From: "Stephen . Amberg"

ABSTRACT: "High Road Possibilities: Multilateral Monitoring as a Constitutive Act"

Stephen Amberg
Division of Social and Policy Sciences
The University of Texas at San Antonio
San Antonio, Texas 78249-0655
samberg@lonestar.jpl.utsa.edu

The paper focuses on the prospects for the "high road" to competitiveness, namely a high skill, high wage workforce in a high performance production organization that produces high value-added products. A review of empirical work in the field reveals an o rthodox theme that what we are witnessing in the American economy is the mechanical working-out of developmental laws on a global scale which have long-operated in capitalist societies. The mechanical conception is Adam Smith writ large. Broadening market s is the context for extending the productive and geographical division of labor. Potentially larger sales make volume production profitable; companies can risk investment in specialized resources, including labor-saving technologies and global production hierarchies. Because what is happening is the working out of immutable economic laws that are somehow outside human society, there is no high or low road choice to make.

Many have challenged such economistic analyses--especially perhaps political scientists--on the grounds of national political culture. I challenge the determinism of both economic orthodoxy and political culture. Instead, I suggest that we understand econ omic change not as a mechanism the operations of which are known in advance nor as an organic outgrowth of society, but rather as an open-ended process of socially constructing industrial order. Some empirical support for doing so is that, even as a world economy is being created, so too are regional variations even within single countries. Although there is evidence for the formation of a world economy, there is also evidence that there is fall less rationalization of corporate operations than there shou ld be. One reason is that it is too risky to invest in expensive technologies and global production organizations. Instead, companies are getting smaller and forming interfirm alliances. In short, companies are still operating according to national rules of the game. This observation supports the national political culture argument. In this theory, each country has a national capitalism which has been channeled by its political history and government institutions. In the U.S. case, however, the argument g oes, the weak form of government and Lockean liberalism have made it impossible to do much channeling compared to other countries. The U.S. is exceptionally oriented to free markets and managerialism. In short, the U.S. simply cannot take the high road. B ut, I argue, the political culture concept overlooks an enormous amount of political and ideological conflict over the development of the U.S. political economy, including the establishment of market-creating institutions like federal collective bargainin g law.

These objections lead me to propose that we conceive economic change as a political process in which economic agents are actively interpreting and defining their work in the image of their ideas about economy, society, and the state. Economic changes shou ld be understood as a series of political struggles over the legitimate nature of the social order, the outcomes of which establish institutional frameworks of industrial governance that shape its basic features, including the scope of markets, the uses o f technology, and authority in the labor process. This conception better explains variations on the international economy, both across and within countries. In many places, political struggles have created forms of multilateral monitoring to create the co nditions for a high road economy.


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