Martin Schröder
Research Interests
General Interests
I am interested in understanding how the German coordinated market economy can preserve its competitiveness without violating deeply held beliefs about social justice of the embedding society.It is also under this angle that I have worked on the welfare state.
I have suggested to combine the typologies of varieties of capitalism (Hall/ Soskice) and the three worlds of welfare regimes by Esping-Andersen. I argue that by integrating these in a unified typology, a more accurate picture of capitalist diversity can be achieved and the explanatory power of each of the two approaches can be greatly enhanced.
A third field of interest to me is the study of local economies (clusters). I am interested in understanding how these achieve a high degree of competitiveness in certain sectors, even if the embedding national institutions are not conducive to this. In order to explain this, one can show that regional clusters develop sub-national institutions, which act as functional equivalents to national ones if these are inadequate.