Conditionality was a central concern in the development literature of the 1990s. With the significant expansion of targeted public support to private firms since the Great Financial Crisis, the issue of conditionality has once again become a focal point in industrial policy debates. Despite the growing interest in the concept, the existing literature lacks a systematic conceptualization of conditionality within the context of industrial policy and does not outline the political factors that enable state actors to introduce it. This article addresses this gap by critically reviewing the existing literature and providing a systematic political economy of conditionality. We offer an overview of the literature on conditionality, examining different industries, historical periods, and national contexts. In doing so, we make three key contributions to the debate on industrial policy and regulatory instruments more broadly. First, we distinguish between two broad approaches to encoding conditionality in industrial policy: hard-coding and soft-coding. Next, we map the coalitional, institutional, ideational, and global contextual factors that facilitate conditionality. Finally, we present two vignettes of recent industrial policy initiatives in the European Union and the United States as illustrative cases. This conceptual exercise, intended to lay the foundation for future causal research on conditionality, demonstrates that the presence of conditionality is not merely a technical matter of political design but is instead shaped by configurations of political economy factors.

Decarbonization forces societies to cope with the restructuring and outright unwinding of assets, firms, workers, industries, and regions. We argue that this problem has created legitimacy for industrial policies managing the reallocation of resources. We illustrate this dynamic by documenting incremental state-building in the European Union, an administration institutionally tilted toward regulatory statehood and the making of the Single Market in energy since the 1990s. European greening policies, we argue, have incrementally lessened the primacy of regulatory tools and have introduced a plethora of instruments to accelerate green restructuring and carbon unwinding. Best understood as a process of multi-sited institutional layering, the European Union increasingly appears to complement financial and regulatory instruments to effect green energy transitions with the management of decline in targeted regions and sectors, based on targeted funds and targeted transition planning.

This paper contributes to Comparative Political Economy (CPE) by developing an analytical concept of corporate welfare. Corporate welfare—the transfer of public funds and benefits to corporate actors with weak or no conditionality—is a prominent form of state-business relations that CPE scholarship regularly overlooks and misinterprets. Such transfers should be understood as a structural privilege of business in a globalized post-Fordist capitalism, and an increasingly common strategy through which states attempt to steward national economic dynamism within a highly constrained range of policy options. However, without a well-developed concept of corporate welfare—premised upon the key criterion of conditionality—studies that identify a ‘return’ of the state in industrial planning misrepresent these transfers to business as a reassertion of state influence and control, rather than a reflection of state weakness and subordination. The paper provides the analytical building blocks to properly conceptualize transfers to business, works out the core challenges for empirical research, and provides empirical illustrations of this burgeoning phenomenon from the fields of unconventional monetary policy, privatization, and urban political economy.

How do policy paradigms change? This article demonstrates that changing social imaginaries about economic growth enabled paradigmatic changes in USA corporate tax policy in the 1980s. Based on archival sources, it reconstructs how policy makers switched from focused support for capital-intensive smoke-stack industries towards support for emerging high tech-sectors between two major tax-bills in 1981 and 1986. This switch was made possible by the emergence of what we call the Silicon Valley imaginary—the idea that sound economic policies stimulate the reallocation of society’s resources towards new economic fields. The emergence of this social imaginary resulted from political realignments and changing notions of economic growth and justice. The search for sources of future economic growth and societal coalitions led policy-makers to appropriate ideas about the promises of new industries.

The discipline of comparative political economy (CPE) relies heavily on aggregate, country-level economic indicators. However, the practices of multinational corporations have increasingly undermined this approach to measurement. The problem of indicator drift is well documented by a growing critical literature and calls for systematic methodological attention in CPE. We present the case for a rocky but ultimately rewarding middle road between indicator fatalism and indicator faith. We illustrate our argument by examining two important cases—Sweden’s recent export success and the financialization of non-financial corporations in France. A careful parsing of the data suggests corrections to common characterizations of the two cases. Swedish exports have been reshaped by intragroup trade among foreign subsidiaries of domestic corporations. The growth of financial assets held by French firms is attributable to the growth of foreign direct investment and to cumulative revaluation effects, while what remains of financialization is concentrated among the very largest firms. Based on these findings, we propose a methodological routine that parses data by zooming in on the qualitative specifics of countries, sectors, and firms, while using all available options for disaggregation.

Competition is a constitutive feature of capitalist societies. Social conflicts over the introduction, abolition and regulation of market organization are saturated with implicit moral arguments concerning the desirability of competition. Yet, unlike private property, exchange relations and social inequalities, economic competition has rarely been the explicit core of moral debates over capitalism. Drawing on a broad variety of social science literature, this article reconstructs, maps and systematizes ethical arguments about economic competition in capitalist societies. We discuss six contradictory rival views of economic competition and illustrate their influence by providing historical examples of the respective views in action in political-economic debates. This article serves as a mapping groundwork for reviving the systematic ethical debate on economic competition. In addition, our map of rival views lends itself to use as a structuring tool in empirical research on the moral economy and ideational embeddedness of capitalist societies, markets and firms.

The oil crisis of 1973/74 is commonly seen as the advent of state-led attempts to restructure rich societies’ energy infrastructures. Indeed, from a historical perspective, crises have repeatedly facilitated infrastructural transformations toward sustainability. But under what conditions can crises challenge existing orders and promote alternative infrastructures? Drawing on a historical vignette that reconstructs the public discourse emerging around the first oil crisis in the United States, this article proposes to reconsider the transformative potential of crises from a perspective focusing on the contested constitution of the future. We argue that the potential of crises to foster broader processes of infrastructural change is dependent on the capacity of actors to discursively challenge hopes and expectations inscribed in established infrastructures. As the example of the first oil crisis illustrates, crises are instances in which political actors engage in interpretative struggles to settle on whether disruptions present ‘real’ crises that require infrastructural transformation - or are mere accidents, errors, or irregularities that existent infrastructure can either withstand or requires only minor adaption as a result. In these discursive struggles, images of the future are contested on three layers: tangible experiences are linked to or detached from broader future consequences; potential causes are projected into the future or relegated to the past; and feasible future remedies are conceived or discarded. It is on these three layers of crisis discourse that the future is ‘opened up,’ and alternative infrastructures become conceivable.

This article builds on the literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and the sociology of expectations to engage in the discussion of how expectation alignment facilitates the development of novel technologies. While existing scholarship has elaborated on how expectations alignment is important to support technological development, it has not fully explored how the challenges of expectation alignment are translated into practices of expectation management and collective governance over the innovation process. Based on a range of archival sources, the article examines three historical episodes of photovoltaics development in locations that had spearheaded its development: the United States, Japan and Germany. Based on these historical episodes, the article suggests three core issues for the management of expectations in technological development: the creation, adaptation and materialization of shared imaginaries.

In this chapter, we discuss sociological analyses of expectations in the economy. Recognition of the social constitution of expectations advances the understanding of economic action under conditions of uncertainty and helps to explain key features of modern capitalist societies. The range of applications of the analytical perspective is illustrated by closer examination of three core spheres of capitalist societies: consumption, investment, and innovation. To provide an idea of crucial challenges of the approach, three research questions for the sociological analysis of expectations are presented.

Corporate concentration is currently being discussed as a core reason for the crisis of democratic capitalism. It is seen as a prime mover for wage stagnation and alienation, economic inequalities and discontent with democracy. A tacit coalition of progressive anti-monopoly critiques and small business promoters considers more deconcentrated corporate structures to be a panacea for the crisis of democratic capitalism, arguing that small firms in competition are better for employment, equality and democracy. This paper offers a brief outline of ideas of the anti-monopoly and small business ideal and critically evaluates whether a more deconcentrated economy may live up to these promises. While we agree that the plea for strengthened antitrust enforcement contains relevant and promising prospects for reform, our analysis concludes on a decidedly critical note. In particular, we caution against romanticized notions of the small capitalist firm.

Auf Basis der Rekonstruktion neo-pragmatistischer, bewegungstheoretischer und erwartungssoziologischer Argumente versuchen wir zu zeigen, dass Prozesse sozialer Sinnstiftung im zukunftsgerichteten Handeln helfen, nicht-institutionalisierte Kooperation zu erklärenDer Artikel entwickelt einen soziologischen Ansatz zum Verständnis der Rolle von Zukunftserwartungen im kollektiven Handeln. Er argumentiert, dass ein erwartungsbasierter pragmatistischer Ansatz Vorteile gegenüber etablierten sozialwissenschaftlichen Theorien in der Erklärung kollektiven Handelns in Episoden sozialen Wandels hat. Die Nützlichkeit der vorgestellten theoretischen Argumente illustriert eine Fallstudie zu technologischen Innovationen im amerikanischen Energiesektor.

Der Beitrag entwickelt eine pragmatistische Theorie technologischer Innovation. Anders als die Wirtschaftswissenschaften und der Mediendiskurs zum Unternehmertum, betont eine pragmatistische Perspektive die zentrale Rolle von Institutionen und kollektivem Handeln für die Entwicklung innovativer Problemlösungen. Somit erlaubt sie, das für die Entwicklung von technologischen Innovationen wichtige Wechselspiel zwischen Routinen, Irritationen und kreativem Handeln zu verstehen.

The paper demonstrates how the Reagan administrations deployed stories of national economic decline to raise popular support for neoliberal tax reform.

The paper compares competition policy reform in the United States and Europe. It argues that ideological and professional legacies in European antitrust agencies blocked the inflow of new concentration-friendly economic ideas into the field.

Social scientists often treat causal relationships as inherently symmetric: if an increase in X leads to an increase in Y, a decline in X will lead to a corresponding decline in Y. This paper challenges this conventional approach and argues that many causal relationships are in fact asymmetric, because their underlying mechanisms work in asymmetric ways. While researchers are aware of this in principle, it is often not reflected in research practice. Therefore, we call on social scientists to pay more attention to the possibility of asymmetric relationships in their theories and their empirical research. They otherwise run the risk of accidentally rejecting sound theories or accepting faulty ones. We develop a typology of different mechanisms generating asymmetry, demonstrate their empirical relevance by replicating empirical studies of electoral dynamics, discuss strategies to deal with asymmetry, and show the relevance of asymmetry for social analysis and political reform.

The paper compares technology policies for coal liquifaction and solar energy in the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that there’s a dilemma between commercializing specific technologies and supporting keeping technological options open.