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Industry And Politics In West Germany: Toward The Third Republic

Edited by Peter J. Katzenstein
Reviewed by By William Diebold, Jr.
Spring 1990
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Edited by Peter J. Katzenstein
Cornell University Press
1989
363 pp.
$49.50

Most of this valuable and original book is made up of studies by German academics on changes in major West German industries during the postwar period. The best chapters are the most detailed and concrete, since the processes of adaptation are subtle and complex, involving new technology, industrial organization, foreign competition, labor-management relations, government help and hindrance, and the pressures of environmental and social movements. To draw conclusions from this dense and sometimes convoluted book is not easy, but this task is bravely undertaken by the editor, a professor at Cornell, in two interesting chapters that relate change to continuity and existing institutions and try to look ahead.

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