Comparing Capitalisms: Debates, Controversies and Future Directions

Abstract

Various strands of the comparative capitalisms (CC) literature agree that the advanced economies have liberalized in recent years, bringing with it rising income and wealth inequality and job insecurity; although these perspectives differ in important ways, there is much common ground between them to explain this heightened level of inequality and insecurity. Through reviewing contributions to three key CC perspectives since 2007/2008, we argue that they have tended to focus on developments in co-ordinated market economies, leading to a neglect of growing structural crises in liberal market economies, which have contributed to the UK and the USA entering uncharted socio-political waters. We extend recent work that emphasizes how variation between countries in labour-market institutions, different corporate forms and states’ fiscal policies help to explain income and wealth inequality to highlight future research agendas that seek to combine more systematically these institutional areas to explain social inequalities, workers’ experiences and socio-political crises within capitalist systems.

From ‘Varieties of’ to ‘Variegated’ entrepreneurship: Understanding heterogeneous and interrelated contexts through a Polanyian lens

“…Given the evident tensions in the VoE approach it is useful at this juncture to examine theoretical developments that have taken place in disciplines further ahead in their application of the VoC framework. Since its inception VoC has been scrutinised by political economists, sociologists and economic geographers who have added more detail and nuance to the original LME:CME binary (Hay, 2020;Jessop, 2012;Peck & Theodore, 2007;Wood & Allen, 2020). Their different versions that develop and complement VoC's original formulation, may be applied to further our understanding of entrepreneurship.…”

“…Jones and Strom (2018) illustrate how Japanese and Chinese firm decisions to internalise business services rather than use external contractors were a result of local institutional, corporate and socio-cultural contexts interacting with the wider global economy. Moreover, the legal and financial structures of powerful global companies take them beyond the remit of national institutional influences, whereby organisations such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple organise themselves to avoid government taxation systems to weaken the influence of national institutional structures, or avoid them altogether (Wood & Allen, 2020).…”

“…Organisations apply pressure for institutional change through lobbying activity (Jackson & Deeg, 2019). MNCs have been compared to nations with powers to set the rules and influence institutional structures at a national and international levels (Dicken, 2003), or by structuring themselves to minimize national governments' ability to tax them weakening or avoiding the influence of national institutions altogether (Wood & Allen, 2020).…”

Digital markets, competition regimes and models of capitalism: A comparative institutional analysis of European and US responses to Google

“…The comparative capitalism literature has progressed substantially since Hall and Soskice’s contribution (see reviews by Jackson and Deeg, 2008; Morgan and Kristensen, 2014; Wood and Allen, 2020; Kornelakis, 2018). More recent work has expanded the ‘universe of cases’ looking at a wider set of countries and business systems, beyond the standard Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member-states (Fainshmidt et al., 2018; Hotho, 2014; Witt et al., 2018).…”

The role of socio-economic embeddedness in promoting cooperation in the workplace: Evidence from family-owned Italian firms

“…Although Bélanger and Edwards also draw on research from countries such as Germany, Sweden and Austria, the elaboration of the conditions for cooperation remains mainly based on studies in the UK and the US. Typically, Anglo-American firms share a number of contextual attributes: many are large organizations, are usually listed on stock markets, and operate within institutionally permissive labour market regimes that privilege short-term shareholder value (Thompson, 2003; Wood and Allen, 2020).…”