Sponsored by:
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
IIR (Institute of Industrial Relations), UC Berkeley
ETLA-BRIE Project

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Day 1: Friday, April 28th, 2006

The Great Hall Conference Room - Bancroft Hotel, Berkeley, CA 94704

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Summaries for Background Document

1. Introduction: Competition in the Digital Global Economy ___________8:45 – 9:30

• The Changing Logic of Value Creation - the most fundamental challenge facing policy-makers in advanced countries?
• The Basics: Sweet Spots, Services, New Competitors
• Implications for innovation
• Jobs and Wealth Creation
• The Core problem: Competition
• Compete with High-Cost Labor
• Strategy, Business Models; Labor, Social and Technology Policy
• How do Governments frame the Challenge? Review of Documents from Rhode Island, Britain, Finland

2. National Responses – What Do Governments Do?_______________ 9:30 – 1:15

This section will attempt to draw parallels between a range of national strategies in response to the challenges of the digital global economy. It will seek to trace both how nations foster development and technology policy in an era when previous tools are seen as obsolete. In doing so, we must understand what the unique domestic factors/coalitions are that enabled change and innovation. If a response has been slow in coming, what are the main domestic impediments to the creation and implementation of a clearly defined national strategy? How can these be overcome?

These questions will be tackled from the perspective of both small and large countries, seeking to understand whether successful national responses rest solely on domestic conditions or if there remain more universal patterns of effective action. In probing these two sets of nations we will identify the stories in small nations and then ask what larger nations can learn from their unique experiences. How might similar technology and development policies be adapted to larger political environments (EU included)? Small nations have always been dependent on foreign markets in order to drive growth. Is this also increasingly true of larger economies or is policy autonomy still possible for larger economies? How large is large enough?

• Small Countries (9:30-11:00): Why Are Small Countries Interesting? Contrasting Countries’ Development and Technology Policies.
  • Country Presentations (15 min.)
• Denmark
• Finland
• Israel , Taiwan and Ireland
• Commentary
• General Discussion

• Big Countries (11:30-1:15): Are there Small Country lessons for Big Countries? What are the Core Issues?
  • Country Presentations (10 min.)
• France
• Germany
• Japan
• Britain
• General Discussion

3. Markets and Social Protection – Policies for Labor Flexibility and Innovatio n ____ 2:15 - 5:00

This section will focus on the question of whether social protection and market flexibility are compatible in the digital era. In an era of increased uncertainty, flexibility has become a crucial factor for successful economic adaptation. Businesses need to capture value from their skilled labor forces and they need flexibility in deploying that labor. In public debates across the advanced countries, recommendations for flexibility have often been translated into arguments for the wholesale reduction of social protection. But is the choice really between flexibility or social protection? Is the crucial issue about the amount of social protection or is it instead an issue of how social protection is delivered?

• Introduction : From Adaptability to ‘Flexicurity’ – a Concept and its Applications
• Combining Flexibility and Security
• Preparing Social Europe for the Digital Era
• From the Headlines: The Success of Denmark
• Flexibility Through Social Protection
• Other National Experiments in Europe: Different Paths to Flexibility?
• Spain : The Persistence of Segmented Protection
• Germany : Internal vs. External Labor Market Flexibility in CMEs and LMEs
• Great Britain : From Thatcher to What?
• France / Synthesis
• Transatlantic Comparisons: the US Experience in Light of European Developments
• The Rigidities of Private Security Schemes

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Day 2: Saturday,  April 29th, 2006

Conference Room 290, Hearst Memorial Mining , UC Berkeley

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4. Challenges – What is different about today? _______________________ 9:00 – 10:00

• The Service Transformation Revisited
• Next Generation Networks

5. Designing Research Projects: What is Worth Knowing and How Can We Find It Out – A Discussion of Graduate Research Plans ____________________________ 10:00 – 1:00

We know that changes are afoot in OECD countries – there is now greater emphasis on activation policies and on increasing the skill-base of the labor force. But as social scientists, how do we understand these changes? What are the appropriate conceptual lenses with which to study them? The Saturday afternoon workshop will address how the issues raised throughout the conference can shape new research agendas, and which analytical approaches show the greatest promise for informing new work.

Current comparative political economy scholarship is dominated by the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach that distinguishes rather sharply between coordinated and liberal market economies (CMEs and LMEs). While its equilibrium-based distinction between reducing transaction costs by non-market means in CMEs and optimizing principle-agent relations in LMEs through markets succeeds in providing a relatively parsimonious account of national institutional difference, the approach’s critics charge it with being both too static and apolitical as well as embracing an overly functionalist notion of institutional complementarity. Where should we go from here? Should we re-embrace structural Marxist perspectives that focus on the size and power of economic sectors and social groups? Could there be a role for cross-class coalition perspectives, scholarship looking at the role of political parties? How can institutionalist scholarship be advanced and how do we explain change in the context of deepening globalization? What kind of comparisons between what units of analysis would be most enlightening?

• Views from the Experts:
• After yesterday’s discussions, what are the key questions that we think need answering?
• What type of research is required to answer them?
• Can these attempts point the way?
• Campbell and Pedersen’s presentation of Denmark as a hybrid case in the varieties of capitalism with its focus on coordination (CMEs) and flexible markets (LMEs)
• Locke and Thelen’s insistence that we have to move beyond matched to ‘contextualized’ comparisons in order to ‘learn’ more about the character of the countries studied
• Herrigel’s insistence to replace the functionalism inherent in much institutional thinking with a more constructivist approach