The+Social+Construction+of+the+Great+Depression+Industrial+Policy+during+the+1930s+in+the+United+States,+Britain+and+France

Frank Dobbin, “The Social Construction of the Great Depression: Industrial Policy during the 1930s in the United States, Britain and France,” //Theory and Society// 22, no. 1 (1993), pp. 1-56. **Alternative Title:** Cultural explanations of change and failure in industrial policy in US, Britain and France in the 1930s **1.** **Introduction** 1.1. **Chapter goal**: To offer an alternative explanation from the common interest-group and institutionalist readings of the dramatic changes to industrial policy during the Great Depression, i.e. cultural rationalism 1.2. **Significance**: The Great Depression ran counter to modernization theory (states or societies progress along a direct path of economic growth) 1.3. **Main argument:** The collapse was caused by the failure of industrial culture to adapt, and therefore culture is a major part of industrial policy during times without economic crisis. 1.4. **Definition of cultural rationalism**: Cultural rationalism, or rationalized culture, is social meaning that changes based on contexts such as time and place; CR is falsifiable in the sense that it is “responsive to evidence that supports” it (48). **2.** **Limitations of the interest group approach:** Interest group approaches are good for explaining distribution of economic resources, rather than income generating activities like industrial policy. Examples where interest group approaches are useful include US pro-labor and social welfare policies after the Democrats got power in the 1930s, and the lack of budget-cutting and devaluation in France. This entails mainly “haggling over details” (44). **3.** **Limitations of the institutional approach:** Institutional approaches help explain why depression era policies failed, and are closely tied to cultural approaches. However, Dobbin thinks that institutional approaches are used to describe administrative norms and are short on theorizing about culture. Applications include why the NRA in the US had no enforcement power to cartelize firms, why the US was weak to enforce plant closures as part of its industrial rationalization policies, and why the vulnerabilities of France’s premier to opposition caused changes to France’s macro-economic policy to fail. The application to change in industrial policy in the 1930s is limited because institutionalists believe that policy-makers chose the most familiar path, whereas cultural approaches consider the impact that crises have policy makers when faced with familiar options. 4. **A cultural approach to US, UK and French industrial policy ca 1930:** According to the culturalist lens, the Great Depression “falsified” previous notions of sound industrial policy. Each country instituted a corrective policy than was, under normal circumstances, against conventional wisdom, or culture. As the economic crises continued, each country in turn rejected the new policy as false, that is, the industrial policy failed to make the firms productive. The experience of each country shows how “shared understandings about fundamental causal processes that transcend interest group boundaries” were falsified first by the onset of the crises, and how the new policies were falsified by the continuation of the crises. The cultural approach is a challenge to realism which contends that policy makers improve through experience.
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