ABSTRACT
Nowadays capitalism is written in the plural. There are capitalisms, national capitalisms, which, built up to models, are checked as to their economic efficiency within the structure of a ‘globalized’ world economy. This pluralization is not a new phenomenon; comparative surveys on the different functions and forms of organization of capitalistic national economies enjoy a long tradition in the social sciences (cf. e.g. Shonfield 1965). However, in the past, research was not as geared to test the development capabilities of national systems in the context of international competition as it is today. This type of questioning was more restricted to the systematic comparison between capitalism and communism. The situation changed after the collapse of the centrally steered economies of the East European countries. Today, the institutional variations of national capitalisms are compared with regard to their contribution to economic growth and increased productivity, employment and innovation, and not so much to their performance in the recent past – how adaptable they are in the light of a rapidly changing world economy (cf. e.g. Streeck 1995).
