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Kathleen Thelen (on leave)
Payson S. Wild Professor in Political Science
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
PhD, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 1987
thelen@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Mailing address for 2008-2009
Kathleen Thelen, Visiting Professor
Department of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Room E53-470
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
Telephone: (617) 253-5262
Kathleen Thelen is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science
at Northwestern University. She is also a Permanent External Scientific
Member of the Max Planck
Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany;
Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University, U.K.; and
Affiliated Professor at the International
Center for Business and Politics at the Copenhagen Business
School in Denmark.
Thelen studies the origins, development, and effects of institutional
arrangements that define distinctive “varieties of capitalism”
across the developed democracies. Her most recent single-authored
book, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills
in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan (Cambridge
University Press 2004), was selected as winner of the 2006 Mattei
Dogan Award of the Society for Comparative Research (based at
Yale University), for the “best book published in 2004-05”,
and as co-winner of the 2005 Woodrow
Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association
for “the best book on government, politics, or international
affairs” published in 2004. A subsequent book, Beyond
Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies,
co-edited with Wolfgang Streeck (Oxford University Press, 2005),
explores the evolution of a range of political-institutional institutions
in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan.
Together with James Mahoney, Thelen recently completed an edited volume, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power in Historical Institutionalism, which provides a new framework for understanding incremental forms of institutional change. Thelen is currently at work on another collaborative project, with Cathie Jo Martin and Duane Swank, on "Institutional Change and the Politics of Social Solidarity in Advanced Capitalist Democracies." Thelen’s
articles have appeared in World Politics, Governance, Comparative
Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative
Politics, Studies in American Political Development, Politics & Society, and Journal of Japanese Studies among others.
Her work has been translated and published in Chinese, Russian,
Portuguese, Japanese, French, and German.
Thelen has received awards and fellowships from the Max
Planck Society, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences (Scheduled Fellow), Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin
(Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), Centro de Investigación
y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City, Society for Comparative
Research, National Science Foundation, Science Center in Berlin
(Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung), Robert Bosch
Foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, American-Scandinavian
Foundation, and Friedrich Ebert Foundation among others.
Thelen recently completed a term as president of the American Political Science Association's Organized Section on Politics and History and was elected president of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). From 2002 to 2006 she served as chair of the Executive Committee of the Council for European Studies based at Columbia University. She has also been a member of the executive boards of the American Political Science Association's organized sections in Comparative Politics, European Politics and Society, and Qualitative Methods. Thelen currently serves on the editorial board of the Cambridge University Press Series in Comparative Politics and the boards of several journals, including among others The American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Political Research Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, Governance, Industrielle Beziehungen, and Economic and Industrial Democracy (Stockholm). She is an appointed member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), of the Board of Trustees of the Social Science Research Center of Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung), and of the Scientific Committee of the Research Unit on European Governance (Unità di Recerca sulla Governance Europea) of the Collegio Carlo Alberto Foundation of Moncalieri in Turin, Italy.
Recent and Current Projects
Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power in Historical Institutionalism (edited with James Mahoney). This book provides a new historical-institutional framework for explaining incremental forms of institutional change. Drawing on contributions that explore a wide range of substantive outcomes across diverse empirical settings, the introduction offers new propositions about the connections among specific types of institutions, strategies for change, and modes of gradual institutional transformation.
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How
Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany,
Britain, the United States and Japan, Cambridge University
Press (2004). Winner of the 2006 Mattei Dogan Award of the Society
for Comparative Research for the “best book published in the
field of comparative research in 2004-05, and co-winner of the 2005
American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation
Award for "the best book published in the United States during
the previous year on government, politics or international affairs."
The institutional arrangements governing skill formation are widely
seen as constituting a key element in the institutional constellations
that define distinctive “varieties of capitalism” across
the developed democracies. This book explores the origins and evolution
of such institutions in four countries—Germany, Britain, the
United States, and Japan. It traces cross-national differences in
contemporary training regimes back to the 19th century, and specifically
to the character of the political settlement achieved among employers
in skill-intensive industries, artisans, and early trade unions.
The book also tracks evolution and change in training institutions
over a century of development. It uncovers important continuities
through putative "break points" in history, but also—and
more importantly, perhaps—provides insights into modes of
institutional change that are incremental but cumulatively transformative.
The study underscores the limits of the most prominent approaches
to institutional change and identifies the political processes through
which the form and functions of institutions can be radically reconfigured
over time.
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Beyond
Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies,
Oxford University Press (2005). This volume, edited together with Professor Wolfgang Streeck, was
based on a conference convened in December 2002 at the Max-Planck-Institut
für Gesellschaftsforschung in Cologne. The contributions focus
on contemporary changes in welfare state institutions in the developed
democracies (Europe, United States, and Japan). The introductory
chapter, co-authored with Streeck, draws on these contributions
and on a broader literature on institutions and institutional change
to develop a typology of diverse modes and mechanisms of incremental change. This book was featured in an invited "author meets critics" panel at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.
Institutional Change and the Politics of Social Solidarity in Advanced Capitalist Democracies. This collaborative project (joint with Cathie Jo Martin and Duane Swank) is concerned with the impact of recent pressures associated with globalization and the rise of the service sector on the institutional arrangements governing the political economies of the advanced capitalist democracies. The book proposes a new framework for analyzing the extent and direction of change in these political economies, and inquires into the political and institutional features that support continued high levels of solidarism in some (but not all) of the so-called coordinated market economies. In addition to a broad comparative analysis, the book examines in detail developments in three countries (Denmark, Germany, and Japan) over the past 30 years in labor market institutions, welfare regimes, and industrial relations.
Selected Publications
Books
Streeck, Wolfgang, and Kathleen Thelen, eds. Beyond Continuity:
Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies. Oxford
University Press (2005).
Thelen, Kathleen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy
of Skills in Germany, Britain, Japan and the United States. Cambridge
University Press (2004).
Thelen, Kathleen, with Sven Steinmo and Frank Longstreth, eds.
Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative
Analysis. Cambridge University Press (1992).
Thelen, Kathleen, Union of Parts: Labor Politics in Postwar
Germany. Cornell University Press (1991).
Selected Recent Articles and Chapters
P. Hall and K. Thelen. 2008. Institutional Change in Varieties of Capitalism. Forthcoming in Socio-Economic Review .
C. Martin and K. Thelen. 2007. The State and Coordinated Capitalism: Contributions of the Public Sector to Social Solidarity in Post-Industrial Societies, World Politics 60 (October), 1-36.
Thelen. K. 2007. Contemporary Challenges to the German Vocational Training System, Regulation and Governance 1: 3 (September), 247-260.
Thelen, K., with I. Kume. 2006. Coordination as a political problem
in coordinated market economies. Governance 19(1): 11-42.
A Japanese translation appeared in the political science journal
Leviathan.
Thelen, K. 2006. Institutions and social change. In Crafting
and Operating Institutions, eds. I., Shapiro and S., Skowronek.
New York: New York University Press.
Translated and published in abridged version as "Institutionen und Sozialer Wandel," in Jens Beckert et al., eds. Transformationen des Kapitalismus (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006).
Thelen, K., with C. van Wijnbergen. 2003. The paradox of globalization:
Labor relations in Germany and beyond. Comparative Political
Studies 36(8): 859-80.
Thelen, K. 2003. How institutions evolve: Insights from comparative-historical
analysis. In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences,
ed. J. Mahoney and D. Rueschemeyer, 208-40. New York: Cambridge
University Press. A French translation of the article, Comment les
institutions évoluent: perspectives de l'analyse comparative
historique, appeared in L'Année de la régulation
7.
Thelen, K. 2002. The political economy of business and labor in
the developed democracies: Agency and structure in historical-institutional
perspective. In Political Science: The State of the Discipline,
ed. I. Katznelson and H. Milner, 371-97. New York and Washington,
D.C.: W.W. Norton and American Political Science Association.
Thelen, K. 2001. Varieties of labor politics in the developed democracies.
In Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of
Comparative Advantage, ed. P. Hall and D. Soskice, 71-103.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Thelen, K. 2000. Timing and temporality in the analysis of institutional
evolution and change. Studies in American Political Development
14:102-109.
Thelen, K., with I. Kume. 1999. The effects of globalization on
labor revisited: Lessons from Germany and Japan. Politics and
Society 27(4): 476-504.
Thelen, K. 1999. Historical institutionalism in comparative politics.
Annual Review of Political Science 2:369-404. A Russian translation
of the article appeared in Oikoumene (Ukraine).
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