Thirty years after the initiatives of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher signaled the beginning of a neo-liberal era that would usher in widespread enthusiasm for competitive markets, the world is experiencing a global recession precipitated by financial crises rooted in the excesses of unbridled competition. As a result, the neo liberal era is at an inflection point, if not a close. Many people are reconsidering what markets can deliver and looking again to states for more assertive efforts to regulate and distribute resources. After several decades of irrational exuberance about what markets could accomplish, scholars are looking at with more sober eyes. In this context, Wolfgang Streeck, the most brilliant analyst of the contemporary German political economy, has produced an indispens able work. It is three books in one a discerning account of recent changes in the German economic model, a wide-ranging critique of institutionalist analysis, and a powerful interpretation of how capital ism works. Written from a profoundly sociological perspective, it offers a corrective to rationalist analyses that will be of interest, not only to scholars of Germany, but to anyone trying to understand institutional change in capitalist economies. Drawing on research carried out under his direction at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Streeck charts the unraveling over the past twenty years of the organized capitalism that once underpinned Modell Deutschland. Five short, sharp chapters trace developments in collective bargaining, intermediary organiza tions, corporate governance, social policy and public finance. In the decade after 1992, net trade union membership in Germany fell from 30 percent of the workforce to about 20 percent. The average tenure of chief executive officers dropped from ten years to eight and a half and, in the largest fifty firms, barely 9 percent of CEOs now have profes sional experience in the public sector, compared with 25 percent in 1990. From an Anglo-American perspective, many aspects of economic relations in Germany still seem relatively organized. Although only 57 percent of employees were covered by an industry-wide collective agreement in 2006, down from 72 percent in 1995, those figures are still high by international standards, and the wave of hostile takeovers
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