ABSTRACT
Do the institutions of the archetypical social-corporatist countries in Nordic Europe have a future? Skepticism about social concertation has grown in recent years, in part due to the poor economic performance of some corporatist economies, notably Sweden and Finland in the early 1990s. Yet it also reflects the political trends of the 1980s and 1990s: skepticism toward collectivist economic solutions, an emphasis on new industrial relations and management methods that jeopardize collective wage agreements, and doubts about the viability of consensus-based economic policies. My chapter challenges this skepticism. I argue that Nordic corporatist institutions do have to change, but that they may in the end prove more long lived than is presently expected.
