Baccaro and Howell place class actors and class power at the center of their argument. Since the end of the 1970s, we have witnessed “a marked shift in the balance of class power,” as “weakened and divided trade unions face resurgent and radicalized employers.”13 In making this case, Baccaro and Howell draw on the power-resources approach, which stresses the importance of the strategic context within which actors operate. Employers are fundamentally unruly, and they will seek an expansion of their discretion at the firm level and a liberalization of industrial relations institutions “unless they are constrained by the power of trade unions or the state. The pace, scale, and scope of liberalization will reflect the relative balance of power between labor and capital.” To recall, VoC scholars portray employers as both rational and strategic as well as cooperative and prosocial in their support of traditional institutions. For Baccaro and Howell, this is misleading: more often, employers play hardball with traditional institutions, transforming them from within. The state, they stress, is far from neutral in this process. On the contrary, it is “the most important agent of liberalization.” They stress that neoliberalism is “not about limiting state intervention …. It is instead about using state power to bring about (and institutionalize) a market order.”15 As Polanyi argued, interventionist states are indispensable for this project.