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A constructivist account of varieties of capitalism : state interventions into naïve theories of British and German home ownership and mortgage markets
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Jacoby, Ben M. (2012) A constructivist account of varieties of capitalism : state interventions into naïve theories of British and German home ownership and mortgage markets. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2680384~S1
Abstract
This thesis offers a constructivist framework to set out political features in capitalist
diversity that the current literatures on „Varieties of Capitalism‟ and „Comparative
Capitalisms‟ have not fully shed light into so far. Taking these scholarly contributions
as a starting point, I argue that their investigations are able to highlight the
distributional outcomes in terms of which actors relatively benefit from a particular
socio-economic setting. However, that they have difficulties to point to the political
aspects of different models of capitalism that relate to their constitutive nature. I then
suggest a method that is able to underline how the very understandings of the
individual economic subject and of the state are themselves political as their
definitions marginalise alternatives ways to make sense of these economic concepts.
Starting from the indeterminacy of the human mind and the theoretically many ways
to interpret the lived environment according to sets of „naïve theories‟, it builds on the
recent developments in constructivist institutionalism to present an account that puts
the individual-state relationship at its core. As such, it breaks with the focus on
production prevalent in the literature, and enables analysis of the normative depiction
of a particular ideal-typical type of economic subject that then engages with consumer
markets. What becomes essential is the exact ways in which a particular
understanding of the state in the eyes of policy-makers leads to the facilitation of
certain definitions of economic agency and market mechanisms, and the exclusion of
their alternatives. The empirical chapters then apply this framework to the cases of the
British and German home ownership and mortgage markets (1997-2007) to explore
the discursive framing patterns that were put forward to legitimate a particular
definition of the ideal-typical home owner and mortgagee in these two economies.
Through the study of parliamentary debates, the findings demonstrate not only that
differences exist in the conceptualisations of the economic subject, but hence also the
political character of such differences as excluding each other. At the same time, such
a process is shown to be deeply political in terms of the policy instruments that are
not considered due to particular taken-for-granted conceptions of policy-makers
themselves. In short, this constructivist account showcases the multiplicity of political
aspects with regards to state interventions in contemporary capitalist economies.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory J Political Science > JC Political theory |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Home ownership -- Political aspects -- Great Britain, Home ownership -- Political aspects -- Germany, Capitalism -- Political aspects -- Great Britain, Capitalism -- Political aspects -- Germany, Mortgage loans -- Great Britain, Mortgage loans -- Germany | ||||
Official Date: | September 2012 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of Politics and International Studies | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Clift, Ben; Watson, Matthew, Ph.D | ||||
Sponsors: | Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg (FNR) (TR-PHD BFR08-053) ; University of Warwick | ||||
Extent: | 496 leaves. | ||||
Language: | eng |
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