ABSTRACT

This edited volume provides a synthesis on the question of business attitudes towards and its influence over the development of the modern welfare state. It gathers leading scholars in the field to offer both in-depth historical country case studies and comparative chapters that discuss contemporary developments.

Composed of six archive-based historical narratives of business’ role in the development of social insurance programs in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, and six comparative case studies, this volume also extends the study of business to policy fields that have hitherto received little attention in the literature, such as active labor market policies, educational policies, employment protection legislation, healthcare, private pension programs and work‐family policies. It illuminates why business groups have responded so very differently to demands for increased social protection against different labor market risks in different countries and over time.

This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of comparative welfare, political science, sociology, social policy studies, comparative political economy and welfare history.

Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. 

part I|2 pages

Country Studies

chapter 6|24 pages

Private or public?

Employer attitudes and strategies towards welfare reform in Finland

chapter 7|35 pages

Misrepresented interests

Business, Medicare, and the making of the American health care state

part II|2 pages

Cross-country comparisons and recent challenges

chapter 8|26 pages

Who controls the workplace?

Business and the regulation of job security in Western Europe 1

chapter 10|21 pages

The business of change

Employers and work-family policy reforms

chapter 11|21 pages

The financial politics of occupational pensions

A business interest’s perspective

chapter 13|22 pages

Pension privatization as a boon to stock market development?

Financial ideas, reform complementarities and the divergent fates of Hungary’s and Poland’s pension fund industries

chapter 14|14 pages

Conclusion

The business of studying business