456 Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action
mass of research and development activities; basic public services necessary
for a good quality of life for those working in middle- to high-level positions in
otherwise footloose (transnationally mobile) firms and sectors; and maintenance
of a public policy environment favorable to investment (and profit making) by
such companies, whether domestic or foreign-owned. I [call] this mixture the
“competition state.”
Finally, of course, globalization has had a severe impact, both direct and indirect,
on the possibility for the state efficiently to provide redistributive public goods.
With regard to labor market policy, for example, corporatist bargaining and
employment policies are everywhere under pressure—although somewhat unevenly,
depending less on the country than on the sector concerned—in the face of
international pressure for wage restraint and flexible working practices. The
provision of education and training increasingly is taking priority over direct labor
market intervention, worker protection, and incomes policies. With regard to the
welfare state, although the developed states generally have not been able to reduce
the overall weight of welfare spending in the economy, a highly significant shift
from maintaining freestanding social and public services to merely keeping up
with expanding existing commitments has occurred in many countries.
Unemployment compensation and entitlement programs have ballooned as a
consequence of industrial downsizing, increasing inequalities of wealth,
homelessness, and the aging of the population in industrial societies, thereby tending
to crowd out funding for other services. Finally, the most salient new sector of
redistributive public goods, environmental protection, is especially transnational
in character; pollution and the depletion of natural resources do not respect borders.
Therefore, in all three of the principal categories of second industrial revolution
public goods, globalization has undercut the policy capacity of the national state
in all but a few areas....
SCALE SHIFT AND THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
In addition to the changing scale of public goods, the changing technological and
institutional context in which all goods are increasingly being produced and
exchanged has been central to this transformation. The third industrial revolution
has many characteristics, but those most relevant to our concern with scale shift
involve five trends in particular, each bound up with the others. The first is the
development of flexible manufacturing systems and their spread not only to new
industries but to older ones as well. The second is the changing hierarchical form
of firms (and bureaucracies) to what has been called “lean management.” The
third is the capacity of decision-making structures to monitor the actions of all
levels of management and of the labor force far more closely through the use of
information technology. The fourth is the segmentation of markets in a more complex
consumer society. Finally, the third industrial revolution has been profoundly shaped
by the emergence of increasingly autonomous transnational financial markets and
institutions....