Fault and Fracture? The Impact of New Directions in Comparative Capitalisms Research on the Wider Field

Abstract

As David Coates notes in the previous chapter, we are currently in a paradoxical period. Peter Hall and David Soskice’s (2001) Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach dominated the Comparative Capitalisms (CC) landscape for at least a decade after its 2001 publication, but is clearly the product of a period in time which is now in the past. Nevertheless, the earlier dominance may well ensure that it is even more widely cited in the coming years. In this chapter, we wish to broaden the scope of critique to encompass the CC field, within which the VoC approach sits. This is because (to quote Coates) the ‘indirect source of legitimation’ now provided by the VoC approach is, in our view, strongly tied to its innovative and creative reworking of the neoinstitutionalist paradigm which came to the fore in the 1980s and 1990s. In other words, although the specific form of rationalist neoinstitutionalism embodied in VoC is no longer at the cutting edge of CC research, the neoinstitutionalist paradigm more generally has remained relatively dominant in scholarship on capitalist diversity. However, this ought not to be the end of the story for the CC field, for many of the limitations inherent to the VoC approach characterize neoinstitutionalist CC scholarship more broadly. Thus, there is a need to develop more fundamentally ‘new directions’ in research on capitalist diversity.KeywordsPolitical EconomyInstitutional ChangeHedge FundSocial PoliticsInternational Political EconomyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.