State: Developmental or Competition?

Abstract

The purpose of this book is to explain the weaknesses of the Irish model. Chapters 4 and 5 have surveyed the principal theoretical approaches to analysing that model and identified their limitations. For the dominant readings, these limitations relate to the narrow and fragmented focus of much of the economic and sociological analyses and the utilitarian and individualist assumptions that inform them, particularly in terms of the relationship of the economy to society. As was argued in Chapter 5, the critical readings offer a broader and more satisfactory examination that overcomes many of these limitations; yet weaknesses remain in terms of the theorisation of the nature and role of the state, of the understanding of the productive economy that informs some, though not all, of the works covered, and the causal connections between state and market on the one hand and social outcomes on the other. Chapter 6 has outlined a theoretical approach that seeks to overcome these limitations, with a particular focus on making explicit the bases for theorising the relationship between political economy configurations (namely how state and market interrelate) and processes of egalitarian social development, in the context of today’s more globalised world in which the national and the international interpenetrate one another.

Contemporary Ireland is an exemplar of the competition state, where social policy is subordinated to the needs of the economy.

Nigel Boyle (2005: 16)