Cooke and Morgan explore important issues of corporate reorganization in the context of heightened global competition, focusing upon how firms associate with regional milieu. In-depth studies of inter-firm and firm-agency interactions are presented for four European regions: Baden-Wurttemberg and Emilia-Romagna as accomplished regional economies; Wales and the Basque Country as learning regions. The book is theoretically informed by an evolutionary economics perspective and draws policy conclusions which emphasize the importance of decentralized industrial policy in support of both corporate and regional economic development ambitions. It concludes that the associational economy may be the third way between state and market coordination of modern economies.

An increasing number of studies in the last decade or so have emphasized the viability and persistence of distinctive systems of economic coordination and control in developed market economies. Over more or less the same period, the revival of institutional economics and evolutionary approaches to understanding the firm has focused attention on how firms create distinctive capabilities through establishing routines that coordinate complementary activities and skills for particular strategic purposes. For much of the 1990s these two strands of research remained distinct. Those focusing on the institutional frameworks of market economies were primarily concerned with identifying complementaries between institutional arrangements that explained coherence and continuity. On the other hand, those focusing on the dynamics of firm behavior studied how firms develop new capacities and are able to learn new ways of doing things. This book aims to bring together these approaches. It consists of a set of theoretically motivated and empirically informed chapters from a range of internationally known contributors to these debates. In their chapters, the authors show how institutions and firms evolve. Ideas of path dependency and complementarity of institutions are subjected to critical scrutiny both by reference to their own internal logic and to empirical examples.

What are the most important differences among national economies? Is globalization forcing nations to converge on an Anglo-American model? What explains national differences in social and economic policy? This pathbreaking work outlines a new approach to these questions. It highlights the role of business in national economies and shows that there is more than one path to economic success. The book sets a new intellectual agenda for everyone interested in relations between politics, economics, and business.

The late twentieth century has witnessed the establishment of new forms of capitalism in East Asia as well as new market economies in Eastern Europe. Despite the rhetoric of globalization, they are continuing to diverge because of significant differences in dominant institutions. This book presents the comparative business systems framework for describing and explaining the major differences in economic organization between market economies.