Ruthless neoliberal reform or pragmatic adjustment to globalizing markets: that's the question

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the ensuing end of communism in the Eastern Europe countries, scholars have discussed the merits of various forms of capitalism with renewed enthusiasm. Over the 1990s and 2000s, these academic discussions resulted in a vast literature on national business systems and VoC. The main issue of debate was the question whether or not the organisation of all developed economies would move in the same, liberal, direction, as a logical consequence of the challenges of globalisation and technological change. A landmark in this discussion was the 2001 volume Varieties of Capitalism, edited by Peter Hall and David Soskice. In this volume, Hall and Soskice introduced the terms Liberal Market Economy (LME) and Coordinated Market Economy (CME) as two contrasting ways of organising the market economy. They argued that both ways could function equally well in their own right, and that there was no need for convergence to one ‘best practice’. But there are other approaches to discuss capitalism, as well as many follow-up studies. Jeroen Touwen’s important book Coordination in Transition: The Netherlands and the World Economy, 1950-2010 addresses the vast literature on the different manifestations of capitalism, and analyses the changes (or endurance) of institutions. Touwen did not built a database of his own, or use a specific archive as core source for his examination. Instead, he has analysed the developments in the Netherlands with the help of the extensive literature that has been published in the last two decades. Not only has he used an impressive number of books and articles, but he has also combined works from many different fields, including economic history, business history, political economy, sociology and political science, which all have their own traditions and scholarly discussions. Most of what these authors have written comparatively about the Netherlands has found its way into this book, so that it has become a rich source in its own right. But this wide-ranging approach comes at a (small) cost. The reader can easily become somewhat confused by the many different theoretical approaches to compare countries, and the large number of different criteria to judge the various aspects of the countries. In his densely written but highly informative book, Touwen explores the Netherlands and its institutions in five, partly overlapping domains: economic devel-