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This book is simply an excellent piece of work and required reading for anyone concerned with research on the comparative political economy of advanced industrial societies. It represents a major breakthrough in our understanding of the nature of the welfare state and the determinants of its emergence. It charts a new path for investi-gation in a field that has been more or less deadlocked over divergent findings and their implications for the validity of contending theoretical perspectives. It does so by conceptualizing three essentially different types of welfare states, with different combinations of state and market functions, and focusing on their social relevance, specifically their impact on decommodification, stratification, and the employment structure. The book is methodologically sophisticated in that it combines quantitative and comparative historical analysis. It also presents evidence based on data that required …