Western Capitalism in Transition ─ Global Processes, Local Challenges

This book is a critical exploration of capitalism in transition, bringing together cutting edge, world renowned scholars who reflect from different disciplinary points of view.
Since its emergence at the end of the 17th century, industrial capitalism as a specific form of organization of society has set recurrent challenges to its own persistence, and until today, it has proved to be successful to develop new ways of accumulation based on its capacity of adaptation. Is this process of transition now accelerating or reaching an end point?

The book is structured in three main sections:

1) the transformations of welfare societies and capitalism with a focus on South European welfare states and their (in)capacity to tackle poverty; 2) the transformation of work and migration with a special attention to informality and the question of social rights; and 3) the transformation of cities and their urban movements.

Drawing principally on the work of Karl Polanyi and Enzo Mingione, authors in this collection engage with the primarily Western themes of welfare capitalism and social fragmentation. Economic sociology and critical urban studies are the main disciplinary influences, though the authors and likely readers lie beyond these traditional boundaries.

Alberta Andreotti, Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

David Benassi, Department of Sociology and Social Research, Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

Yuri Kazepov, Department of Sociology, Universitat Wien