The Proliferation of Capitalisms: Organized Capitalism, Disorganized Capitalism and Beyond

Abstract

The concern of sociologists to distinguish a number of different types of capitalism was noted earlier in Chapter 1. Moore’s (1967) comparison between capitalist democracy and reactionary forms of capitalism directs attention towards the varying political frameworks within which capitalist industrialization has taken place. Other approaches highlight the importance of differences in the cultural context, as in Abercrombie et al.’s (1986) contrast between ‘individualistic capitalism’ (which is treated as a norm in the literature) and the ‘non-individualistic capitalism’ found in countries such as Japan. The conclusion to be drawn from such analyses is that neither democracy nor individualism should be considered a defining characteristic of capitalism. In recent years, the focus of attention has shifted more to the distinction between different phases of capitalism, and this shift in perspective is particularly marked in debates around the transition from ‘organized’ to ‘disorganized’ capitalism. The linkage of organized capitalism to ‘Fordism’ in the sphere of production and disorganized capitalism to ‘post-Fordism’ is central to this distinction, but connections to changes in the political and cultural spheres have also been made. Offe, for example, suggests that disorganized capitalism can be seen as a phase in which there is a failure to maintain welfare state capitalism’s ‘dynamic balance between social power and political authority’ (1985, p. 6).