Divergent Capitalisms: The Social Structuring and Change of Business Systems

This book presents the comparative business systems framework for describing and explaining the major differences in economic organization between market economies in the late-twentieth century. This framework identifies the critical variations in coordination and control systems across forms of industrial capitalism, and shows how these are connected to major differences in their institutional contexts. Six major types of business system are identified and linked to different institutional arrangements. Significant differences in post-war East Asian business systems and the ways in which these are changing in the 1990s are analysed within this framework, which is also extended to compare the path-dependent nature of the new capitalisms emerging in Eastern Europe.