Creating Cooperation

Pepper D. Culpepper is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is coeditor of The German Skills Machine: Sustaining Comparative Advantage in a Global Economy.

David Soskice and Peter Hall's agenda-setting edited volume Varieties of Capitalism appeared in 2001, and much of the work that appeared as chapters there is now beginning to appear as the first books of assistant professors. Pepper Culpepper's superb, theoretically literate, and empirically well researched comparative monograph is one of these.... Culpepper is a deeply learned and widely read scholar, very aware of the steps he is taking and, as a result, constantly stopping to address potential alternative explanations and challenges to his research design, empirical argument, and theoretical line of thought. I highly recommend Creating Cooperation to anyone interested in the problem of cooperation in general, rational choice versus constructivism in political economy, and the specific politics of human capital creation in contemporary Europe. This is a fascinating and bold book on many levels.(Perspectives on Politics) This book deepens our understanding of how to foster what might be deemed 'positive' cooperation in public policy reform. This is a book that will appeal to those interested in the study of human capital policies in Europe and intrigued about the sources of social cooperation. It is a detailed, well-researched analysis that successfully illustrates why, as problems of decentralized cooperation arise across the industrialized world, we need to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the conditions that foster successful cooperative public policy.- Paul Riseborough (EU Policy Network)