Towards a critical, global Comparative Political Economy

There is no abstract, but this is a representative paragraph from the introduction:

'What unites the different chapters is that they transcend the previously near-hegemonic position of Hall and Soskice’s Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach. This means that the gravitational pull exerted by VoC’s founding principles – an emphatic focus on the national level and on the influence of institutional factors relating to business behaviour and economic efficiency – is weakening (see Coates and Bruff et al. in this volume). Where ‘second generation’ attempts at renewing the VoC approach had given rise to mere ‘incremental’ theoretical innovations without hurting the theoretical core of the approach, the chapters which have formed part of this collection respond – each in their own way – to the observations made by David Coates in his chapter. That is, such incremental refinement of VoC and similar approaches will not help us to understand the present reality of capitalist crisis and contestation and even the possible return of capitalist models to their established trajectories.'