Biography
Biography
Hello, welcome to my website.
I am Associate Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago.
For many years, I have been doing research and publishing in the areas of comparative political economy, economic sociology, economic geography and business history. The common thread in my work has been an interest in the changing boundaries of firms and the arrangements that govern them in Europe (especially Germany) the United States and Japan.
Concretely, the research has focused on the interrelationship between the following four levels of socio-economic process:
- the organization of production within and among firms
- workplace organization: e.g.: craft organization, Taylorism, lean production, cellular forms of organization,
- relative integration or disintegration of production within the vertical division of labor
- governance of production: e.g. corporate governance
- the relationship between individual producer strategies and the organization of industrial markets, for example:
- specialization, diversification,
- customization,
- modularity,
- competition, oligopoly,
- cartelization,
- anti-trust
- the role that non-firm organizations and institutions play in the production and reproduction of firm strategies, for example:
- research and training institutions
- financial institutions
- trade unions,
- business associations,
- regional, national and supra-national governments
- the way that forms of governance in the economy relate to, influence and depend on forms of political governance and order (e.g. democracy)
My work is comparative, historical, qualitative and very informed by pragmatism.
Book Projects:
My first book, Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power, (Cambridge University Press, 1996) focused on the conditions in German regions that gave rise, on the one hand, to large vertically integrated firms and, on the other hand, to decentralized clusters of small and medium sized specialized producers. The book showed how both patterns of industrialization were embedded in extra firm arrangements and policies for training, competition, finance, dispute resolution etc. It also traced the evolution of the patterns over time and showed how change involved a process of creative institutional and strategic re-composition by actors at many different levels. A central claim of the book is that Germany never had and does not have a single or unitary system of governance in the political economy. There are multiple logics of governance at work at every level. The "national business system" in Germany, in other words, is a composite system.
A second book, to be published by Oxford University Press in late 2008, is entitled Manufacturing Possibilities: Creative Agency and the Recomposition of Industrial Practice in the U.S., Germany and Japan . It examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile, construction machine, agricultural equipment and mechanical engineering sectors in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since World War II. During the postwar period, these industries have been crucial locations for the emergence of organizational forms, business strategies and institutional systems that govern the economy more widely in each of the three societies. Moreover, each industry has been profoundly affected by processes of globalization. The boundaries of firms and industries, producer strategies, stakeholder interests and governance mechanisms have all undergone enormous change as actors try to remain competitive against rivals around the world. Examining change in these core manufacturing sectors identifies critical changes in the national systems of social relationships and institutions governing industry in each country over the past six decades.
Manufacturing Possibilities argues that there has been surprising plasticity in the arrangements that govern industry in each country. It attributes this plasticity to processes of creative agency that generate the recomposition of institutions and organizations. This position represents a distinctive alternative to both neo-liberal claims that globalization produces institutional convergence and institutionalist claims that national institutional systems remain relatively durable in the face of global pressures due to path dependency. Manufacturing Possibilities argues that industrial actors in all three countries pursue similar strategies in global markets. However, they do so in ways that both recompose national and sub-national arrangements and create new relational and institutional differences across the societies.
The Sequence of the chapters and flow of argument in the book is as follows: Part I (chapters 1-3) presents an historical portrait of the evolution of the steel industry in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since the mid-20th century. Chapter 1 focuses on the reconstitution of the German and Japanese steel industries under U.S. military occupation in the immediate post-WWII period. Chapter 2 traces the organization of the steel industry in the US, Germany and Japan during the glory days of the three decade long postwar “economic miracle.” Subsequently, Chapter 3 showcases the dramatic processes of recomposition that have occurred in these three national steel cases since the mid-1970s. Chapter 3 concludes that the steel industry, often left for dead, is in fact in many ways unfettered by its past. Although their institutional and practical arrangements differ tremendously, firms in each of the three countries are still competing and innovating, creating value and employing people. And, they are accomplishing this by refusing to view the institutional rules that governed their past behavior as constraints on how they will create their future.
Part II (chapters 4-7) broadens this analysis of adjustment in manufacturing by examining processes of vertical disintegration in automobiles, agricultural implements, construction machinery, and mechanical engineering in Europe and the U.S. over the past 30 years. Vertical disintegration is understood as a world historical trend affecting producers in all locations, but especially those in advanced industrial economies. It is driven by global competition that creates unremitting pressures on producers to constantly innovate, while at the same time continuously reduce costs.
These chapters argue that relations in the disintegrated supply chain are extremely unstable, requiring suppliers and customers to play a broad array of potential roles. Moreover, which role(s) will be played and who will play them is typically unclear to all players ex ante. Governance problems, both at the level of production relations and the surrounding institutional context, are generated by this pervasive role ambiguity.
Chapters 4 and 5 set out the general dynamics of vertical disintegration at the firm and industry level. They describe emerging modal relations within the supply chain, characteristic firm strategies, and emergent forms of organization and governance that define practice in all of the cases. Chapter 4 argues that role ambiguity and the need for suppliers and customers to continuously innovate and upgrade has given rise to what it calls “sustained contingent collaboration” as the modal relation in supply chains. The second part of the chapter outlines the range of product market strategies (specialization vs diversification) that producers adopt given the modality of sustained contingent collaboration. Chapter 5 then turns to the way in which flexibility is organized and governed in contemporary supply chains. It argues that in contrast to flexible organization in the past which relied extensively on informal relations and tacit knowledge, contemporary flexibility is achieved increasingly through the construction of formal procedures designed to create transparency within and across organizations and thereby generate information and organize reflexive deliberation about possibilities for improvement and innovation.
Chapters 6 and 7 analyze the ways in which the general trends in relations, firm strategies and organizational governance are manifesting themselves in the U.S. and Germany. Chapter 6 analyzes trends and experiments over the last ten years in firm strategy and corporate and regional governance in the two countries, while Chapter 7 is a case study of transformative politics currently underway in the German system of industrial relations. Both chapters show that these experiments in strategic, organizational and governance adjustment often run in directions completely contrary to historical practice and institutional tradition in both countries.
Throughout, Parts I and II emphasize creative agency and recomposition while critiquing the idea of institutions as structuring frameworks for action. Social transformation within the economy is shown to be a re-compositional process driven by collectively reflexive actors. Rules and roles are continuously and reflexively redefined as actors collectively strive to cope with challenges they encounter in their environments. This bottom-up, anti-path-dependent analysis in Manufacturing Possibilities points to the critical theoretical importance of identifying opportunities for empowerment and self-governance within and among economic organizations.
Future Projects
Currently I am engaged in a new collaborative international research project on the evolution of global production networks and the relationship between developing and developed manufacturing regions. See the Global Components section of this website. My plan is to write a third book on these issues.
Edited Books/Journal Special Issues
While engaging in the above research projects, I have written many articles, some of which are available on this website, and all of which may be found referenced on my CV. I have also co-edited one book and one special issue of the business history journal, Enterprise and Society.
The co-edited book was done together with Jonathan Zeitlin of the University of Wisconsin. It was entitled Americanization and its Limits: Reworking Management and Technology in Europe and Japan after World War II, (Oxford University Press, 2000). Essays in this book analyzed the diffusion and selective adaptation of American management and technologies in Europe and Japan in the twenty years after World War II. My own essay looked at the reconstitution of the Steel Industry in Germany and Japan under US occupation in an effort to understand the interpenetration of ideas of industrial governance and organization with contending conceptions of democracy and political order.
The special issue of Enterprise and Society, which appeared in September 2007, highlights a new wave of historical scholarship on the matter of corporate governance in the US, Britain, Japan, France and Germany.
Teaching:
I teach both undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Chicago. At the undergraduate level, I teach exclusively in the common core. For many years, I have been the chair of one of the primary sequences in the undergraduate social sciences common core curriculum, Power Identity and Resistance. The course focuses on close reading of foundational texts in the liberal tradition, as well as core critical arguments against that tradition.
On a graduate level, I teach seminars related to my substantive and theoretical interests. Generally I teach one substantive, middle range comparative seminar and one social theoretically oriented seminar a year. Examples of my graduate courses can be found on the “Courses” page of this website.