Contradictions, Crisis, and Capitalist Institutionalist Diversity

Institutionalist political economy did not prepare us well for the global financial crisis.  The crisis changes fundamentally both the context in which we analyse capitalist institutional diversity and the patterns of diversity that capitalist institutions exhibit.  This panel asks how.  Panellists will reflect on whether it is still useful to refer to distinct national varieties of European capitalism and, if so, the extent to which the hindsight the crisis now affords us might lead us to reconsider both the categories we have used to map such diversity and the expectations generated by finding that a particular capitalism ‘belongs’ to a particular variety.  It asks how we might develop an analysis of capitalist institutional diversity more attuned and sensitive to disequilibrating dynamics and the contradictions which characterise such diversity just as much as the synergies on which we have lavished so much analytical attention in recent years.