Contemporary Capitalism
Subtitle: The Embeddedness of Institutions (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)
Contributors: J. Rogers Hollingsworth (Editor); Robert Boyer (Editor)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: March 28, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 511
ISBN-13: 9780521561655
Subjects: Capitalist or free market economies; Political structure & processes; General; Capitalism; Business & Economics; Politics / Current Events; Business/Economics; Institutional economics; Free Enterprise; Political Science / Economic Conditions; Economics - General; Organization
First sentence: This volume addresses several distinctive but interrelated problems.
Description: This book argues that there is no one best institutional arrangement for organizing modern societies. Therefore, the market should not be considered the ideal and universal arrangement for coordinating economic activity. Instead, the editors argue, the economic institutions of capitalism exhibit a large variety of objectives and tools that complement each other and cannot work in isolation.

The various chapters of the book explore challenging issues in the analysis of differing institutional arrangements for coordinating economic activity, asking what logics and functions they follow, and why they emerge, mature, and persist in the forms they do. They conclude that any institutional arrangement has its strengths and weaknesses and that such institutions evolve according to a logic specific to each society.

They also note that institutions continuously respond to changing circumstances and are not static entities.