidimensional conception of power shows how interaction between EU institutional actors is structured by different kinds of power – coercive, institutional and ideational – and that none of these are sufficient on their own for actors to successfully drive the reform process. We ask not just who leads the euro zone, but how interactions between actors enable the polity to achieve (or not) its goals. This requires thinking of power …
Working with ideas
Literatures on institutional, ideational and policy change have made great strides in dynamically conceptualizing agency within structure. What continues to be insufficiently understood, however, is how actors actually work with ideas, that is, how broad policy ideas become concrete and implementable. One concept that has gained some traction in understanding actors' application of ideas is bricolage, understood as the stabilization or changing o…
Ideational robustness in turbulent times
The concept of robustness has received increasing scholarly attention regarding public policy and governance, where it has enhanced our understanding of how policies and governance are adapted and innovated in response to disruptive events, challenges, and demands associated with heightened societal turbulence. Yet, we know little about the robustness of the ideas undergirding the efforts to foster robust policymaking and public governance. Based…
Problems and Solutions in the Knowledge Economy
Societies are grappling with uncertainty about how to adapt to the emerging knowledge economy. Drawing on the public policy literature, we propose a new approach to studying the politics of ideas during long‐term structural changes. We depart from existing scholarship that focuses on the politics of ideas during episodic crises, and instead focus on ideas that develop gradually in the context of “slow‐burning” crises, using the example of the kno…
Meeting the Twin Challenge in Times of Labor Shortage
The twin transition to a digital and green economy has placed skill formation at the center of efforts to sustain competitiveness. Reforming skill formation systems poses enduring dilemmas on how to balance concerns about economic efficiency with social inclusion while securing employer commitment. The context of significant uncertainty brought on by the twin transition—placed at all levels, from individuals to firms to the state—amplifies the ch…
Using bricolage and robustness theory to explain the dynamism of collaborative governance
Collaborative governance has developed into a well-established strand of public administration research. An impressive number of empirical studies document how collaborative governance processes can be relatively volatile, multi-vocal, distributed and heterogeneous. Hence, it is commonly observed that the actor composition changes over time, actors’ reasons for participating differ, the collaboration consists of multiple sub-projects, and there a…
Ideational robustness of economic ideas in action
Is it possible to develop a robust crisis management response in a system where governance is characterized by coercive power and adversarial bargaining rather than the diversity, inclusion, and openness highlighted by extant scholarship as conducive factors for robustness? Using two instances of crisis in the European Union—the Eurozone crisis (2010‒2015) and COVID-19 pandemic (2020‒2022)—the paper argues that how actors reinterpret existing rul…
Wegauskünfte
The Nature of Ideas, and Why Political Scientists Should Care
Research on the role of ideas has contributed greatly to our understanding of processes of policy change. The article suggests that theories that deal with interest-driven reform processes might also benefit in important ways from including ideas as a variable in their models. Arguing that ideas are useful to power-seeking actors, the article develops a theory about the nature of ideas that emphasises the dynamic and open-ended relation between a…
Paradigm man vs. the bricoleur
The status of ideational explanations in political science has been strengthened by the argument that institutionalized ideas structure actors’ identification of their interests as well as the interests of their political adversaries. Despite its utility, the focus on the institutionalization of ideas has had the unfortunate consequence that actors are often, implicitly or explicitly, believed to internalize ideas, making it difficult to understa…
Ideas are Not as Stable as Political Scientists Want Them to Be
Most theories about ideas in politics implicitly conceptualise ideas as relatively stable entities that act as a catalyst for political change in times of crisis. In these theories political change is usually brought on by the full and sudden replacement of old ideas with new ones. This article's main charge against the mainstream view of ideas is that it is based on a simplified conception of ideas which in turn creates a bias within the theorie…
The Relevance of an Incremental Approach to Ideational Change
This rejoinder takes issue with two criticisms of my Political Studies article on incremental ideational change presented in a recent reply by Liam Stanley. It argues that by presenting my critique of historical and discursive institutionalism as focused on the lack of ‘realism’ in their standard conceptualisation of ideas, Stanley creates a straw man. Instead, my criticism aims at the analytical outcomes of the mainstream understanding of ideas …
Conceptualising Ideational Novelty
Research Highlights and Abstract This article Gives clearer conceptualisation of what an idea is. Provides clearer conceptualisation of how ideas may change over time. Uses central arguments from relational sociology and conceptual analysis in discursive institutionalism. Provides new theoretical perspectives on ideational change in wake of the recent financial- and economic crisis. How can we conceptualise the emergence of new political ideas? D…
Projecting from a Fiction
Institutional and ideational crises are characterised by fundamental uncertainty about the world, and at the same time require swift action on part of decision makers. How do political actors overcome uncertainty to enable collective action? The paper argues that actors use the ideas of the pre-crisis regime and through processes of bricolage seek to fit them to radically different circumstances. This enables action, but it also privileges the ac…
Bringing Ideational Power into the Paradigm Approach
The work of Peter A. Hall (1993) on the role of policy paradigms in public policy is remarkable. Unrivalled by any other publication in ideational scholarship in terms of citations and impact, it — together with the work of scholars like Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993), Kingdon (2003), Baumgartner and Jones (2009), and Stone (1988) — drew on the social learning-tradition (Heclo, 1974) to help bring ideas on the agenda of mainstream political sc…
Ideas, Political Power, and Public Policy
Power through, over and in ideas
Owing to the tendency of discursive institutionalists to conflate the notion that ‘ideas matter' for policy-making with the ‘power of ideas’, little has been done to explicitly theorize ideational power. To fill this lacuna, the contribution defines ideational power as the capacity of actors (whether individual or collective) to influence other actors’ normative and cognitive beliefs through the use of ideational elements, and – based on insights…
Ideas, Political Power and Public Policy
Throughout the last couple of decades, scholars have increasingly emphasized the importance of political ideas in understanding processes of change and stability in politics and public policy. The
Institutional bricolage in times of crisis
How may we understand the occurrence of gradual but significant change following economic crisis? Theories of gradual institutional transformation offer important insights to analyses of long-term institutional change, but have so far shied away from dealing with institutional change during and following crisis, leaving the issue to more traditional critical juncture models. Instead of seeing gradual institutional change originating only in the e…
Ideational power and pathways to legitimation in the euro crisis
How have European Union institutional actors sought to build, defend or undermine the legitimacy of crisis management during the euro crisis? Scholars have tended to investigate the euro crisis from either a pragmatic and prescriptive perspective – asking which reforms are necessary to build legitimacy in the governance structure of the Eurozone – or an analytical perspective focused on the power wielding of actors useful for understanding what a…
Power and changing modes of governance in the euro crisis
Which European Union actors are most powerful in the governance of the euro crisis? The euro crisis has reignited the classic debate between intergovernmentalists, who tend to stress the coercive power of dominant member states in the European Council, and supranationalists, who maintain that through the use of institutional power, the Commission, and the European Central Bank turned out the “winners” of the crisis. This article argues that euro …
Of paradigms and power
How do ruling policy paradigms persist over time and why do they often undergo significant internal ideational changes? While the impact of Peter Hall's approach to policy paradigms on the study of governance has been immense, there is a burgeoning consensus that a “Kuhnian” understanding of paradigms makes punctuated equilibrium style shifts the only game in town. While Hall's approach can account for inter‐paradigm change with reference to exog…
Three dimensions of institutional contention
This article develops a new analytical framework to account for institutional change in vocational education and training (VET) systems. Trajectories of institutional change are typically explained using one of two perspectives on institutional contention. First, the Varieties of Capitalism-approach highlights positive efficiency effects from coordination between companies on skill formation. Second, a historical institutionalist approach focuses…
Legitimation as justification
In accounts of institutional change, discursive institutionalists point to the role of economic and political ideas in upending institutional stability and providing the raw material for the establishment of a new institutional setup. This approach has typically entailed a conceptualisation of ideas as coherent and monolithic and actors as almost automatically following the precepts of the ideas they hold and support. Recent theorising stresses h…
Invasion From Within
How do institutional logics travel within a political economy? Employing insights from historical and ideational institutionalist theory, this article offers a novel understanding of change dynamics as driven by actors’ creation of institutional interlinkages. It develops the causal mechanism of “invasion from within,” consisting of a three-stage process: the progressive weakening of a policy paradigm within one institutional site coinciding with…
Between power and powerlessness in the euro zone crisis and thereafter
Employing a multidimensional conception of power shows how interaction between EU institutional actors is structured by different kinds of power – coercive, institutional and ideational – and that none of these are sufficient on their own for actors to successfully drive the reform process. We ask not just who leads the euro zone, but how interactions between actors enable the polity to achieve (or not) its goals. This requires thinking of power …
Orchestrators of coordination
Liberalization poses significant challenges for the continued provision of collective goods within coordinated market economies (CME). Extant scholarship suggests two dominant sets of responses. Either CMEs continue to rely on employer coordination, but only for a privileged core, leading to dualization. Or, in cases where the state enjoys high capacity, the state instead compensates for liberalization but ends up crowding out employer coordinati…
Ideas and power in employment relations studies
Motivated by the efforts to understand shifting dynamics of change and stability in employment relations—not least ones brought on by a decade of crisis in what was a neoliberal consensus—scholars increasingly focus on the role of ideas, discourses, and identities. This paper argues for the potential of continuing down this path of employing ideational explanations in employment relations. First, it highlights four key weaknesses of employing mor…
Why we need bricoleurs to foster robust governance solutions in turbulent times
The public sector frequently confronts a heightened societal turbulence triggered by an increasing number of unpredictable and disruptive economic, political, and environmental crises. How can the public sector respond to this challenge? This article argues, first, that to continue to provide relevant solutions, public governance must be robust in the sense of adapting and innovating policies, programs, and services in ways that facilitate the ac…
The other side of agency
Agency has received much attention in recent historical institutionalist theorizing of change processes, but remains largely disconnected from questions about mechanisms that stabilize institutions. To help fill this lacuna, the paper presents bricolage as one key mechanism through which actors stabilize an institutional setup. It suggests that institutions may be defended by keeping intact the institutional logic on which the incumbent coalition…
Setting the terms of state intervention
How do coalitional dynamics matter for the capacity of states to maintain social inclusion in coordinated models of capitalism? Taking its departure in scholarship emphasizing the influence of employers on the extent of state intervention in post-industrial economies, this paper argues that employer influence depends on which actors they team up with – unions or parties. If unions depend on employers for their organizational influence in a policy…
Education as social policy
Education has long played an important role in social policy as a means for strengthening labour market integration and increasing social mobility. The shift towards a knowledge economy has placed education policy even more centrally in efforts to provide the institutional preconditions for making economic efficiency compatible with social inclusion. To provide conceptual and theoretical context to the special issue, this paper first explores the…
Political science (30 works) · Economics (29 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Positive economics (13 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works)