ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the social scientific lineages of efforts to understand the “imagined” nature of capitalist economies, before addressing their relevance to longstanding debates on Scottish capitalism. The first section positions the research in a longstanding sociological tradition which seeks to denaturalise the economy, a critical tradition with origins in Marx and Weber. The next section examines regulation theory, which began as a French offshoot of Marxist political economy and became a popular way of conducting empirical research into the shift in capitalist regimes post-Bretton Woods. It particularly examines Jessop’s approach to reconciling these insights with state theory and critical discourse analysis. The last section examines traditions of sociological literature on Scotland, to place this study’s significance within it. It charts the decline of approaches rooted in theories of uneven development, and the growing importance attached to identity politics, the public sector, and the new middle class. It highlights how, after the 2008 crisis, researchers sought to “bring capitalism back in” to the analysis of Scottish specificity. This, however, left unanswered questions about the debates that predominated within the era of capitalist crisis, which centred less on class struggle than constitutional dynamics and technical questions linked to imagining a post-independence economy.
