American Exceptionalism and Comparative Political Economy

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511809798.003

2 - American Exceptionalism and Comparative Political Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

David Soskice

Edited by

Clair Brown ,

Barry J. Eichengreen and

Michael Reich

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Clair Brown: Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Barry J. Eichengreen: Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Michael Reich: Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

More than any other individual in my academic career, Lloyd Ulman shaped my interests in and intellectual approach to comparative political economy. He has had a profound – even dominating – influence on the development of comparative industrial relations. Although there has been much rich work on institutions and much economic modeling of unions and labor markets, Ulman put these divergent approaches together. What comes through insistently in his work is the need to both understand carefully how institutions in fact function (“Don't be taken in by their propaganda”) and to apply economic models to explain their behavior.

Ulman has been preoccupied throughout his career by the divergences and similarities between Europe and the United States, especially in the field of industrial relations and redistribution; previously, his interest was in understanding the history of American labor relations. These interests are fused in his typically analytical presidential address to the 1986 Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA) annual meeting – from which I draw for this chapter – in which he attempts to understand why different industrial-relations systems developed differently (Ulman 1986). Indeed, his paper played a significant part in sparking a revisionist retake on the original debate on the exceptionalism of the American working class – Why no class-consciousness? Why no major socialist party? – that Sombart (1906) and Perlman (1928) had dominated in the early twentieth century and that can be traced back to Engels.

Type: Chapter
Information: Labor in the Era of Globalization , pp. 51 - 93

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511809798.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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