TY - JOUR
T1 - Reluctant state capitalism
T2 - Antipathy, accommodation and hybridity in Irish telecommunications
AU - Palcic, Donal
AU - Reeves, Eoin
AU - Whiteside, Heather
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022.
PY - 2023/2
Y1 - 2023/2
N2 - The state capitalism literature emphasizes the new roles played by states in global politics and domestic economies through heightened intervention and ownership of key resources and sectors. In Ireland, we instead find a reluctant state capitalism evinced by antipathy towards state ownership, the accommodation of private sector failures and embrace of hybrid governance. Rather than something new and unprecedented, the Irish state has been a long-standing feature of domestic market development and an important institution supporting private enterprise today as in the past. Urging a more academically robust conceptualization of state capitalism, this paper relinquishes innate assumptions of obvious boundaries dividing liberalized capitalism from state capitalism in favour of engaging the domestic state and sectoral developments on their own terms and within their proper historical context. We find reluctant state capitalism in Ireland's telecommunications sector through a continuum of state–market involvement in four phases: commercial, devolving, evolving and partnership state capitalism. By identifying temporal phases of state capitalism, we move beyond the here-and-now of more contemporary ‘new’ state capitalism analyses that suggest rupture with an idealized, liberalized past.
AB - The state capitalism literature emphasizes the new roles played by states in global politics and domestic economies through heightened intervention and ownership of key resources and sectors. In Ireland, we instead find a reluctant state capitalism evinced by antipathy towards state ownership, the accommodation of private sector failures and embrace of hybrid governance. Rather than something new and unprecedented, the Irish state has been a long-standing feature of domestic market development and an important institution supporting private enterprise today as in the past. Urging a more academically robust conceptualization of state capitalism, this paper relinquishes innate assumptions of obvious boundaries dividing liberalized capitalism from state capitalism in favour of engaging the domestic state and sectoral developments on their own terms and within their proper historical context. We find reluctant state capitalism in Ireland's telecommunications sector through a continuum of state–market involvement in four phases: commercial, devolving, evolving and partnership state capitalism. By identifying temporal phases of state capitalism, we move beyond the here-and-now of more contemporary ‘new’ state capitalism analyses that suggest rupture with an idealized, liberalized past.
KW - Ireland, public-private partnership, state capitalism, state owned enterprise, telecommunications
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85123675897&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0308518X221073989
DO - 10.1177/0308518X221073989
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85123675897
SN - 0308-518X
VL - 55
SP - 100
EP - 121
JO - Environment and Planning A
JF - Environment and Planning A
IS - 1
ER -