Friday, July 14, 2017
Gilbert Scott Building - Room 134 (University of Glasgow)
The aim of this paper is to align meso-institutional and macro-systemic analyses in gender regime theory. The paper argues against comparative approaches to transformations in gender and the economy, which reduce diversity to a continuum from liberal to social democratic gender regimes and liberal to coordinated varieties of capitalism. The alternative developed in this paper argues for a meso-institutional analysis of historical developments. Applied to the German and Japanese cases, this approach yields a dynamic perspective on the initial convergence and current divergence of German and Japanese gendered political economies. The conceptualization proposed harkens back to theories of multiple modernizations to argue for integrating systemic analysis with historical comparative approaches in sociology. A contribution of aligning meso-institutional with macro-systemic analysis lies in the analytical enrichment of historical-institutionalist political economy, to show how varieties of capitalism reconstitute as a direct results of gender-institutional transformations, which they typically ignore.
