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.

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.

This chapter brings together arguments from economics, sociology, and political economy to show that innovation processes are characterized by a dilemma between the advantages of aligned expectations—including greater coordination and investment—and those of diversity, including superior openness to new technological possibilities. To illustrate the argument, the chapter discusses a historical case involving one of the largest coordinated peace-time attempts to hasten technological innovation in the history of capitalism, namely the US energy technology policies of the 1970s and 1980s. Close examination of the commercialization of photovoltaics and synthetic fuel initiatives illustrates both sides of the dilemma between shared versus diverse expectations in innovation: coordination but possible premature lock-in on the one hand, and openness but possible stagnation on the other. The chapter shows that even the exploration and interpretation of new technologies may be as much a product of focused investment as of trial-and-error search.

This paper discusses sociological analyses of the formation and role 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 core 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 core challenges of the approach, three major research questions for the sociological analysis of expectations are presented.

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.