Том 2 - Тенденции и предизвикателства в развитието на ...

actors through history and culture of one nation. Institutionalcomplementarities suggest that nations with a particular type ofinstitution develop complementary institution in other spheres. Firms ofLME and CME respond very differently to a similar shock andinstitutions are socializing agencies and go through a continuous processof adaptation. Institutional arrangements of a nation’s political economytend to push its firms toward particular kinds of corporate strategies.Thus, two types of economies have different capacities for innovationand tend to distribute income and employment differently.The varieties-of-capitalism approach offers fresh and intriguinginsights into differences among the developed economies, but it canhardly be considered viable if it cannot also address processes ofinstitutional change. Many of the criticisms suggest that the equilibriumelements of the new economics of organization analysis are inimical todynamic analysis and that rationalist approaches understate the chaoticquality of institutional change or the contribution unintendedconsequences make to it. These concerns have significance for theanalysis of institutional change more generally.In this paper, institutions are c onceptua lized as sets ofregularized practices with a rule-like quality in the sense that the actorsexpect the practices to be observed; and which, in some but not all,cases are supported by formal sanctions. They can range fromregulations backed by the force of law or organizational procedure,such as the rules that apply when a worker is laid off, to more informalpractices that have a conventional character, such as the expectationthat firms will offer a certain number of apprenticeships.Although some institutions rely on sanctions for their operation, theVoC approach moves away from a view of institutions purely as factorsthat constrain action towards one that sees them also as resources,providing opportunities for particular types of action, and especially forcollective action.Also, the VoC framework emphasizes that the political economyis replete with a multiplicity of institutions, many of which are nestedinside others. Some can serve as functional substitutes for otherinstitutions, at least for some purposes. Thus, any strategy adopted by41