This volume has its origins in a workshop on the “Swedish model” organized by David Soskice at the Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin, in 1992. From the beginning, our concerns were analytical and comparative rather than descriptive and narrative and, over time, the collective deliberations that went into this volume became less “Swedocentric.” As it now stands, the volume includes quantitative analyses that encompass the entire range of OECD countries as well as single-case studies of the evolution of Swedish wage bargaining and macroeconomic policy and qualitative analyses that compare the Swedish experience to that of other Northern European cases. Motivated in large measure by David Soskice's distinction between “coordinated” and “liberal” market economies, the contributors focus on differences among and the dynamics of change within coordinated market economies. The Swedish case still figures prominently in most of the chapters that follow — it is seen by most as a central puzzle in the political economy of advanced democracies — but all the contributors are broadly concerned with the political economy of organized capitalism, including the causes of institutional change in wage bargaining, the rise of monetarist macroeconomic policies, and the politics of wage and income equality.

A distinction that is quite central to this volume is that between centralized and decentralized coordination, the former epitomized by Sweden and the latter by Germany. Applied to the collective endeavor of this project, this is clearly a case of decentralized coordination. Although all contributors broadly agree what the important research questions are, and although we share a common conceptual framework, there is too much disagreement about the facts and too many conflicts in our understanding of theoretical mechanisms to warrant a single overarching theoretical model. Nevertheless, the chapters in this volume are the result of a continuous collective enterprise in which ideas and data have been freely shared, and in which theoretical puzzles and answers have been bounced back and forth between different authors. We all reject the notion that changes in institutions and economic policies over the past two decades can be adequately understood within either a neo-corporatist or a new classical framework, and we all accept the idea that the patterns of change and stability are the result of distinct sets of interactions between economic institutions and actors, including employers, unions, state bureaucracies, and governments.