Social Structures of Accumulation: A Marxist Comparison of Capitalisms?

This chapter will examine whether a dialogue with the Marxist tradition of historical capitalist stages can serve to address a number of shortcomings in the Comparative Capitalisms (CC) literatures. In order to do so, I will first return to some common criticisms of the standard approaches to capitalist variation, which are particularly relevant for such a dialogue. Subsequently, the Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) framework will be described. Thereby, an argument will be made that the SSA framework develops an institutional approach which avoids the previously identified problems, partially because it emphasizes variation across time as well as variation across space. The strengths of the approach will be illustrated by a brief study of the recent economic development of Ireland before concluding.