Social scientists dealing with business and politics have tended to focus mostly on the power of business and less on the political challenges and constraints that business interest groups face. This paper analyses how business interest groups respond to political initiatives that challenge...

During the past decade, Corporate Responsibility – the voluntary engagement of business for social and environmental ends above legally mandated minimum standards – has risen to prominence, if not pre-eminence in global economic governance. However, Corporate Responsibility is not uniformly...

We investigate whether left-wing governments decrease wage inequality among civil servants. The data is based on salaries of civil servants in the German states. Since a reform in 2006, German state governments are allowed to design salaries of civil servants. We employ encompassing data for pay...

We investigate whether left-wing governments decrease wage inequality among civil servants. The data is based on salaries of civil servants in the German states. Since a reform in 2006, German state governments are allowed to design salaries of civil servants. We employ encompassing data for pay...

Inspired by scholarship on the free city-state experience in North Italy at the turn of the first millennium, I analyze whether present-day levels of social capital and economic performance in German cities are also explicable by reference to social patterns that emerged during a period of...

Little light has been shed on the functioning of business in potential post-growth economies. With this paper, we aim to expand discussions on post-growth economies to the company level and suggest one possible way to connect existing management practise with the fact that, in order to stay...

In this paper, I examine the role of tradition in the German textile industry with regard to how SMEs will manage future technological change. The study is based on a sample of 38 semi-structured in-depth interviews with C-level executives from German textile manufacturing companies and textile...

This essay reviews the development of approaches within the comparative capitalisms(CC) literature and points to three theoretical innovations which, taken together, define and distinguish these approaches as a group. First, national economies are characterized by distinct institutional...

Despite mediocre macro-economic performance of the German economy, German companies are successful players in global trade. This article explores the strategies of one of the pillars of this export success, the 'Hidden Champions.' Our empirical analysis focuses on their leading medium size...

We study the descriptive and substantive representation of workers through worker representatives, focusing on the selection of German works council representatives and their impact on worker outcomes. Becoming a professional representative leads to substantial wage gains for the elected,...