Gender, Inequality, and Capitalism: The "Varieties of Capitalism" and Women

In this brief note, I would like to discuss possible future directions for studies that aim at gendering the varieties of capitalism (VOCs), as well as choices I have made in my own recent research. Before we proceed, however, let me provide a brief introduction to the VOC literature for those readers not familiar with it.

The concept of the VOCs was originally developed to contrast two equally economically efficient institutional equilibria. Liberal market economies (LMEs) rely upon the market mechanism in the sense of neo-classical economics; and coordinated market economies (CMEs) rely upon on mutual cooperation among economic actors facilitated by dense networks of institutions. Countries such as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and Sweden are generally considered to resemble CMEs, whereas the English-speaking countries resemble LMEs. One important idea behind the notion of institutional equilibrium is that any deviation from either of these two equilibria should result in less successful economies. France, Italy, and Spain have been cited as examples here. (True, these countries shared many of the institutions present in CMEs, but they lacked the cooperative industrial relations present in most CMEs. And, more importantly, their economies were not as successful as those of other CMEs.)

Why was VOC interested in efficient institutional equilibria? In order to understand this, we have to go back to how VOC literature emerged in the first place. VOC emerged as scholars responded to a wave of findings that showed that firms in the same product market behaved very differently in different countries. Back in the 1980s, observers wondered why countries such as Germany, Japan, and Sweden had more successful manufacturing sectors than countries such as the UK and the United States. David Soskice and others associated with VOC were not the only ones interested in this question. Many scholars had noted that different countries had different advantages and disadvantages when taking part in global trade (Aoki 1988; Aoki and Patrick 1994; Berger and Dore 1996; Dore 1973, 1987; Matzner and Streeck 1991; Porter 1990; Zysman 1983, among others). All these scholars were aware that the old notion of comparative advantage failed to capture the nature of these advantages and disadvantages. Some countries, for instance, were blessed with more cooperative industrial relations, which, in turn, helped accelerate product cycles or facilitated a particular type of production method. This led scholars to think about institutional comparative advantage. VOC literature synthesized and built up on existing studies by specifying how institutions could structure the behavior of private firms and industrial relations. The key institutions here include: vocational training/educational systems; employment protection and other social protection programs; corporate finance systems; and corporate governance systems. To reiterate, the principal intellectual preoccupation was to understand why private firms in different countries proceeded to carry out their business differently. VOC scholars understood that, at least in manufacturing, firms could depart from prescriptions of neo-classical economy yet do well in global market competition. This is why VOC's initial contributions focus on the efficient institutional equilibrium defined by the CME. The idea of institutional equilibrium was closely tied to the idea of institutional complementarity, which assumes that some institutions reinforce each other's effects (Milgrom and Roberts 1995). Most of the initial scholarly efforts in VOC thus engaged in identifying the range of institutional complementarities-to understand which institution and which one went together and why.

Given the initial preoccupation of VOC, it is unsurprising that it appeared functionalist and apolitical-two frequent criticisms against VOC (Mandel and Shalev raise these criticisms). VOC scholars were less interested in explaining why some countries possessed institutional complementarities or how these complementarities developed. They were primarily interested in showing that certain institutions, when accompanied by specific others, produced efficient outcomes such as greater human capital investments. VOC's preoccupation with institutional complementarities and private firms' product market strategies also meant a general lack of interest in politics that might have produced or sustained relevant institutions. As far as VOC was concerned, it was the institutional complementarity that mattered rather than where it...