Capitalist diversity and variety: Variegation, the world market, compossibility and ecological dominance

Abstract

This article critiques the institutionalist literature on varieties of capitalism and the more regulationist comparative capitalisms approach. It elaborates the alternative concept of variegated capitalism and suggests that this can be studied fruitfully through a synthesis of materialist form analysis and historical institutionalism within a world-market perspective. It highlights the role of institutional and spatiotemporal fixes that produce temporary, partial, and unstable zones of stability (and corresponding zones of instability) within the limits of the crisis-prone capital relation, and illustrates this from the crisis of crisis-management in the Eurozone crisis.

The enclosure of “waste land”: Rethinking informality and dispossession

“…Yet capital needs first to socially construct other varieties as outside the dominant model. Here, it is important to stress that this process should not be understood as a mechanical outcome, but rather as the result of the uneven capacity of different private groups and the state to “use soft power, force, and domination to impose specific patterns of valorisation, appropriation and dispossession” (Jessop, , p. 54), in other words, the capacity to impose a specific variety of capitalism.…”

“…Second, it examines how this phenomenon resulted in an acceleration of the concentration and centralisation of capital in the community of recyclers and suggests that this brought about a complex social stratification with the emergence of owners of capital and wageworkers (Béja et al, ). While waste recycling grew into a mature industry, it also co‐existed and was unevenly interrelated with urban circuits of capital (Jessop, ). The section shows that the evolution of waste recycling has been a process co‐dependent on these circuits.…”

“…This is important to offer a new reading of the relationship between dispossession and informality. Rather than identifying informality as the other of the formal capitalist economy, the paper understands it as inherently linked and existing within the ecology of varieties of capitalism (Jessop, ). Following this line of argument, the paper extends concepts of dispossession to the analysis of processes operating both outside and within the capitalist space.…”

What do we know about cross-country comparative studies in HRM? A critical review of literature in the period of 2000-2014

“…At the same time, identifying ever more capitalist archetypes means that the impact of structural trends in the global capitalist ecosystem may be discounted (Jessop 2014). Hence, it is important to infuse into comparative approaches an awareness of the contemporary nature of world capitalism, and the multiple structural causes of the ongoing economic crisis.…”

Variegated capitalism, the Greek crisis and SYRIZA’s counter-neoliberalisation challenge

“…The review speaks to the broader literature on variegated capitalism (Brenner et al, 2010b;Dixon, 2010;Jessop, 2014;Peck and Theodore, 2007;Springer, 2011). Developed in reaction to the binary opposition between structuralist understandings of neoliberalism as an ''all-encompassing hegemonic bloc" and poststructuralist accounts that emphasise its ''radical contextual particularity", the variegated capitalism framework conceptualises neoliberalisation as ''a historically specific, unevenly developed, hybrid, patterned tendency of market disciplinary regulatory restructuring" (Brenner et al, 2010a: 330).…”