The varieties of capitalism theory revisited

Colin Crouch

Chapter 4 in Handbook of Comparative Political Economy, 2025, pp 87-101 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Studies of diversity among capitalist systems developed rapidly during the 1990s. Development of the approach called Varieties of Capitalism (VofC) at the start of the new century added a necessary theoretical basis to what had often been only empirical descriptions. It also continued an ongoing search for a very limited number of types. While this greatly aided subsequent studies of capitalist diversity, pressing all different forms into two or three types strained the limits of taxonomy. This was especially the case as research moved beyond the original heartlands of comparative political economy in Western Europe, Japan and North America. An alternative approach will be suggested here, which concentrates on a number of forms of governance, with the expectation that both varieties of capitalism and empirical cases will make use of combinations of governance forms. This also makes it easier to accept that individual countries might contain more than one form of economic governance and might not possess sovereignty over the forms of governance found within them, without sacrificing the need for a theoretical base.

Keywords: Varieties of capitalism; Market economies; Taxonomies; Governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035327775
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