Deindustrialization

Decarbonization forces societies to cope with the restructuring and outright unwinding of assets, firms, workers, industries, and regions. We argue that this problem has created legitimacy for industrial policies managing the reallocation of resources. We illustrate this dynamic by documenting incremental state-building in the European Union, an administration institutionally tilted toward regulatory statehood and the making of the Single Market in energy since the 1990s. European greening policies, we argue, have incrementally lessened the primacy of regulatory tools and have introduced a plethora of instruments to accelerate green restructuring and carbon unwinding. Best understood as a process of multi-sited institutional layering, the European Union increasingly appears to complement financial and regulatory instruments to effect green energy transitions with the management of decline in targeted regions and sectors, based on targeted funds and targeted transition planning.

Together with Valentina Ausserladscheider and Philipp Golka I’m organizing a SASE mini-conference on the Socio-economics of asset stranding in Montréal in July 2025. If you’re working on climate change mitigation and adaptation please consider joining us. A detailed call can be found here.

Together with Valentina Ausserladscheider and Philipp Golka I’m organizing a SASE mini-conference on the Socio-economics of asset stranding in Montréal in July 2025. If you’re working on climate change mitigation and adaptation please consider joining us. A detailed call can be found here.

How do policy paradigms change? This article demonstrates that changing social imaginaries about economic growth enabled paradigmatic changes in USA corporate tax policy in the 1980s. Based on archival sources, it reconstructs how policy makers switched from focused support for capital-intensive smoke-stack industries towards support for emerging high tech-sectors between two major tax-bills in 1981 and 1986. This switch was made possible by the emergence of what we call the Silicon Valley imaginary—the idea that sound economic policies stimulate the reallocation of society’s resources towards new economic fields. The emergence of this social imaginary resulted from political realignments and changing notions of economic growth and justice. The search for sources of future economic growth and societal coalitions led policy-makers to appropriate ideas about the promises of new industries.

The paper demonstrates how the Reagan administrations deployed stories of national economic decline to raise popular support for neoliberal tax reform.