ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the performance of and preconditions for corporatism in four countries: Austria and Sweden, as small capitalist economies, and Hungary and Bulgaria, as newly emerging, postsocialist economies. In all the former East bloc countries, particularism and fever for founding new interest group organizations have replaced the enforced solidarity of the monolithic, monist system of interest intermediation under socialism. Postsocialist countries have to tackle a problem of enormous complexity that no industrialized society has had to face: how to rebuild simultaneously both political and economic institutions. Neocorporatist arrangements were to be the pacesetter among economic governance institutions in the 1970s, and they are expected to become obsolete in the 1990s. The upshot is that both the state and employers allegedly have a strong interest in dismantling corporatist arrangements in order to enhance economic performance. This consensus will trigger an inevitable trend toward the "disorganization" of capitalism because all changes that damage the performance of corporatism are structural in nature.
