(Page 9 of 33) - A Comparison of Critical Information Infrastructure Protection in the United States and Germany: An Institutional Perspective authored by Pommerening, Christine.

and associations. Their focus is the governance of and within industry sectors; for this
purpose, they develop a typology of the American economy in terms of technological
complexity and size. In this typology, a mix of governance mechanisms prevails, which is
constrained not only by size and technology, but also by general political and institutional
factors. Among those factors are the pattern of inter- and intra-industry competitiveness,
the relatively low capacity for collective (associational) action, and the selective strength
of the state.

The elaborate version of these public-private arrangements, corporatism, is particularly
prevalent in Europe, and has been prominently defined by Philippe Schmitter, again:

“a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a
limited number of singular, compulsory, non-competitive, hierarchically ordered and
functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state
and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in
exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of
demands and supports” (Schmitter, 1974: 13).

This type of institutionalized interest representation has created a specific mechanism of
coordination and cooperation that goes above and beyond articulation. It defines roles
and responsibilities towards capital and labor resources in a particular industry in the
context of the larger public and national interest. Corporatism was designed inter alia to
mitigate the disturbances created by fluctuations in the capital and labor markets that
endanger the stability of the established economic order and, by association, the political
system

. It can be argued that global threats to CII industries cause similar disturbances,

in particular if in addition to capital and labor, knowledge is seen as a third resource of
wealth (Drucker, 1992); (Bell, 1976).

From an international comparative point of view, which is part of this paper, the question
is also whether corporatist arrangements can transcend their particular national context.
Ottaway has tried to explore the general possibility of a global version of corporatism,
arguing that current modes of coordination in international issues indeed resemble the
long-established European model of tripartite cooperation (Ottaway, 2000). In contrast,
Cutler et al. contend that domestic corporatism cannot be replicated on the international
level because of lack of a concise definition of responsibilities. On the other hand, they
concede that the scale and scope of public-private institutional cooperation can relate
directly to certain political systems. Countries with a considerable level of corporatist
arrangements seem particularly willing to delegate power to international treaty and non-
governmental organizations (Cutler, Haufler, & Porter, 1999).

For the legitimate or legitimized, often historically derived influence of firms (or groups
of firms) on international economic governance, the same autors have coined the term
‘private authority’. They define private authority as the decision-making power over a
particular issue area that is regarded as legitimate and/or appropriate even in the absence
of government (Cutler et al., 1999). The ultimate basis of international private authority,
then, is pure interfirm cooperation, ranging from informal industry norms and practices,

This very function is what sets European-style corporatism apart from the Anglo-American tradition and

understanding of state and industry in a free market economy. In addition, there are general reservations
regarding corporatism since parts of the concept originate and were closely linked to the fascist regimes of
the 1930s (Luebbert, 1987).