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How societies organise economic activities is obviously crucial to their economic performance and the wellbeing of their members. As we have just seen, the French state took an early and intense interest in co-ordinating market activities. ‘The idea that the state is responsible for the public good is indeed a typically French idea which baffles most Anglo-Saxons’ (E. Suleiman). This attachment of the French to the vision of the state as the supreme arbiter of social processes and individual actions is put down to the country's historical legacy, its legal dispositions and, ultimately, its cultural preferences. But obviously, since France never attained the command economy stage, other institutions must be taken into consideration, those which operate the market or capitalist economy. A century ago Wilhelm Sombart (1863–1941) postulated a ‘weak disposition of the French towards capitalism’. While this still constitutes a controversial proposition with regard to the nineteenth century, it seems that the postwar development of the French economy has proved the founder of the German historical school wrong. To be sure, a deep distaste lingers in the national consciousness for commercial transactions, and anti-capitalist pronouncements are commonplace (as the popularity of anti-globalisation campaigner José Bové has shown recently). The French, however, like most people, are eager to secure the benefits of competition as consumers while safeguarding their money as producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It can be shown for all countries for which statistics exist that strikes are somewhat sensitive to the trade cycle – indeed it would be surprising if this were not so. DID I GO WRONG? Studies of the economic determinants of strikes (i.e., their relationships to the level of general economic activity) have not been based exclusively on unemployment. Actually, given the novelty of labor-force surveys in most industrialized countries, it was only in the postwar period that unemployment became the most commonly used cyclical indicator in empirical investigations of strikes. Various other economic series have been used as proxies for the business cycle: price and wage indices, the value of imported raw materials, industrial production, composite cyclical indicators, and GNP. The empirical evidence put forward in this literature strongly supports the hypothesis of a positive relationship between strike activity and the business cycle, however measured, with one major qualification: The number of strikes is the factor that is most sensitive to business-cycle fluctuations. The findings reported in Chapter 2 confirm that strike frequency in Italy was related to the movements of real wages and unemployment. These findings run counter to those reported by David Snyder (1975) in one of the few econometric analyses of Italian strike data. According to Snyder, there is no evidence in favor of an economic model of strikes for the Italian case. In order to address this discrepancy between Snyder's findings and my findings, in this chapter I will take up at greater length the question of economic determinants of strikes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]