of bureaucratization), and the institutionalization of controls needed to ensure the maintenance of legal order” (Arnason 2005, 33; see also Brand 2006; Jessop 2007; Leibfried and Zürn 2006; Mann 1998; Offe 2006). With regard to economic policy, moreover, it it possible to distinguish between market-creating, market-regulating, and market-restricting measures.
State power can be analyzed as the product of processes mediated by both institutions and discourse within shifting societal power constellations. The objective is therefore to disaggregate the state and examine the characteristics of local government apparatuses, for instance. At the same time, the reliance of the modern “tax state” on material income results in a link between political and economic institutions. Various approaches fail to take sufficient account of the close link between the state and the economy in capitalist-driven societies, and this applies not only to the case of China. State institutions may be based on reproduction criteria that differ from those of modern companies. The latter have to assert their financial strength and hence profitability, while the state has to assert its dominance toward the populace and other countries. Generally speaking, however, the state and the economy form a nexus characterized by structural interdependencies. The paradigm of structural interdependencies “insists … that state action always plays a major role in constituting economies, so that it is not useful to posit states as lying outside of the economic activity” (Block 1994, 696).13 Often seen as an “external” force, the government must therefore be viewed as a fundamental component of capitalist systems—despite the fact that state institutions have been able to achieve greater independence in the past than these hypotheses would initially lead us to believe.14 The overlapping areas of responsibility of the state and its sedimented institutional properties form distinct political systems—such as liberal democracy or, in the case of China, the party-state. In a capitalist system, the state does not necessarily have to follow representative democratic principles.
(7) The contradictory development dynamics of capitalist-driven societies should also be seen as the result of the struggle between market forces or processes of commodification and the desire for social security as well as legal, political, and social recognition that continually arises in the social lifeworlds of the subordinated. According to Polanyi, capitalist dynamics as anonymously linked trade systems (“satanic mills”) destroy permanent social connections and constitute a fundamental contradiction between capitalist development and the requirements for an intact lifeworld (Polanyi 2001). Should the market—in an expanded sense the production relationships—encroach on the foundations of social reproduction, this would inevitably trigger the mobilization of social forces of self-protection, either covert or open. In the capitalist-driven modern era, this self-protection is characteristically expressed as social and political struggles within (and about the politics of) the state and in attempts to institutionalize class conflict (Wright 1997).
Consequently, in contrast to a perception of political processes in nonliberal democratic societies exclusively as a result of functional problem solving dictated from above, the present work aims to illustrate how social power structures and class conflicts played a central role also in China’s past development. Class conflict, for example, could bring about market-limiting measures and improvements in labor and social standards. This illustrates the importance of examining mobilizing, societal actors here. In the case of China, a number of such phenomena can be identified. Arguments are being postulated, however, that, because of the fact that its values contradicted those of the Christian countries of Europe, Chinese history lacks the concepts of autonomy that would form the basis required for a struggle for “fair” wages or social security, for example.
As the next section shows, my research framework requires a definition of institutions that factors in the level of targeted human action over and above mere structuralism.15
Institutions, Historical Change, and the Sociocultural Embedding of Capitalism
The subsequent sections look at how I have approached the issue of the relationship between structure and action, on the one hand, and path-dependent and path-forming development processes, on the other hand. This is followed by an account of various concepts that will aid the examination of gradual institutional change and the introduction of historical and sociocultural traditions from China and East Asia, which I then integrate into my analysis in a nonculturalist manner.
STRUCTURES, STRATEGIC CAPACITIES, AND CHANGE
In societies where capitalism prevails, social actors are subject to external imperatives to act. Unlike orthodox liberal explanations, which postulate a balance of rational individual choices, such constraints result in practices that are not merely the result of intentional action. For this reason, relationships between structure and action (as well as their meaning) have to be looked at dialectically, as it were (Hay 2002). In addition, the different strategic capacities of social actors—the difference between Chinese migrant workers and influential entrepreneurs, for example—also have to be taken into account because such differences result in an uneven playing field for conscious or strategic intervention.
Human labor power is marked by its creative ability to recognize problems and find innovative ways of solving them. This creative ability is one of those phenomena that are difficult to capture in theory, let alone predict. Similarly, entrepreneurial innovations are difficult to comprehend rationally and, indeed, often come about as a result of spontaneous ideas, or even by chance, during search and learning processes (see Sauer and Lang 1999). Innovations require conditions that, in most cases, do not exist at the moment of innovation, which is why there is only a limited scope to calculate risks rationally. For societal dynamics under capitalism, it is important that not only the socially privileged but also the middle and lower social classes attempt to seize opportunities for advancement: “The exceptional level of commitment or motivation that capital valorization is based on can only be achieved with a strong focus on advancement” (Deutschmann 2009b, 47, my translation). Thus, to facilitate an examination of political economies, the actors’ normative orientation must be factored in. An analysis of social structures must always take into account actors’ options and strategies, as well as their motivation and perceptions:
In stressing the interdependence and co-evolution of … interrelated semiotic (cultural) and extra-semiotic (structural) moments in complexity reduction and their consequences for meaning-making and social structuration, [one can] avoid two complementary theoretical temptations. The first is seen in different forms of structuralism and social determinism, which reduce agents and actions to passive bearers of self-reproducing, self-transforming social structures…. The second temptation is the sociological imperialism of radical social constructivism, according to which social reality is reducible to participants’ meanings and understandings of their social world. (Jessop 2009, 8–9)
Unlike analyses where historical developments are ordered within the tight frame of reference to capitalist development logic, drivers of capitalism should generally be examined within the context of their historical change. In reality, structural dynamics and imperatives to act are shaped by social and political strategies, that is, strategies based on normative motivation, including the power elite’s strategic projects. The latter may possess the power to form structures. Drivers of capitalism must not be viewed in a functionalist light as they are embedded in social, political, and other sociocultural institutions and processes.
On the one hand, specific traditions and social structures give political economies distinctive foundations for economic action. In relation to the postcommunist regimes in Russia and Central Europe, for instance, Eyal, Szelényi, and Townsley refer to path dependencies that fuel the continued existence of what they refer to as “political capitalism.” This can also apply to China’s recent history:
Political capitalism is capitalism in the sense that it is oriented towards the rational acquisition of profits, but it is political because this happens under the tutelage of the state and/or in conditions of systematic political interference in the economic system. There are many reasons why managers who have become owners might
