The limitations of methodological Fordism

My commitment to taking the global angle seriously is at odds with a lot of research in the fields of political economy and labour studies. Single country case studies and comparative studies of a small number of countries are common currency. Both have contributed significantly to our understanding of different capitalist social formations and the fact that institutions and configurations of actors at the national level matter and differ. Through establishing differences and communalities across national states, they enhance our understanding of what the capitalist mode of production is, and what the specificities of macroregional or national contexts are.

Many of those studies exhibit a research strategy that can be called ‘methodological Fordism’. With this term, I refer to a set of methodological choices starting from the implicit assumption that Fordism is the standard mode of capitalist development. This does not mean that all research in this mould studies ‘Fordist’ or ‘post- Fordist’ configurations or uses the corresponding terminology. My point is that it has a family resemblance with scholarship that explicitly does so and shares with it a number of guiding assumptions: the primary unit of analysis is the national state; the study of manufacturing and of the labour relations in the sector – frequently referred to as ‘industrial relations’ (see Nowak, 2021) – are key to understanding national political economies; and contemporary capitalism can be deciphered by focusing on a relatively small number of highly industrialized core countries. Notably, ‘methodological Fordism’ entails a specific mode of comparison. It starts from the presumption that capitalism consists of a collection of capitalist national states forming ‘discrete bounded units’, whose relationship is ‘external’ (Hart, 2018: 376). In Philip McMichael's words, these units are subjected to an ‘analytic comparison’ (1990: 389): Clearly delimited cases are compared with the aim of identifying and separating casespecific and common traits. Due to this being research in the field of political economy, these traits are either national or macroregional specificities or transnational invariances. They often refer to Varieties of Capitalism, as Peter Hall and David Soskice's influential edited volume on the ‘comparison of national economies’ is called (2001: v).