Variegated Capitalism as an approach for understanding globalisation in the wake of COVID-19

Abstract

The various social and economic crises triggered by COVID-19 have revealed and reflected the many forms of contradictions, interdependencies and power asymmetries that underpin our current form of globalised capitalism. While Comparative Capitalisms approaches can provide useful insights into how national economies mediate crisis and how external forces can lead to shifts within domestic economies, these frameworks struggle with various theoretical and methodological limitations. This paper instead argues that Variegated Capitalism is better suited to analysing the effects of COVID-19 and, importantly, to understanding the COVID-19 crisis at a systemic level, by engaging with and integrating these levels of analysis in a wider examination of capitalism as a hegemonic global system. With this, we also aim to demonstrate that Variegated Capitalism provides an ambitious framework for analysing moments of globalised capitalism beyond the current conjuncture.

Dynamics in the automotive industry in Germany, Brazil and India – changes triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic

“…To anticipate the critique of supposedly static institutions, we are inspired by the tradition of social blocs (see also Handley/Martin 2023) and governance compromises (Amable 2003) in the 'wage-labour nexus' in which institutions mediate the tension between capital and labour in varying ways. Labour markets can also be highly segmented between a (shrinking) segment of protected and stable permanent workers, and a (growing) segment of unprotected, informal, and precarious workers.…”