The institutions around which the postwar German model has been constructed have increasingly been questioned both from within and from outside Germany, a transformation process which many observers have interpreted as cultural convergence to the currently hegemonic Anglo-American paradigm. Rather than representing change and resistance in Germany in terms of a transition from one stable cultural container to the other, the paper starts from a position which assumes the existence of different representations of the social economy at any moment in time, frameworks which compete for authority and hegemony. Conceptualizing this negotiation process as being constituted both discursively and materially, the paper shows that what is currently going on in Germany is neither institutional convergence nor sclerosis, but rather a contested process where different beliefs, ideas and views battle for hegemony and which has profound consequences for those subject to it.
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