| This work addresses the capacity of state actors in advanced industrialized welfare states characterized as "coordinated market economies" to exploit comparative institutional advantages and induce cooperation among strong state and non-state actors in order to coordinate economy-wide or even sectoral industrial growth and adjustment efforts that draw on and utilize resources from several distinct policy spheres. In particular, this work focuses on the different institutionalized relations and roles of important political-economic actors, especially those of civil servants as state actors, business actors, and interest organization actors, in the Danish industrial policy sphere and the Danish active labor market policy sphere and their impact on industrial policymakers' efforts to coordinate industrial adjustment in the 1990s in response to globalization-related processes.; Based on an analysis of industrial and labor market politics in Denmark, I argue that the particular power relations among relevant state and non-state actors, the particular roles the actors have to play, and the particular priorities among these actors in distinct policy spheres are likely to result in institutional variation not only across national political economies, but across policy spheres within national political economies. Even if effective coordinating institutions are established within distinct policy spheres, the particular roles, relations, and priorities among important political-economic actors within any given policy sphere are likely to lead to unique policies and institutions that are not necessarily predisposed to coordination across policy spheres. Furthermore, these roles, relations, and priorities will impact not only the content of policies and the form and function of coordinating institutions, but the manner in which state actors may increase their autonomy and lead adjustment processes. The extent to which state actors will be able to purposefully manipulate and exploit comparative institutional advantages and establish effective coordinating institutions is therefore likely to be much more limited than envisioned in theoretical debates on coordinated industrial adjustment. |
