Business Conflict and Theories of the State

Abstract

The value of the business conflict model lies in its detailed attention to tensions and contradictions within and among intraclass capitalist interests, as well as in the potential payoffs business conflict approach might provide toward a more concrete understanding of contemporary state institutions. The dominant positions within Marxist state theory have been instrumentalism and structuralism. This chapter argues that alternative pluralist and Marxist approaches are less adequate to the understanding of business conflict. The value and limitation of the state as an analytic concept has been a notably controversial topic among political scientists. Theoretically developing the business conflict model to address the problem of the state reveals a need for certain shifts of methodological emphasis. State theory is centrally concerned with interpreting the form and functions of a set of public institutions, while the business conflict model has been articulated primarily in the study of policy.