SUMMARY

As explained beforehand, the main objective of the thesis is to introduce a different political reading into VoC and the wider literature on comparative capitalisms. Building on from the scholars who are attempting to introduce the state into these endeavours, this piece only sees the state as a unit of secondary importance, in the literal meaning of the terms. In other words, the state is not worthwhile of analysis just because it is often seen as the cornerstone of politics, but because of the constitutive relationship it nurtures with the individual. As such, the investigation here goes beyond the state as a universal concept and locates the political domain in elements ontologically prior to the state. The modern state must be taken as a historically specific construction (Bonney 1995), one that is embedded into larger meanings about the individual, the market and the legitimation of the state itself. Such a perspective (Jackson 2006) allows to deconstruct the concept of the state into an institution that is in a relationship with the individual.

It is this opening towards potential variability not only of institutional features as the VoC literature so successfully demonstrates but of the concrete individual-state relationship that introduces deeply political features into the ways state policies act in relation to the economic regime. As the facilitation efforts of some conception of the

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individual always come with elements that legitimate the latter and delegitimizes others, state policy must be seen as political, as adopting some assumptions of good economic life over others. These efforts are tracked down through an investigation of parliamentary debates that showcase the narratives of legitimation and delegitimation that were present in relation to the British and German homeowner/mortgager (1997- 2007). After a discussion of various types of state discourse in chapter four, the implied meanings of state policies in relation to housing and mortgaging are analysed empirically.

What then becomes of prime interest is the triangular relationship between the individual, the state, and the market as well as other economic mechanisms. It is hence not merely that the state is added onto an existing framework, but the state plays a central role in the understanding of the economic agency and of the economy more generally. Such an approach follows from perspectives that integrate societal variables into the study of comparative capitalisms and hence refute their distinction into separate fields of enquiry (Zafirovski 2002, 2). At the same time however, it does not fall into anecdotic story-telling whose character is limited to a very particular context (Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008). The aim is not to follow a certain individual and relate back how he/she makes sense of economic processes but to track down the ways in which the individual as such is depicted in relation to the latter by official authorities. Again, the individual here is understood as a theoretical category then, not as a specific person.

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Once such a point of departure is chosen, it leads to consumption issues in a way that the VoC contributions are unable to engage with. It breaks with the productionist bias (Hancké et al. 2007, 7) and opens up towards issues of how the individual is made sense of, as a consumer of housing and of mortgages for instance. Such a break from VoC then allows to complement this literature with an alternative framework, one that is not focussing onto the firm. Instead it provides a toolkit for investigating the individual, its relationship with the state, and concerns with markets from a point of view that is supplementary to the literatures mentioned. In this sense, the notion of „markets as politics‟ applies to this thesis (Fligstein 2001, 98; see also Zelizer 1983; Stehr 2008). The thesis makes a contribution to the literature that sheds a different light onto comparative capitalisms and its political nature.

In relation to the concept of institutional complementarities (Hall and Soskice 2001, 17; Hall and Gingerich 2004; Palier and Thelen 2010), the thesis introduces the concept of micro-macro complementarities. Such a notion reflects the focus on the relationships between the two levels of analysis. It points towards the theoretical observation, later demonstrated empirically through the case studies, that consumer markets require the constitution of particular types of market agents that match with the conceptions of this market more broadly. In other words, the conceptions held about the individual match with those about markets, as the former are constitutive parts of the latter. This is not a finding in itself but follows logically from the theoretical framework set out in this chapter and refined in the subsequent parts. What it highlights however is how the individual must be seen as a constitutive part of the market, and how state actors frame both in a way that is consistent, at least at the first

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glance. This notion is referred back to when the form and content of policy initiatives are discussed in chapter four.

To conclude, this chapter has explored the vibrant VoC literature, starting from its most influential text. It has shed light into various perspectives on a range of issues that are relevant for the research that I am engaging with, most centrally how the literature has performed in regard to provide a political account of capitalist diversity that goes beyond the distributional features of various economic models of capitalism. At the same time, it has also shows how this study fits into a distinct lineage of reflections and how it builds on the current state of knowledge, even though it goes beyond it. Apart from the theoretical contributions, the thesis also offers a great amount of empirical insight into the case studies. So even though the prime rationale is to lay bare a novel methodology of how to study capitalist diversity, the empirical chapters also present arguments that are valid as contributions on their own right. However, before going over to the empirical parts, the next two chapters lay the foundations. Building on from the incomplete treatment of the political features of models of capitalism, they present an ontological basis that explains how and why the individual and the state alike can be seen as constitutive of the variability, and hence the political nature, of capitalist types of socio-economic organisation.

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Chapter 3: Why the Individual and the State? The Politics of Naïve