The theme issue ‘Making Space for the New State Capitalism’ brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series of papers published in three ...installments, each accompanied by an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the second of these introductory commentaries, we explore the consequences of embracing relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development, together with the second group of papers. Introducing a final group of papers, the third installment will address the challenges and opportunities of thinking conjuncturally.
This intervention responds to a series of articles—including one published in Antipode—on what is referred to as “new” state capitalism (NSC) or sometimes, simply, state capitalism. Our overarching ...argument is that by eliding state and institutionalist theory and, specifically, separating the analysis of state transformation from the power and leverage of social forces under late capitalism, NSC scholars end up offering an inaccurate, inchoate and incoherent conceptualisation and analysis of important phenomena. Our contention is that future work needs to return to socio‐relational analyses of the state, prioritising the power and leverage of social forces operating under patterns of accumulation characterised by more‐integrated‐than‐ever‐before global economic‐market relations and the concentration of productive and financial capital.
Drawing from institutional polycentrism, we advance understanding of how affiliation with different government levels influences innovativeness and profitability in emerging countries. Our framework ...suggests that as different government levels vary in their objectives and resources, they affect firm innovativeness vis-à-vis profitability in qualitatively different ways. The analysis of 18,430 Chinese firms shows that affiliation with higher-level governments enhances firms’ innovativeness, whereas affiliation with lower-level governments is effective for enhancing profitability. Our framework also clarifies how location-specific institutional substitution occurs, indicating that the usefulness of government affiliation for innovativeness depends on how effectively legal institutions protect intellectual property in each region.
The article explores the role of state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) in the globalisation of China's infrastructure capital. Examining how accumulation strategies of Chinese SOEs are driven by a complex ...set of political and economic, state and private, interests, it foregrounds the inherently hybrid nature of China's state capitalism. We use Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) as a case study to analyse how state infrastructure capital traverses borders, and the specific ways that contradictions of accumulation in China are relocated through the improvised hybridity of SOEs. In Kenya, China Road and Bridge Corporation, the main SGR contractor, shifted and adapted its strategies as the pursuit of economic productivity gave way to political priorities in China, simultaneously responding to changing socio‐political circumstances in Kenya and across East Africa. Analysing these dynamics, we highlight the contingencies of, and limitations to, structural reorganisation of actually existing forms of state capitalism in China and beyond.
This paper comments on the unexamined bifurcation of new state capitalism studies into two camps: changes in liberal capitalism and analyses of illiberal state forms. I characterize these aspects as ...Lazarus meets Loch Ness: Lazarus-like when focused on the ever-reborn market interventions of the liberal capitalist state, and Loch Ness-like in its rediscovery of the resurfaced ‘other.’
Rethinking d/Development Mawdsley, Emma; Taggart, Jack
Progress in human geography,
02/2022, Letnik:
46, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
A dialectical relationship between ‘big D’ Development (broadly, the formal interventionist, international Development sector) and little ‘d’ development (the immanent structures and processes of ...capitalism) is a concept widely invoked in Geography and Development Studies. In this paper, we ask how the d/Development dialectic is evolving under current conjunctures of emergent state capitalism(s). We suggest that, going beyond ‘containment’, Development is ever more deeply inhabited by (capitalist) development; with implications for its palliative and restructuring roles, and for praxis, contestation and transformation.
State Ownership and Political Connections Tihanyi, Laszlo; Aguilera, Ruth V.; Heugens, Pursey ...
Journal of management,
07/2019, Letnik:
45, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The influence of the state on firms in the global economy is alive and well. States have become dominant owners of companies in many countries around the world. Firms have also increasingly ...established political connections to access resources and improve their competitive positions. Nonetheless, our understanding of how state ownership and political connections affect firm performance remains limited and marked by conflicting findings. Using meta-analytical techniques on a sample of 210 studies spanning 139 countries, we examine two key research questions: (a) How do state ownership and political connections affect firm strategies and financial performance? and (b) How does firm-level strategic decision making mediate the relationships between state ownership, political connections, and firm financial performance? Our findings show that state ownership has a small negative effect on firm financial performance and that political connections have no direct consequences for performance. However, we find evidence that both state ownership and political connections have a profound effect on the strategies firms pursue, such as financial leverage, R&D intensity, and internationalization, and that these strategies play a mediating role in the state ownership–firm performance relationship. We conclude with some suggestions for fruitful future research in further connecting these two important and timely research fields.
Official discourses of Development are being redefined. If the key geopolitical contexts shaping the post‐war Development project were decolonisation and the Cold War, the defining world‐historical ...transformations shaping the emerging vision of Development are the expansion of state capitalism and the rise of China. The IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the G20, other multilaterals, and bilateral partners are increasingly taking stock of the rise of state capitalism, and acting as ideational vectors of this emerging regime. However, this new “state capitalist normal” is also portrayed as carrying risks. There is anxiety regarding the direction the political form of global capital accumulation is heading: with the unchecked proliferation of state capitalism possibly blunting competition, politicising economic relations, and intensifying geoeconomic tensions. This anxiety underwrites the current re‐articulation of Development, one which embraces the state as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital; even as it critiques China’s use of similar instruments.
CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping has overseen a significant transformation of China's domestic economic system, undergirded by important new reforms that have drastically expanded the reach of the ...Chinese state into the economy and Chinese firms. This has included the integration of CCP organizations into public and private firms, the regulatory shift of SASAC from "managing enterprises" to "managing capital," and the role of government guidance funds in driving industrial policy. The overall change in China's economic and regulatory structure – and the political control wielded by the CCP – combined with the Xi era blending of the public and private, and market and planning, is of such a proportion that it marks a new paradigm in China's development trajectory.
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