1st Edition

Business Interests and the Development of the Modern Welfare State

Edited By Dennie Oude Nijhuis Copyright 2019
    376 Pages
    by Routledge

    376 Pages
    by Routledge

    This edited volume provides a synthesis on the question of business attitudes towards and its influence over the development of the modern welfare state. It gathers leading scholars in the field to offer both in-depth historical country case studies and comparative chapters that discuss contemporary developments.



    Composed of six archive-based historical narratives of business’ role in the development of social insurance programs in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, and six comparative case studies, this volume also extends the study of business to policy fields that have hitherto received little attention in the literature, such as active labor market policies, educational policies, employment protection legislation, healthcare, private pension programs and work‐family policies. It illuminates why business groups have responded so very differently to demands for increased social protection against different labor market risks in different countries and over time.



    This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of comparative welfare, political science, sociology, social policy studies, comparative political economy and welfare history.



     



    Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license: https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780815377917_oachapter4.pdf

    1. Analyzing the role of business in welfare state development

    Dennie Oude Nijhuis

    Part I: Country Studies

    2. Business interests and the development of the Bismarckian welfare state

    Thomas Paster

    3. Explaining employer support for welfare state development in the Netherlands

    Dennie Oude Nijhuis

    4. Business interests and the development of the public-private welfare mix in Switzerland, 1880-1990

    Pierre Eichenberger and Matthieu Leimgruber

    5. British employers and the development of state protection for unemployment, sickness and old age, 1900-1990

    Paul Bridgen

    6. Private or public? Employer attitudes and strategies towards welfare reform in Finland

    Susanna Fellman

    7. Misrepresented interests: Business, Medicare, and the making of the American health care state

    Peter A. Swenson

    Part II: Cross-country comparisons and recent challenges

    8. Who controls the workplace? Business and the regulation of job security in Western Europe

    Patrick Emmenegger

    9. Employer organizations and the evolution of active labor market policy in Sweden and the United States

    Joshua C. Gordon

    10. The business of change: Employers and work-family policy reforms

    Magnus Bergli Rasmussen and Øyvind Søraas Skorge

    11. The financial politics of occupational pensions: A business interest's perspective

    Nataschavan der Zwan

    12. Industrial coordination and vocational training in the postindustrial age

    Cathie Jo Martin and Lukas Graf

    13. Pension privatization as a boon to stock market development? Financial ideas, reform complementarities and the divergent fates of Hungary’s and Poland’s pension fund industries

    Marek Naczyk

    14. Conclusion: The business of studying business

    Dennie Oude Nijhuis

    Biography

    Dennie Oude Nijhuis is senior researcher at the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and lecturer at the Institute for History, Leiden University, Netherlands.