In the early 1990s, French officials viewed with some concern the emerging and innovative high-technology sectors of the U.S. and British marketplace. Fearful of falling too far behind, the French government implemented a vast array of policies -from tax incentives for investing in risky high-tech start-ups to new standards for electronic signatures -designed to promote the commercialization of new economy technologies in France. The efforts have turned French innovation policy on its head. Traditional government and bank-financed research and development were replaced by private venture capital. Professionals in France's technical elite -long accustomed to a secure career track in prestigious laboratories and industrial conglomerates -began moving into risky entrepreneurial ventures. New technologies, once developed exclusively by France's national champions of the marketplace, such as Ariane, Airbus, and Renault, began to be commercialized by technology start-ups. Efforts to promote the new economy, however, have proved politically and socially contentious. Many French policymakers and public intellectuals fear that regulatory liberalization might threaten or undermine state sovereignty. Gunnar Trumbull investigates France's experience in adapting to the requirements of innovation in the new information and communications technology (ICT) sectors by focusing on events over a six-year period, from 1996 to 2002. This short stretch of time proved a crucible for French leaders and businesspeople: it saw dramatic efforts at regulatory reform; a boom in technology start-ups, venture capital, and initial public offerings; the spread of the Internet; and then a collapse in the Internet market, accompanied by a broader economic decline. The new challenges of the ICT revolution were confronted, and new policies and practices were tested and stressed. The author describes France's new technology policy as both boldly new and familiarly French. He commends the French state for continuing to play a central role in shaping France's new economy and argues that the new reforms actually reinforce the role and autonomy of the state. Acknowledging that the government's solutions have not been elegant, Trumbull asserts that they nonetheless offer a workable accommodation of French values to the requirements of competitiveness in the new economy sectors and provide a model for others. Silicon and the State provides important new insight into the way France has worked to reconcile its traditions of state engagement and social solidarity with the challenges the country faces from new economy technologies.

Why did America embrace consumer credit over the course of the twentieth century, when most other countries did not? How did American policy makers by the late twentieth century come to believe that more credit would make even poor families better off? This book traces the historical emergence of modern consumer lending in America and France. If Americans were profligate in their borrowing, the French were correspondingly frugal. Comparison of the two countries reveals that America's love affair with credit was not primarily the consequence of its culture of consumption, as many writers have observed, nor directly a consequences of its less generous welfare state. It emerged instead from evolving coalitions between fledgling consumer lenders seeking to make their business socially acceptable and a range of non-governmental groups working to promote public welfare, labor, and minority rights. In France, where a similar coalition did not emerge, consumer credit continued to be perceived as economically regressive and socially risky.

Why did America embrace consumer credit over the course of the twentieth century, when most other countries did not? How did American policy makers by the late twentieth century come to believe that more credit would make even poor families better off? This book traces the historical emergence of modern consumer lending in America and France. If Americans were profligate in their borrowing, the French were correspondingly frugal. Comparison of the two countries reveals that America's love affair with credit was not primarily the consequence of its culture of consumption, as many writers have observed, nor directly a consequences of its less generous welfare state. It emerged instead from evolving coalitions between fledgling consumer lenders seeking to make their business socially acceptable and a range of non-governmental groups working to promote public welfare, labor, and minority rights. In France, where a similar coalition did not emerge, consumer credit continued to be perceived as economically regressive and socially risky.

Many consumers feel powerless in the face of big industry s interests. And the dominant view of economic regulators (influenced by Mancur Olson s book "The Logic of Collective Action, " published in 1965) agrees with them. According to this view, diffuse interests like those of consumers are too difficult to organize and too weak to influence public policy, which is determined by the concentrated interests of industrial-strength players. Gunnar Trumbull makes the case that this view represents a misreading of both the historical record and the core logic of interest representation. Weak interests, he reveals, quite often emerge the victors in policy battles.

Based on a cross-national set of empirical case studies focused on the consumer, retail, credit, pharmaceutical, and agricultural sectors, "Strength in Numbers" develops an alternative model of interest representation. The central challenge in influencing public policy, Trumbull argues, is not organization but legitimation. How do diffuse consumer groups convince legislators that their aims are more legitimate than industry s? By forging unlikely alliances among the main actors in the process: activists, industry, and regulators. Trumbull explains how these legitimacy coalitions form around narratives that tie their agenda to a broader public interest, such as expanded access to goods or protection against harm. Successful legitimizing tactics explain why industry has been less powerful than is commonly thought in shaping agricultural policy in Europe and pharmaceutical policy in the United States. In both instances, weak interests carried the day."

"The unfettered marketplace, in which uncertainty rules and the admonition caveat emptor ('let the buyer beware') dictates each consumer decision, has today virtually disappeared. Consumers have become the focus of intensive economic policymaking designed to protect them from the risks and disappointments of the market. . . . Today, arguably no other economic actor in the advanced industrial countries not the investor, not the worker, not the welfare recipient enjoys a more thorough set of legal and institutional protections than the modern consumer when he or she enters the corner store." from the IntroductionGunnar Trumbull investigates the origins of national systems of consumer protection in France and Germany, where, in the early 1970s, consumer groups and producers organized to advance their own ideas about the identity and interests of the affluent consumer. Through a comparison of eight areas of policy product liability law, product safety standards and recall, misleading advertising, comparative product tests, product labeling, quality standards, consumer contracts, and pricing Trumbull shows that different conceptions of the consumer interest emerged in the two countries. The result was the development of distinctive national consumption regimes, which have in turn influenced the market strategies of domestic producers. Trumbull's findings help to clarify distinctive national approaches to recent product crises including cases of BSE and genetically modified foods. His research suggests that, in the age of consumer capitalism, national competitiveness may hinge not only on endowments of labor and capital, but also on the institutional forms of national consumption."