Capitalism, institutions, and power in the study of business

Abstract

This chapter explores the contributions of historical institutionalist scholarship to understanding preference formation in business. It critiques the analytical drift of the literature away from some conceptual sites of essential political action in democratic capitalism: issues of power, common trends across capitalist countries, and the role of voters in structuring the character of political conflict among interest groups and political parties. The chapter proposes a governance space, defined by the two dimensions of political salience and institutional formality, as a way to combine insights about the importance of institutional context with the structurally uneven allocation of power resources in capitalism.