In this Issue

Abstract

This issue of “Warsaw Forum of Economic Sociology” (WFES) is devoted to an advanced conceptualization of patchwork capitalism (hereinafter also referred to as KP), largely supported by the critical articles by Krzysztof Jasiecki, Wiesław Gumuła, and Jacek Sroka, published in this issue of WFES, as well as the articles by Adam Czerniak, Piotr Maszczyk, and Marek Garbicz, published in the next issue of WFES (26). As a side note on conceptualizations, it should be added that debates on the patchwork nature of capitalism emerging in Poland and other countries in the region were initiated by a team of economists from the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH), led by Ryszard Rapacki, who was joined by economic sociologists from the SGH (Juliusz Gardawski and Rafał Towalski) as early as 2015. It was then that the term “patchwork capitalism” emerged, proposed by Ryszard Rapacki during a discussion with Juliusz Gardawski. In 2017, the team developed a concept for a publication titled The Emerging Patchwork Capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe. Ultimately, a publication under a similar title was published in 2019 by Routledge under the title Diversity of Patchwork Capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe [Rapacki (ed.) 2019a]. That same year, the Polish Economic Society (PTE) published a Polish edition: Patchwork Capitalism in Poland and the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe [Rapacki (ed.) 2019b]. This issue contains the “Extended Conceptualization” of patchwork capitalism. It constitutes the third step in work on the methodological aspect of patchwork capitalism. The first step was the conceptualization, which served as the basis for the research published in the aforementioned books edited by Ryszard Rapacki in 2019. This is referred to as “Conceptualization I.” The next step was the development of a second conceptualization by Juliusz Gardawski and Ryszard Rapacki [2021], which we will refer to as “Conceptualization II.” While Conceptualization I was primarily grounded in New Institutional Economics, comparative political economy, and related disciplines, Conceptualization II, while still incorporating economic and institutional perspectives, was partially grounded in the work of New Economic Sociology and culturological approaches in the social sciences. Conceptualization II was evaluated by economists and sociologists. Their comments, as well as the results of new analyses by Juliusz Gardawski, conducted in collaboration with Ryszard Rapacki, influenced the development of the conceptualization presented in this issue of WFES, which we term “Extended Conceptualization.” It should be emphasized that it is not qualitatively new compared to Conceptualization II, but it deepens it. In the proposed Extended Conceptualization, we introduce several changes to Conceptualization II. First, we adopt the methodological perspective of gradual punctuationism, a concept drawn from biology. Second, we draw on Hall and Soskice’s theory of the varieties of capitalism (VoC), combining an approach focused on the company rather than on the state institution, although we assume that in certain situations the state intervenes. Third, we draw more extensively than in Conceptualization II on the theory of a dependent market economy (DME) of Andreas Nölke and Arian Vliegenthart. Fourth, we assume that the Polish socioeconomic order is key to the peculiarity of patchwork capitalism prevalent in most CEE countries. Thus, we follow the pattern established by the authors of the VoC theory and their relianceon the cases of the United States and Germany in constructing the ideal types of liberal and coordinated market economies (LME and CME). The changes introduced resulted in an expansion of the ideal type of patchwork capitalism.
The article is structured as follows. Besides this introduction, it consists of five sections. Section 2 addresses the aforementioned commentaries, particularly those by Krzysztof Jasiecki, Wiesław Gumuła, and Jacek Sroka. It considers the problem of the discontinuity between Conceptualization I and Conceptualization II. The section begins with a discussion of Conceptualization I, including the qualitative difference between Conceptualizations I and II. It then characterizes the specificity of Conceptualization II, details the differences between Conceptualizations I and II, and presents remarks on the ideal type method in Marxist economics and history. Section 3 is devoted to the rationale for developing the Extended Conceptualization and the theoretical inspirations influencing this extension. Section 4 discusses the Extended Conceptualization: its historical legacy, the specific sequence of two successive ruling elites of the PC (the breakthrough elite and the adaptation elite), and the role of foreign capital. Section 5 presents the ideal type of the Extended Conceptualization. Section 6 discusses, on the one hand, the competitive advantages of the PC and, on the other, its deficits and the risk of the PC transforming into authoritarian capitalism.