Sectors in Modern Capitalism: Modes of Governance and Variations in Performance

Abstract

‘Capitalism is a moving target’. This seems so obvious as to be hardly worth repeating, but the implications of such an observation have rarely been explored, much less been incorporated systematically into our explanatory models and theories. ‘Its’ science, the discipline of economics, is usually presented as a singular and consistent body of steadily accumulated knowledge, without epistemological or theoretical breaks due to discontinuities in its subject matter.¹ In ordinary language, we rarely refer to ‘capitalisms’ in the plural,² and the most common qualifier we place in front of the singular noun is just the name of a country or a people: American capitalism, German capitalism, Bolivian capitalism, and even (more recently) Soviet capitalism. Efforts to specify fixed sequential stages of capitalism; mercantile, industrial, financial and post-industrial; or local competitive, national monopolistic, state monopolistic and trans-national monopolistic, have not proven very fruitful analytically, although they have occasionally been quite effective politically. Perhaps the most useful device for breaking up the subject matter and producing meaningful sub-categories for analysis has been to impose a simple temporal distinction between early, later, delayed, late, even late-late and delayed-late capitalisms. Alexander Gerschenkron and Albert Hirschman (among others) have argued convincingly that the the timing of capitalist development has a significant impact upon both the role of institutions and the strategy of actors (Gerschenkron, 1962; Hirschman, 1958).