Business Interests and the Development of the Modern Welfare State

This edited volume provides a synthesis on the question of business attitudes towards and its influence over the development of the modern welfare state. It gathers leading scholars in the field to offer both in-depth historical country case studies and comparative chapters that discuss contemporary developments. Composed of six archive-based historical narratives of business' role in the development of social insurance programs in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, and six comparative case studies, this volume also extends the study of business to policy fields that have hitherto received little attention in the literature, such as active labor market policies, educational policies, employment protection legislation, healthcare, private pension programs and work-family policies. It illuminates why business groups have responded so very differently to demands for increased social protection against different labor market risks in different countries and over time. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of comparative welfare, political science, sociology, social policy studies, comparative political economy and welfare history. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Dennie Oude Nijhuis is senior researcher at the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and lecturer at the Institute for History, Leiden University, Netherlands.

1. Analyzing the role of business in welfare state development Part I: Country Studies 2. Business interests and the development of the Bismarckian welfare state 3. Explaining employer support for welfare state development in the Netherlands 4. Business interests and the development of the public-private welfare mix in Switzerland, 1880-1990 5. British employers and the development of state protection for unemployment, sickness and old age, 1900-1990 6. Private or public? Employer attitudes and strategies towards welfare reform in Finland 7. Misrepresented interests: Business, Medicare, and the making of the American health care state Part II: Cross-country comparisons and recent challenges 8. Who controls the workplace? Business and the regulation of job security in Western Europe 9. Employer organizations and the evolution of active labor market policy in Sweden and the United States 10. The business of change: Employers and work-family policy reforms 11. The financial politics of occupational pensions: A business interest's perspective 12. Industrial coordination and vocational training in the postindustrial age 13. Pension privatization as a boon to stock market development? Financial ideas, reform complementarities and the divergent fates of Hungary's and Poland's pension fund industries 14. Conclusion: The business of studying business