Theories, Tensions, Controversies

Abstract

Abstract The chapter critically reviews the theories, tensions, and controversies surrounding the study of state capitalism. To the students, researchers, and practitioners who are new to the field, this chapter will provide a useful overview and introduction of recent scholarship and debates on the new state capitalism. How has the ‘new’ state capitalism been theorized and explained? In exploring this question, the chapter synthesizes key arguments and identifies surprising silences and omissions, in four bodies of literature: strategic management, comparative capitalism, development studies, and global political economy. It notes difficulties in theorizing how state capitalism differs from other forms of capitalism, as well as problematic geographical assumptions concerning the nature and scale of state capitalism. Explanations tend to focus on the rise of a nationally scaled and relatively coherent variant of capitalism. These assumptions about the spatialities of the new state capitalism restrict readings of its rise and significance. Importantly, they leave little appreciation for the various forms of interconnections, inter-referentiality, and combination that may exist between the new repertoires of state intervention across the territorial borders of nation-states. They also preclude a reflection on the historic development and self-transformation of global capitalism, such as planetary mutations in the spheres of production, circulation, and distribution of value. This points to the need for an explicitly geographical approach, one that allows probing into the multiple spatialities (beyond nation-state centric territoriality) and temporalities (beyond that of catch-up development and crises) at the core of contemporary state capitalism.