The Varieties of Capitalism and Hybrid Success

By John L. Campbell, O. K. Pedersen. 2007

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The varieties of capitalism literature maintains that advanced capitalist countries whose institutions best fit either the liberal or coordinated market economy types will perform better than countries whose institutions are mixed. This is because hybrids are less likely to yield functionally beneficial institutional complementarities. The authors challenge this assertion. Denmark has performed as well as many purer cases during the 1990s. And Denmark has recently developed a more hybrid form than is generally recognized by (a) increasing the exposure of actors to market forces and (b) decentralizing collective learning and decision making. The institutional complementarities associated with such hybridization have contributed to its success; however, these complementarities are based on institutional heterogeneity rather than homogeneity. This is demonstrated by analyses of three cases: Danish labor markets, vocational training, and industrial policy. The implication of the authors’ argument is that the varieties of capitalism theory is logically flawed.

Subfields: Finance, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc9cc41b3dd66304f308e2f133daffbc1668e283

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Citations in the corpus

E Pluribus Unum? Varieties and Commonalities of Capitalism (2010, unknown): “Campbell and Pedersen (2007) point to the frequency and apparently high economic viability of “hybrid” national systems that combine coordination by institutions with “coordination” by markets, arguing that the functional advantages of structural homogeneity, if they exist at all, may be weaker…”
From comparing capitalisms to the politics of institutional change (2008, background): “Campbell and Pedersen (2007) have even argued that Denmark performed better after becoming an institutionally mixed economy (also Martin and Thelen, 2007).”
From Typology to Taxonomy: A Configurational Analysis of National Business Systems and their Explanatory Power (2014, background): “…Kristensen (2011) highlights the fact that work organization is strikingly similar across the Nordic countries, and that organizations in these countries typically rely on decentralized decision making, skilled labor, and relatively flexible labor markets (see also Campbell & Pedersen, 2007).”