ABSTRACT
Goldthorpe’s interest in the political economy of advanced capitalist societies can be traced through many of his writings, beginning with the Affluent Worker study (Goldthorpe et al., 1968a, 1968b, 1969). However, his major contribution to political economy takes the form of two lengthy and stimulating essays published in the 1980s. Both take a broad comparative perspective, having been written for collaborative research projects on Western Europe. They survey the previous decades of the ‘post-war era’ which were characterized by the iong boom’ extending from 1945 to the mid-1970s, and they look ahead to the emergent trends in political economy in the 1980s. The first, ‘Problems of Political Economy after the Post-War Period’ (1987b), discusses the nature of the economic crisis of the 1970s, and investigates the logic and prospects of the dramatically divergent options apparent in economic management strategies in the 1980s. This paper was originally written in 1981 and revised in 1983. However, publishing delays meant that it did not appear until 1987. The second study, ‘The End of Convergence: Corporatist and Dualist Tendencies in Modern Western Societies’ (1984b), begins with a critique of liberal pluralist convergence theories, aspects of which Goldthorpe had discussed elsewhere (1964, 1971); it complements the earlier essay in its discussion of the very different trends in political economy emerging in the 1980s. These essays also take up themes developed in an earlier essay, ‘The Current Inflation: Towards a Sociological Account’ (1978). This analyzes the social and institutional context of heightened distributive conflict in the 1960s and 1970s and its significance for economic outcomes.
