Despite this extensive array of workplace reforms, the momentum toward
industrial and economic democracy has slowed since the early 1980s as a result of
recurrent economic crises and the transatlantic ideological shift toward
neoconservative economic and social policies. Together, these trends have
introduced significant strains in the partnership between capital and labor,
especially in the United Kingdom and the United States where a central theme of
both Thatcherism and Reaganism has been official action to curtail union power.
Organized labor lost political influence, including its capacity to promote the
further extension of codetermination, in West Germany as well following the
return of the Christian Democrats to executive office in 1982. Only in Sweden and
France, where Social Democrats dominated executive office for most of the 1980s,
has the balance of power between employers and unions remained largely intact.

The purpose of this volume is to assess the empirical and theoretical
consequences of the central factors currently transforming modern capitalism--the
globalization of production and finance, the diffusion of new forms of political and
social consciousness, and efforts to promote industrial and economic democracy--
in five advanced industrial nations: the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Federal
Republic of Germany, France, and the United States. These countries are
systemically similar in that they are among the most highly developed and affluent
capitalist nations in the world. ¹⁴ Each is an important international economic
actor in its own right: the United States as the world's leading trade partner;
Britain, France, and Germany as core members of the European Community; and
Sweden as the dominant industrial nation within Scandinavia and a leading exporter
of quality industrial products to the EC, the United States, and other industrial
nations. All five are stable and effective pluralist democracies, even though they
experienced profound differences in their historical transition from predemocratic

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