ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the influence of institutional frameworks on work intensity and sustainability. It tries to make sense of the general observation among students of work that, despite decades of internationalization and the transfer of ‘best practices’ in organization, different countries keep on exhibiting marked variation in work organization and job contents; in order to do so, the chapter combines neo-institutionalist (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Hall and Soskice 2001) and neo-contingent (Sorge 1991) insights to produce a political economy of work organization. The main argument of this chapter is that a comparative institutional perspective on both intensive work systems (IWS) and sustainable work systems (SWS) helps understand different trajectories of IWS and different possibilities of SWS in different countries.
