ABSTRACT
In most neo-liberal accounts of developments in markets and organizations there exists an implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that firms and organizations will converge towards a single form of structure and coordination because of the forces of global market competition. The detailed processes whereby such convergence might occur are rarely explained and such empirical work as has been done tends to show that claims of convergence and globalization are exaggerated (see e.g. Berger and Dore 1996; Boyer and Drache 1996; Hirst and Thompson 1996). In contrast to this approach, neoinstitutionalist theories of national business systems have emphasized the way in which forms of economic activity are shaped by their embeddedness in specific social contexts. From this perspective, the impact of globalizing markets has to be considered in the context of all the other forces within national settings (such as culture, capital markets, systems of labour relations and education, the nature of the state) that act to reproduce existing forms of economic coordination (see Whitley and Kristensen 1996, 1997). In this chapter, we seek to build on the neoinstitutionalist approach by examining how regulatory regimes within particular national contexts shape the structures and capacities of collective economic actors. Even when societies and organizations face similar problems, for example in terms of the crisis of welfare spending or the internationalization of financial markets, their responses are different because of the influence of their specific regulatory regimes.
