Kathleen Thelen is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is the author of Union of Parts: Labor Politics in Postwar Germany and co-editor of Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Her work on labor politics and on historical institutionalism has appeared in, among others, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, The Annual Review of Political Science, Politics and Society, and Comparative Politics. She is chair of the Council for European Studies, and serves on the executive boards of the Comparative Politics, European Politics and Society, and Qualitative Methods sections of the American Political Science Association. She has received awards and fellowships from the Max Planck Society, the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the Society for Comparative Research, the National Science Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt foundation, the American Scandinavian Foundation, and the German Academic Exchange Program.

• 1. The political economy of skills in comparative-historical perspective; 2. The evolution of skill formation in Germany; 3. The evolution of skill formation in Britain; 4. The evolution of skill formation in Japan and the United States; 5. Evolution and change in the German system of vocational training; 6. Conclusions, empirical and theoretical.

'This book should be required reading for every academic writing about, or conducting research into, skills. … I can thoroughly recommend this book.' Industrial Relations Journal