Analysis of Blim's (2000) Capitalisms in Late Modernity

Neo-Weberian, neo-institutional and neo-Marxist approaches to the analysis of modernity make increasing contributions to understanding the structural variability in modern societies. By the end of 1990s the research of capitalism has gained wide currency in anthropology. Over the second half of the 20th century the anthropological contribution to the scholarship of capitalism has exhibited four-fold increase. Though not all anthropological research contributes to "understanding of capitalism in the late modern world" (p. 26) in equal manner, in the 1990s there has occurred a structural shift in the anthropological investigation of modernity. Three sets of alternative interpretative approaches to the late capitalism originate in revised application of Marxist, Weberian, and institutional economic explanatory schema that give to respective anthropological accounts their advantages and disadvantages pertaining to each approach. These neo-institutional, neo-Weberian, and neo-Marxist approaches, however, have arisen in the context of mutual awareness by the researchers pursuing various explanations of capitalist transformations in the late 20th century, which lends common theoretical ground to the three approaches.

Weber (1978: 164-65) theorizes capitalism as phenomenon grounded in a variety of historically specific types that included not only free markets but also state monopolies, political favoritism, and colonialism that as forms of causal explanation of particular economic structures are just a sub-set of possible ideal types of capitalism. Braudel's (1984) concept of capitalism places restrictions on Weber's ideal types of economic relations within the two countervailing poles of egalitarian economic relations, in the form of free markets and economic self-provisioning, and the hierarchical economic structures connected to monopolies, financial speculation, and political regulation. While Weber's stress on value-free sociological inquiry allows for recognition of ideal types of capitalism within wide variety of configurations, the contribution of Braudel's historical research lies in giving recent anthropology of capitalism broad comparative basis.

The anthropological research of global spread of capitalism has not followed closely Weber's methodology for ideal type construction as "organic" capitalism (Miller 1997), "diaspora capitalism" (Lever-Tracy et al. 1994; Cooper and Jiang 1998), "patronal" or "comprador" capitalism (Hefner 1998b; 1998c), "bureaucratic capitalism" (Bestor 1997; 1998; 2000), "political capitalism" (Verdery 1996), "booty" capitalism (Hutchcroft 1998), and ceremonially oriented capitalism (Yang 2000) were identified. Such anthropological typifications of capitalism frequently fail to specify how features of each type causally produce the described configuration of economic relations. These inaccuracies in ideal-typical construction lead to excessively localizing use of the concept of capitalism (Smart 1995; 1999), to taking local variation of economic relations for varieties of capitalism (Hefner 1998a), and to conflating the historically specific capitalist formations with abstract concept of economic theory (Sahlins 1994).

From the perspective of ideal types of capitalism the "structuring of the exchange relations within capitalist activities" (p. 28) does not affect the distinctive characteristics that make up each ideal type. For establishment of distinct ideal types of capitalism the causal efficacy of recurring social practices aimed at maintenance of economic exchange should be examined in comparative context, which of necessity must avoid assertions of structural equivalence (Alexander 1998). Anthropological study of systemic and comparative significance of institutional or interinstitutional differences will significantly contribute to establishing whether single ideal type of capitalism suffices to describe economies of United States, Germany and Japan (Stiglitz 1993) or variations in relations among banks, firms and politics warrant specification of distinct ideal types of capitalism as could be the case in Asia (Wade 1998).

Institutional approach to "study of economies as social as well as economic structures" (p. 29) receives growing currency (Hodgson 1994) as it reaches back to Veblen's (1919; 1927) seminal works on class distinctions and capitalist institutions the theory of which has found only limited application in economics despite attempts at conceptual embedding of economies into social-structural relations (Granovetter 1985). Neo-institutionalism has found wide application in anthropology in terms both of its theoretical elaboration (Acheson 1994; 2000), and of its successful application to anthropological topics (Acheson 1998; Acheson and Knight 2000). The numerous applications of neo-institutional approach in anthropological research include works on mitigating effects of personal relations on risk-laden transactions (Plattner 1998), on "rent-seeking" behaviour in Chinese boom towns (Smart 1993b), on relative costs in Tokyo fish marketplaces (Bestor 1998; 1999; 2000), on social intentions in Shanghai stock market (Hertz 1998), and on women in Guangzhou labor markets (Shi 1999). Attempts at formulating economic anthropology (Wilk 1996) by attributing rationality to all economic behaviour find limitation in certain resistance that time- and place-specific differences exhibit in relation to such overarching generalizations. Applications of causal explanations in anthropological research guided by neo-institutional approach, while less wide-spread than in sociology, remain tethered to micro-level redescriptive rather than analytical accounts even though they have the benefit of drawing on multiple cultural contexts.

In the early 1990s, neo-Marxian anthropological analyses have highlighted the rise in capitalist variability in the contexts of ethnographic research on industrial decentralization (Nash 1989), on labor of women and former peasants (Cook and Binford 1990), on globalization of economic peripheries (Blim 1990), on gender and household work (Ong 1987; Harrison 1997), and on petty capitalism in China (Gates 1995). Across anthropological research a recognition grew that a new global regime of flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989) stands in a causal relationship (Ong 1991) to such emerging forms of economic activity as works dealing with Mexican economic crises (Rothstein 1996; 1999), industrial restructuring in Canada (Leach 1998), instrumentalization of NAFTA in Mexico (Gledhill 1998), downstream women labor in Caribbean (Freeman 1998), and economic collapse in formerly socialist countries (Verdery 1996). Neo-liberalism as array of policies implementing the flexible accumulation has found its critics that argue that it has crippled national economies (Babb 1998; Buechler and Buechler 1998) and led to exploitative welfare and homelessness policies (Susser 1997). However, the universalistic assumptions of the neo-Marxist approach in anthropology are undermined by frequent failure to go beyond case-study focus towards comparative investigation.

The respective shortcomings of the renewed anthropological interest in Weberian, institutional, and Marxist approaches in understanding worldwide spread of capitalism make necessary to "reimagine them as as complementary devices in the task of understanding a complex phenomenon" (p. 31). As the relative social importance of capitalism as regime of economic accumulation and regulation grows it becomes imperative to explore how analytically graspable structure of economic relations particular to capitalism changes over time. As Arrighi (1994) contends capitalism makes part of the world system of states that, in concert with Weber's, Marx's, and Braudel's insights, puts unequal concentration of power in direct relation to capitalism as its reciprocally supporting regime that through globally distributed governance is dynamically affected (Arrighi et al. 1999; Blim 1996, 1997) by hegemony of such countries as the United States. Historical uniqueness of the United States hegemony in the world economy (Arrighi et al. 1999) lies in "unprecedented control over international organizations that regulate the international flows of capital, banking, and trade" (p. 32) that in view of controversial involvement of IMF and World Bank in 1997 Asian financial crisis (Krugman 1999: 109-117; Sachs 1998: 81-82) makes local capitalisms viable to the extent that they either are in agreement with US-backed international norms or are able to successful withstand US hegemonic pressure.

Among the anthropological efforts to formulate criteria for variability of capitalism, neo-institutional approach fails to greatest extent, as opposed to neo-Weberian or neo-Marxist, since it does not offer its own theory of economic relations let alone establish sufficiently different configuration of causal mechanisms of capitalism. Consequently, anthropological neo-institutionalism both lacks theoretical definition of capitalism as an object of investigation and remains in need of borrowing consistent conceptual apparatus from neo-Weberian and neo-Marxist approaches that would go beyond the lowest common theoretical denominator. Similarly, despite its widely recognized record in theorization of capitalism, neo-Marxist approach needs to develop comparative reflexivity to variants of capitalism, to which neo-Weberian research has been more sensitive, in order to construct, not too different from Braudel's manner, causally convincing accounts of local economies.

As "mechanisms of capitalist governance need anthropological attention" (p. 33) further research on variation in ideal types of economic relations should contribute to promoting ethnographic fieldwork on international markets for capital (Braudel 1984), on institutional impact of management education (Thrift 1998), and on rising transnational classes (Sklair 1998). With respect to theorization of capitalism there is growing demand for conceptualization of agency as ethnographic research turns to anti-hegemonic consumption practices (Miller 1997, 1998), to corporate marketers' effect on capitalist production (Applbaum 1998; 2000), to commodity chain organization by coffee tastes (Roseberry 1996), and to global demand reorganization (Schneider 1994).

As opposed to overly localizing critiques of theorization of collective agency (Carrier and Heyman 1997), ethnographic research should integrate conceptual articulation of its multiple contexts with their "structural relationships to the operation of capitalism as a world economic system" (p. 34). Weber's (1978) studies of how economic agency differences lead to variation in the structures of capitalism demand renewed attention as Marxist models of insufficiently account for economic crises (Hobsbaum 1954; Baran and Sweezy 1966; Krugman 1999). Theoretical challenges of integrating ethnographic research with conceptually sensitive accounts of global capitalism call for comparative studies of capitalist systems on the basis of renewed attention to legacy of sociological research of capitalism.