ABSTRACT
The fading of the Keynesian welfare state and weakening of corporatist arrangements may well signal the end of ‘organized capitalism’ in the advanced industrialized economies of the West.1 In 1987 Lash and Urry had predicted the further deconcentration or ‘spatial scattering’ of earlier patterns of social relations based on cohesive labor politics, mass production, and industrial concentration within national borders. Erosion of the institutional and cultural resources of organized labor, and the rise of the service class based in professional associations would foster both dismantling of earlier patterns, and a restructuring featuring class dealignment, rise of the ‘catch-all’ political party, flexible production, and global market ties.2 The deconcentration appears well underway now a decade later but, as yet, the profile of a reconstructed capitalism in the economies of the leading Western economic powers remains unclear. At the same time alternative forms of mediating state and market have begun to take the place of the now deregulated Keynesian welfare state and have affected corporatist arrangements in Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere as well.
