Drawing on key theoretical approaches and empirical findings from economic sociology and comparative political economy, the course provides the essential elements for understanding and explaining capitalist heterogeneity across societies. The topics and readings that form the core of each session are divided into four main blocks. The first deals with the main arguments of different classical authors (Marx, Weber, Schumpeter, Polanyi, Bourdieu, Veblen). The second focuses on various approaches (institutionalism, varieties of capitalism, growth models) that explain capitalist heterogeneity in space and time. The third block considers power and politics as crucial elements that interact with economic forces and decisively influence the functioning of capitalism. Finally, the fourth block focuses on specific institutions (industrial relations systems, welfare states), actors (public intellectuals), and current trends (deindustrialization, tertiarization, inequality) that invite reflection on the future of capitalism.
By examining the interplay between macro- and micro-level processes, between material and ideational dimensions, between external constraints and individual agency, market economies are described, on the one hand, as historically shaped and regulated by a set of institutions. At the same time, these institutions are themselves created and reproduced by the individuals subject to them. Every economy and every organized form of political endeavor rests on an imagined order based on the belief of its constituent individuals in the existence of that very order. With particular reference to European democratic countries, capitalism is characterized as a consensual form of social organization based on democratic institutions that are accepted by the average citizen as the natural social fabric of society.
- Lehrende(r): Sinisa Hadziabdic