Culture, Coordination and Anarchy

• In Event: Political Economy of Advanced Capitalism

Abstract

Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden have different economic structures; yet they share similar corporatist industrial relations institutions. Theories about patterns of industrialization, power resources, and religion cannot easily account for these similarities. This paper explores the role of culture in the evolution of employer-labor relations. We hypothesize that countries with corporatist industrial relations in the Twentieth-Century share similar cultural constructions about the individual in society and relations among social groups dating back to at least the early eighteenth-century. These cultural constructions are radically different from those found in countries with pluralist industrial relations systems. We apply natural language processing techniques to literary corpora from Britain, Denmark, France, Netherlands, and Sweden to evaluate our core hypotheses. The research has significance for our understanding of the role of culture in the evolution of modern political economies.

Authors

• Cathie Jo Martin, Boston University

• Erik Olsson