Center for Culture, Organizations and Politics - Previously Affiliated

Globalization is transforming the relationship between states and markets. Even as some authors predict the demise of the state in the face of increasingly global markets, others focus on the role states play in constructing markets themselves and making sustainable market interactions possible. As the times change so do our theories, generating new concepts which can be used to better understand the previous period. This paper undertakes such a project. I argue that state, market and society are embedded in each other and constructed by their interactions with one another . The paper briefly reviews world-systems and comparative political economy analyses of the relation between states and markets. This review provides the framework for a discussion of the variety of models of state-market interaction in the postwar 'Golden Age' of capitalism. Finally I review the challenges which globalization poses to these models and consider contemporary experiments with state-market relations in a transformed international order.