Critical Institutionalism in Studies of Comparative Capitalisms: Conceptual Considerations and Research Programme

Abstract

Despite the criticisms to which institutionalist approaches in Comparative Capitalisms research (CC) have been exposed in recent years (see Coates and Bruff et al., in this volume), it would be unfortunate, in our view, to discard them altogether for the comparative analysis of capitalism. Instead of ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’, we suggest that building upon established concepts within institutional research and further developing them in a critical spirit is a fruitful way of finding ‘new directions’ for CC scholarship. To argue this point, and to show how it might be accomplished, is the purpose of this chapter.