Berk, GeraldJeung, Yongwoo2020-09-242020-09-242020-09-24https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25592This dissertation delves into the American state’s capabilities by examining its experiments with corporatism and labor training during the 1960s. The dissertation relies on the frameworks of layering, patchwork, intercurrence, and entrepreneurship from various disciplines including comparative historical analysis, historical institutionalism, American Political Development, and the school of political creativity. The dissertation first challenges the mainstream view that regards as impossible any tripartite bargaining among U.S. labor, management, and the state. The United States experimented with the unique tripartite committee—the President’s Committee on Labor-Management Policy—in the early 1960s to address emerging problems such as automation and intractable industrial conflicts. The tripartite committee, created by Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, was to provide a new deliberative platform to labor, management and the state. The experiment was short-lived due to reignited turf wars between labor and management. The failure paved the way toward further encroachment on collective labor rights and the uneven rise of individual employment rights. It also contributed to the Kennedy administration’s transition in its policy orientation from conventional Keynesianism with public spending to the unconventional macroeconomic measure of cutting taxes. The dissertation also challenges previous literature that sees the American state’s fundamental limitation in implementing interventionist social and welfare policy. By examining the origins and evolutions of the War on Poverty (WOP) training programs, I reveal that the legislative history of various manpower programs was a patchwork of improvisational responses to national and regional change. From the Johnson administration’s attempts to update WOP programs to respond to the inflation of 1965, the issue of unemployed adults, and Martin Luther King Jr’s request to “hire now, train later,” I claim that the fragmented nature of the American state could promote new solutions to new problems. This study contributes to American political development scholarship by providing a non-Weberian optimistic perspective in analyzing the American state. It shows how entrepreneurial politics can promote reform in the fragmented structures of the American state, shedding light on the ways of continuously recalibrating the American state’s capacity. This dissertation includes previously published material.en-USAll Rights Reserved.EntrepreneurshipJob TrainingLayeringPatchwork and intercurrenceU.S. Tripartite ExperimentWar on PovertyElectronic Thesis or Dissertation