Practicing conjunctural methodologies: Engaging Chinese capitalism

Introduction: Conjunctural analysis, contextual theorizing, and Chinese capitalism

Setting out to explore the potential of conjunctural analysis for economic geography, this article combines a prospective discussion of the scope and potential of this somewhat elusive methodology with reflections on the problematic of Chinese capitalism, encountered not as a case per se, but as an open (and demanding) epistemological question. As such, the article seeks to be methodologically indicative rather than substantively conclusive or theoretically definitive. And rather than being ‘about’ the restructuring of Chinese capitalism, it is motivated by a concern to pin down what is implied and entailed by the embrace of a conjunctural approach, given that the precepts and principles of conjunctural analysis are neither singular, nor are they typically declared in advance or out loud. Anything but a standardized, cookie-cutter approach, the hallmark of conjunctural analysis is contextualized and situated theorizing, such that to ‘abstract’ its associated rules and routines might be considered something of a stretch. Nevertheless, the first part of the article attempts to do just that – to tease out the precepts and principles of conjunctural analysis qua methodological orientation – prior to their anticipatory ‘grounding’ in dialogue with the case-cum-question of Chinese capitalism. Instead of opting either for a solely ‘in principle’ exposition or a more concrete application, the article strives to toggle in between.

Conjunctural analysis entails a commitment to context-engaged modes of analysis and reflexive theory-building, focused on the analysis of politically salient ‘situations’, places, and moments. Working to disentangle intersecting and articulated sources of conditioning and causality, conjunctural inquiries are explicitly situated in space and time. Given that matters of conceptualization and methodological practice tend to be subsumed, in an ‘organic’ fashion, in most extant examples of conjunctural analysis, to offer an entirely decontextualized reading would be certainly incomplete and perhaps inappropriate. This is the rationale for extending the following discussion to the category-unsettling question of Chinese capitalism, which is engaged here as a problem – and opportunity – for conjunctural analysis. The challenge of accounting for China's apparently sui generis development experience will often confound or frustrate extant conceptual categories and received frameworks, sometimes to the point of theoretical defeatism, or recourse to declarations of ‘exceptional’ status. Indeed, some of the most basic questions seem to have become, if anything, less settled, such as whether China is de facto capitalist or not; whether its state form remains substantively or only nominally socialist; whether a distinctively Chinese ‘model’ can be said to exist, in light of its continental-scale heterogeneity, ‘decentralized’ governance, and uneven development; and where to ‘locate’ this experience with reference to received theories of post-socialist transition, late development, neoliberal globalism, and the world system.

Rather than embarking on the fool's errand of attempting definitive answers to these questions, or by rushing toward analytical closure, the article instead dwells with some of the preceding issues of methodological specification, exploring the purchase of conjunctural analysis as a means to problematize (rather than simply operationalize) conceptual categories, to stress-test emergent theory claims, and purposefully to work in the more open-ended direction of explanatory reconstruction. In leading with and leaning on this extended moment of methodology, its concern is with the ‘hinges’ between theoretical framing, research design, and the formulation of strategies of inquiry. This entails an effort to marshal the hitherto scattered and sparsely codified resources of conjunctural analysis in the service of an indicative methodological response to this challenging situation, blended here with complementary insights from the extended case method, with its emphasis on reflexivity and concept testing. While the article seeks to identify some of the distinctive features of conjunctural analysis, sometimes sharpening contrasts with parallel approaches (for instance, with grounded theory, induction, and more formal treatments of ‘casing’), this is neither to deny the contribution of such alternatives, nor to suggest that conjunctural analysis can serve as an all-purpose substitute. Less still is there any intention to licence an amorphous ‘“conjuncturalism” that dissolves everything into a conjuncture’ (Koivisto and Lahtinen, 2012: 276). The more modest objective is instead to articulate an enabling and positive remit for conjunctural analysis in economic geography, worthy of a place alongside other methodological strategies. A subsidiary goal, in relation to the prevailing methodological culture of economic geography, is to give voice to the often silent (and sparsely documented) moment of conceptualization and research design, such discussions being typically cursory or tacit.

With roots traceable to the historical materialisms of Gramsci and Althusser, conjunctural analysis can be seen as a distinctive alternative to more orthodox and formal methodologies, albeit hardly a singular or discrete one. In economic geography, the most significant lineage runs through the work, project, and influence of Doreen Massey (Hall and Massey, 2010; Massey, 1995), which has been supplemented by an array of complementary currents and extensions (see Hart, 2002, 2020; Pickles and Smith, 2016; Werner, 2016). While various permutations of conjunctural analysis have been named (and suggestively operationalized) in this more recent literature, it is rare to encounter anything approaching an extended discussion of the ‘downstream’ methodological implications of the approach. In Massey's case, despite exemplifying a certain style of conjunctural analysis practice, only late on in her career was she ‘convinced about the importance of thinking conjuncturally as a method’ (Clarke, 2018: 201, emphasis added). This is perhaps not surprising, since conjunctural analysis tends to present as something closer to a critical ethos or ‘craft’ practice, rather than a codified method per se. Indeed, as Larry Grossberg (2019: 40) has said of the most sustained and productive tradition of conjunctural analysis, that associated with Stuart Hall and his collaborators, ‘I realised that I did not have, and I could not find anywhere … a well-theorised understanding of how conjunctural analysis is to be done, and how a conjuncture is defined or constituted’.

The present article aims to construct a methodological remit for conjunctural analysis in economic geography, indexed for heuristic purposes to a self-consciously preliminary discussion of Chinese capitalism, where it speaks also to the question of ‘China as method’ (see Franceschini and Loubere, 2022). Beginning with a methodological synthesis of conjunctural analysis, the article then contextualizes this approach in dialogue with the problematic of Chinese capitalism, according to three analytical axes – historicization and temporality; uneven development and regionality; and scale and scalar relations. This is prelude to an indicative discussion of the case of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), rendered as a methodological problem space. The article's conclusion returns to the question of the (methodological) difference that conjunctural analysis might make in and for economic geography. As with all such reflexive and critical methodologies, there can be no ‘guarantees’, yet this approach has the potential to make a distinctive contribution.

On stony ground: Framing conjunctural inquiry

From the Latin root coniugere – meaning to bind, to join, to combine, or to inflect – conjuncture denotes circumstances of combination and coexistence. While often invoked in a passing sense to refer to an historical situation, an era, or some ‘slice of time’, Stuart Hall (1980: 165) insisted that, in an analytical sense, the term refers to ‘a “moment”, not a “period”’, one that ‘can only be defined by the accumulation/condensation of contradictions, the fusion or merger … of different currents and circumstances’. Following from this reading of conjuncture as a space, moment, or site of contradictory confluence, where diverse forces and determinations come together, clash, and periodically tear apart, approaches to conjunctural analysis engage complexity not for its own sake but in the service of deeper and more meaningful understandings, accompanied by principled antipathies to reductionism, teleology, and determinism (see Callinicos, 2005; Hart, 2023; Koivisto and Lahtinen, 2012). Conjunctural analysis characteristically begins with (and returns to) obligations to understand politically active ‘situations’, critical junctures, unfolding crises, or problem spaces, which in turn are understood to be embedded in (and constituted with) social formations, often in circumstances of disruption or transformation. Exploratory rather than formalized, these analyses are constructed through practice, on the contested terrain of the historicized and situated present. This entails searching and often granular inquiries which dig deeply into particular situations but which tend to be characteristically dissatisfied with immediate, proximate, or otherwise pre-emptive accounts of causality. As such, these searching, exploratory inquiries will often reach backward and spiral outward, rather than being corralled within fixed explanatory horizons or predefined study sites.

A goal of conjunctural analysis is the construction of contextualized modes of explanation and meso-level analytical pathways. Wary of theoreticism, ‘overly abstract speculation’, and conceptual innovation indulged for its own sake, conjunctural analysts are also skeptical of ‘excessive particularism’, if with that comes a reluctance ‘to situate or explain … with reference to [more generalized] social relations or historical tendencies’ (Gilbert, 2019: 5). Eschewing the notion (indeed the possibility) of pretheoretical inquiry, conjunctural analysis mobilizes theory in a critical and reflexive fashion, but also as a resource. A form of creative theorizing in place, it involves ‘working the contradictory, stony ground of the present conjuncture’, to recall one of Hall's (1986: 6) memorable formulations. In order to ‘theorise and analyse the concrete complexity of a social formation’, Hall (1988: 162) maintained, it is necessary to ‘keep on’ theorizing. But this is not the capital-T Theory of a comprehensively prefabricated and unforgiving framework, foisted upon the facts on the ground; it is a continuous and critical practice of conception, interrogation, and reconstruction, deeply conditioned by context and situation. As Hall once reflected, ‘I would do without theory if I could! The problem is, I cannot. You cannot’. This is because, he continued,

the world presents itself in the chaos of appearances, and the only way in which one can understand, break down, analyze, grasp, in order to do something about the present conjuncture that confronts one, is to break into that series of congealed and opaque appearances with the only tools you have: concepts, ideas, and thoughts. To break into it and to come back to the surface of a situation or conjuncture one is trying to explain, having made ‘the detour through theory’. (Hall, 2018: 310)

Like Doreen Massey, Hall theorized in a subtle and ‘organic’ fashion, in solution, rather than by heavy-handedly ‘overwriting’ the events and circumstances at hand. Conjunctural theorizing, in this sense, is always emergent; open and contestable, it exists in a persistent state of reconstruction.

Conjunctural analysis engages the abstract, the structural, and the historical through the contingent, the concrete, the particular, and the real; it works through the specificity and particularity of situations in part for their own sake, as loci of concern, but also as prisms through which to read, to map, and to situate the systemic, the global, and the ‘general’. Understood as (often disruptive) interventions on an always-moving terrain, the approach does not privilege any particular entry point or moment, beyond considerations of social relevance and political salience, in due course tending routinely to exceed boundaries and stretch horizons, resisting premature foreclosure. The methodological act of ‘breaking in’ to a problem or situation is therefore always ‘midstream’, never in isolation but in medias res, in the midst of things – being duly sutured to obligations to situate and historicize (see Tooze, 2021). Frequently expansive but nevertheless ‘intermediate’ and situated pathways of inquiry, explanation, and theory-building are generally prioritized, reflexively allied to the development, refinement, and interrogation of midlevel concepts. Conjunctural analysis seeks to mediate between the macro and the micro, the epochal and the everyday, the structural and the contingent, the historical and the quotidian, while disengaging from none of these. Skeptical of deductive approaches that lean too heavily on one-sided abstractions or monocausal narratives, conjunctural analysis nevertheless differs from grounded theory and assemblage methods, being less freely inductive than the former and more loyal to (provisional and revisable) theoretical (pro)positions than the latter (cf. Decoteau, 2018; Tavory and Timmermans, 2009).

Conjunctural analysis is predicated on a distinctive understanding of articulation and causality, echoing the historical-materialist conception of the concrete as the ‘synthesis of multiple determinations’, but also resonating with notions of intersectionality in feminist theory, with some strands of post-structuralism, and with critical-realist positions on contingently realized causation, codetermination, and the role of mediating mechanisms and contexts. In contrast to the closed and controlled conditions of the laboratory, ‘open’ social systems rarely, if ever, reveal the one-to-one conjunction of cause and effect (if A, then always and everywhere B); hardly ever do conditions of singular or unmediated causation obtain; and consequently, there is ‘no reason to expect anything but contingent, conjunctural causality to apply in the social sciences’ (Steinmetz, 1998: 181). Conjunctural analysis is duly concerned to specify and ‘tease apart’ overlapping and intersecting sources of causality in their socially occurring, ‘tangled’ state(s), in situations that may be temporally or spatially proximate, but often not (see Li, 2014). Its domains of interrogation are variegated states of inconstant conjunction, engaged in social configurations that vary, significantly and constitutively, over time and space. Or as John Clarke more colloquially puts it, in every such complex and multiply-determined situation, ‘there is more than one thing going on’ (Clarke and Cochrane, 2019: 131). This is not a weak-kneed submission to complex contingency but a commitment to facing and disentangling causation through intersecting and mediated processes. Conjunctural analysis rejects the idea of isolating some ‘signal’ of singular, underlying causation by tuning out the ‘noise’ of contingency; instead, it engages conditions more resonant of cacophony and fugue. This is to invoke an ‘eventful’ treatment of (always messy and mediated) causation, where ‘events are caused by concatenations of multiple, intersecting forces’, expressed in heterogeneous and combinatorial social formations that are nonrepeating and nonreplicating; in other words, historically and geographically unique (Decoteau, 2018: 89; Paige, 1999; Sewell, 2004: 100–101). Understood in these terms, the problem spaces engaged by conjunctural analysis imply what might be thought of as a Venn diagram conception of causality, exploring zones of overlap and interaction, where there is always more than one thing going on, always more than one ‘driver’, tendency, or source of causation.

Conjunctural analysis and exposition, it follows, is not spare or minimalist, and neither does it yield ‘clean’ models expressed in parsimonious, ideal-typical, or logically complete terms, or in the form of internally coherent and discrete social systems. Since conditions of mediated, multiple causation and inconstant (or ‘local’) conjunction imply that there are only (and can only be) a plethora of spatiotemporally distinctive, or ‘atypical’, configurations, conjunctural inquiries inhabit spaces of specificity, predicated on ontologies of uneven development, hybridity, and disjuncture, rather than universalism, convergence, or equilibrium. Their domains of inquiry are moments, sites, and spaces of relational interaction and codetermination – always subject to social mediation and the play of politics. Typically, these situations are engaged in real time, with a concern to document and explain ‘live’ processes of underlying causation, social action, and political strategy; particular social formations and (im)balances of forces; and conditions of existence and mutual constitution that reach into history while extending over the horizon. These are not, in other words, self-contained or neatly ‘cased’ inquiries, confined to pre-given boundaries or narrowly ‘local’ sources of agency. While they may depart from such situations, they tend instead to work in an iterative fashion, looping out and back (spatially) and venturing back and forth (temporally), reconstructing, mapping, and charting (potential) explanations in the process. As Gillian Hart (2020: 241) has said, for example, of her distinctive approach to ‘global conjunctural analysis’, spaces of inquiry are ‘not [understood] as pre-given bounded national [or regional] units or separate “cases”, but rather as variously connected yet historically specific nodes in globally interconnected historical geographies – and as sites in the production of global processes, rather than just passive recipients of them’.

When Stuart Hall began his long-term project on the crisis and reconstruction of Britain's postwar social settlement, he was gripped by the sense that society itself seemed to be ‘coming apart at the seams’ (Hall et al., 2013: 1). Behind this metaphor sits a conception of articulation, together with Hall's reading of conjunctures as ‘complex structures’, imperfectly stitched together from a diversity of constituent parts, never in a fixed or final fashion. The crystalline makeup of conjunctural formations, it follows, is not reducible to a singular essence or discrete (pre)dominant logic; they exist, instead, as ‘articulated combinations’, in some circumstances congealing into ‘contradictory unities’ (Hall, 2021: 220). This approach resonates with relatively porous and nonreductionist readings of capitalist social formations, as unevenly developed, variegated, combinatorial, and ‘constructed’, the always-moving parts of which are not to be found in (solid) states of constant conjunction, friction free, but in heterogeneous and contradictory configurations (cf. Jessop, 2018; Peck, 2023; Sewell, 2008). The seams or ‘welds’ within this stitched-together order (or ecology of orders) will hold under some ‘instituted’ conditions, but will often fray, fracture, or ‘come apart’ in ruptural moments of crisis and accelerated transformation (Hall and Massey, 2010). In a similar vein, processes of economic ‘restructuring’ are not to be understood as singular, inexorable, or teleological, but as contradictory vectors of transformation, relationally constituted on what amounts to a shifting terrain.

To engage such processes is to intervene in medias res, in the middle of things, unavoidably opening up questions of positionality and relationality, since this is not a world comprised of free-standing models (each with their own circumscribed, internal logic), nor one in which a ‘local’ situation can ‘represent’ (or proxy for) the whole. Problem specification, research design, and ‘casing’ therefore cannot be innocent, neutral or pretheoretical exercises, since there is but an array of ‘atypical’ sites (conjunctural formations), in an unevenly developed world of other atypical sites, cross-cut by relational interdependencies. There are implications here for the methodological stock-in-trade of critical economic geography and geographical political economy, which tends to involve theoretically suggestive investigations in the ‘restructuring present’. These are characteristically grounded in the analysis of actually existing economies in their regionalized or network form, engaged at first hand and in real time, frequently in the throes of transformative change.

Conjunctural inquiries might in principle adopt similar points of entry, although they will generally demur from any ascription of paradigmatic or ‘frontal’ status to such contradictory formations-in-motion. They are more drawn, instead, toward the bleeding rather than (ostensibly) leading edges of contemporary change, and to moments of intensified restructuring or crisis, rather than to clean-cut cases or would-be ‘models’. In these more messy contexts, they are disinclined to prioritize immediate or (locally) endogenous sources of innovation, growth, or institutional efficacy, even as they are never content to simply replace ‘internalist’ accounts of causality and agency with ‘externalist’ or top-down treatments of forces, constraints, and determinations. Conjunctural analysis tends to share with geographical political economy a defining concern with the roles of contingency and ‘context’ (see Hart, 2002, 2023; Leitner and Sheppard, 2020; Peck, 2012, 2023), but it is more invested in probing and problematizing the deeper, conditioning contexts of these more proximate and immediate contexts (the ‘contexts of contexts’ for short), involving historicization, critical forms of (nonrepeating) pattern analysis, and the interrogation of more-than-local positionalities and conditions of existence. This mitigates against both localist and presentist modes of inquiry-cum-explanation, the privileging of ‘interior’ or proximate causes, the tight spatial delimitation of case-study areas, and for that matter restricted horizons of analysis. Instead, there is a concern with relational ‘hinges’ of mutual constitution between the (nominally) internal, local, or interior and the (also nominally) exterior or global, as signaled for example in conceptual frameworks like the spatial division of labor, geopolitical economy, and some approaches to state rescaling and global production networks, where more-than-local relations are engaged (and perturbed) relationally, from grounded sites of specificity (see Hart, 2023; Pickles and Smith, 2016; Werner, 2016; Werner and Bair, 2011).

Conjunctural analyses may be at their most dense, intense, and granular in the vicinity of their targeted sites and situations, but this does not mean that the spaces beyond and in between are rendered as unmarked, unstructured, and untheorized territory, as is often the case when cities stand in as prototypes or archetypes, when certain regional economies are presented as paradigms, or with the formal comparison of (supposedly) separate, independent, and free-standing cases. Conjunctural analysis does not conceive of (or address) places as geographical ‘isolates’, or as the proving ground of internally coherent ‘models’, but instead engages them in a fashion reminiscent of Massey's notion of ‘throwntogetherness’: heterogenous sites of interaction and articulation, shaped by constitutive relations and connections with elsewhere (see Clarke, 2018; Massey, 1999), but nevertheless hanging together in a recognizable (and not merely fleeting) fashion. Sites of conjunctural inquiry may present as junction points, nodes, or meeting places; as entanglements or ‘knots’ in networks; or as recombinant formations, all of which index the fundamental inseparability of internal characteristics and external relations. There are suggestive connections, therefore, between conjunctural analysis and relational approaches to comparison and cross-site inquiry (see Hart, 2023).

To invoke ‘conjuncture’ is to address and problematize relational, inside/outside connections, ‘hinges’, and articulations, not to sever or circumscribe them. The extent, form, and scope of these constitutive relations are unlikely to be empirically self-evident; they will not necessarily come to light through so-called fishing expeditions or strictly inductive investigations. They are properly subject to ongoing theorization, retaining a degree of loyalty to theoretical principles, always reflexively engaged, coupled with a proactive commitment to the interrogation and revision of appropriate analytical frames, midlevel concepts, and operational categories. This means that the relationships between places, cases, and research sites, on the one hand, and the constitutive worlds that they inhabit, on the other, are (theory) questions from the outset, but also open ones. It follows that the conduct of conjunctural analysis is incompatible with the postponement of theorization, even though theorization itself is understood to be a necessarily incomplete, imperfect, and ongoing process. Provisional or ‘starting’ theories can provide an initial sketch of relevant axes of concern and principles of explanatory pertinence, while also highlighting apparent anomalies or points of tension. The role of theory here is akin to that of an iteratively generated ‘map’, never fully pre-given but unfolding through the analysis itself and ‘improv[ing] with use’ (cf. McMichael, 1990; Tilly, 1984: 125). The chicken-and-egg problem that conjunctural inquiries confront is that they cannot begin without an explanatory map of some kind (be this some provisional ‘map’ of state-capitalist configurations, for example, or takes on the terrain of capital-labor conflicts, the architecture of corporate supply chains, or the historical geography of financial crises), even as their critical orientation requires the redrawing of these maps. Conjunctural analysis does not follow straight lines from received theory to illustrative case; it cannot be limited to the shading of pre-existing explanatory maps, coloring safely inside the lines, or the predetermined positioning of case-study sites in relation to a (fully known) world system. Exploratory in nature, conjunctural analysis aspires to the mapping out of new understandings. This represents a distinctive form of spatiotemporally contextualized explanation, one that seeks ‘both to explain particular events and ideas, and to map the movement of a period as a whole, by relating them to the working out of a dominant combination of causes’ (Rosenberg, 2005: 29, emphasis added).

But if ‘theory’ is neither to be enthroned (and rendered impervious to revision) nor postponed (to some anterior moment of freely inductive inquiry), how else is it to be constructively engaged? There are cues to be taken here from Michael Burawoy's (re)conception of the extended case method, where there is a predisposition to the actively critical – but never ambivalent – deployment of provisional theories and proto-explanations. In response to the vexing but fundamental question of where to start and where to anchor a program of inquiry, there is a compass here if not a fully formed map: research sites, cases, and problem spaces are located not in the cross-hairs of ‘preferred’ or starting theories, in the service of illustration or affirmation, but where these theories (with their associated claims and concepts) can be challenged, stretched, stress-tested, and perhaps troubled. For his part, Burawoy reserves a special place for anomalies defined against, or in tension with, theoretically informed expectations. Anomalies are defined in relation to ‘preferred’ but critical theories, with a view to their stress-testing and reconstruction via ‘crucial experiments’. ¹ Importantly, this is not just a matter of mobilizing ‘othered’ theories as foils, against which exceptions and discrepancies are assembled in the service of sophistry or negation, since this sets a bar that is too low. In the extended case method, there is neither ambivalence about nor alienation from extant theory, but a commitment to its purposeful reconstruction:

We begin with our favorite theory [seeking] not confirmations but refutations that inspire us to deepen that theory. Instead of discovering grounded theory we elaborate existing theory. We do not worry about the uniqueness of our case since we are not interested in its ‘representativeness’ as its contribution to ‘reconstructing’ theory. (Burawoy, 1998: 16)

Conjunctural analysis is an invitation to what might be called ‘thick theorization’, in which the contextualization and conditioning of theory claims are not seen as ‘retreats’ in the direction of empiricism, inductivism, or ideographic description, but as means to hold these claims, positions, and propositions together, in generative tension. As Massey (1989: 695) once explained, ‘the aim must be to use general theory not to reject it [but this] means to use it in specific contexts – for there are no “general” ones, in that sense, to use it on’. Theorizing and contextualizing, in other words, are two sides of the same coin. This adds to the reasons why the determination of research sites, situations of concern, and moments to ‘cut in’, in medias res, cannot be pretheoretical, but instead combine the normative with the analytical. Normatively, there is an orientation to moments of crisis, contestation, and sociopolitical urgency, and to sites where new explanations are needed. Analytically, there is an orientation to discrepant, unsettled, or anomalous situations presenting at the limit of, or as challenges to, extant understandings. These challenges may be frontal, as Burawoy would have it, or more circuitous, as Hall implies, but both call for a proactive and reflexive posture when it comes to the question of where to start, on the uneven and ‘stony’ terrain of the conjuncture.

These orientations are broadly compatible with prevailing dispositions in economic geography, the heterodox and eclectic theory culture of which rarely permits orthodoxies to settle, and where advances often occur through (generative) critiques of dominant, mainstream, or ‘metropolitan’ formulations. Conjunctural analysis is similarly predisposed against universalizing or ‘centripetal’ theorizing, favoring disruptive methodological interventions, fashioned with ‘dirty hands’, over more formalized methods, controlled experiments, and the refinement of clean models. Conjunctural analysis also offers distinctive rationales for inquiry in zones of instability, contestation, or conflict, in sites of accelerated restructuring and transformation, and in liminal spaces or through limit cases defined in relation to orthodoxies both theoretical and normative. These might be characterized as jujitsu moves, methodological maneuvers that use the weight of existing theoretical explanations against those core propositions, engaging from unexpected or oblique angles in order to unbalance, reset, or to disturb centers of gravity. While this might involve the use of chokeholds or even takedowns, it need not be an offensive exercise; these maneuvers also work in self defense, reworking ‘favored’ theories, developing fresh perspectives, and building new alliances.

Methodological articulations: Approaching China conjuncturally

The discussion so far has sought to distill features of conjunctural analysis as a distinctive methodological ethos and orientation, one concerned with the task of disentangling multiple lines of congealed causality on the shifting and ‘stony’ ground of context-rich situations. Out of this, a cluster of critical dispositions of methodological rules of thumb can be identified. First of all, the heterogeneity, ‘atypicality’, and indeterminacy of such context-laden situations are seen not as obstacles to theorization but as opportunities for the development of new and relevant understandings, involving reconstructed and ‘thicker’ theorizations. Conjunctural analysis does not ‘sample’ on sites according assumptions of representativeness or typicality, but rather, as loci of concern and moments of revelation. As rationales for ‘breaking in’, the latter serve as starting points for explorations that are not to be restricted to proximate or presentist horizons of analysis, but which instead seek both to historicize and to situate in spatial-relational terms. The goal is to forge intermediate explanatory pathways. There is a refusal to drift off into the thinly oxygenated heights of detached theoreticism, with its privileging of top-down, singular, essentialist, and one-sided explanations. But this is matched with a determination to avoid getting unnecessarily bogged down in the weeds of narrative description and theoretically unprincipled modes of induction. Theory–case relations are therefore actively problematized from the outset, while domains of exploration are navigated with the assistance of midlevel conceptual frameworks predicated on relational readings of mutual constitution and contingent causation.

Conjunctural analysis marries a distinctive concern to ‘analyze situations’, to recall the Gramscian phrase, with an orientation to theoretically ‘open’ and politically contestable situations. While there is no singular (or best) way to conceptualize conjuncture, or to pursue conjunctural analysis (see Clarke, 2017; Decoteau, 2018; Hart, 2020, 2023), distinctive features nevertheless accompany both the ontological orientation and the epistemological approach. In this spirit, the threads of the discussion so far are summarized in Table 1, not as fixed rules, but as a recognizable cluster of predispositions, commitments, and rules of thumb. Many of these, notably, stand in various degrees of contrast to more orthodox methodological maneuvers like controlling for context, isolating determinant variables, delimiting investigations in temporal or spatial terms, or refining clean-cut models and parsimonious explanations.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Conjunctural methodologies: orientations, commitments, and rules of thumb.

Analyzing situations: Beginning at the sharp end of contestations, crises, and intensified restructuring, read as moments of revelation, strategic agency, and heightened struggle; obligation to contextualize and situate in spatiotemporal terms; deployment of critical theories as orienting devices.

Open horizons: In contrast to aspirations to theoretical closure and the refinement of tightly drawn concepts and categories, conjunctural analysis licenses a more open remit of continuous theorization, revisable conceptual categories, and iterative inquiry; sites for conjunctural analysis may also be moments of political contestation, jeopardy, and opportunity, where new interpretations and analysis may serve more than academic purposes.

Articulation: Conjuncture as the site and synthesis of multiple determinations; intersecting processes of conditioning and causality; prioritizing mutual and relational constitution over unilateral determination or the simple primacy of internal or external causes.

Anomalies and disruptions: Crises as animating moments; ‘stress-testing’ potentially fruitful proto-explanations and theories in spaces of contradiction and disjuncture; engaging sociospatial difference, within and between spaces of focused inquiry.

Thick theorization: Context-rich explanation, developed on the ‘stony ground’ of the conjuncture; conditioning and remaking of theory claims; exploring (limits and scope of) midlevel concepts, mediating between the epochal and the eventful; eschewing strong deduction and simple induction.

Historicization: Working across arcs of (historical) transformation, beyond presentism and foreshortened analyses; attending to discontinuous histories and multiple sources and rhythms of temporality, with a strategic focus on middle-range historical timescales and movements in the ‘life’ of social formations.

Uneven and combined development: In the absence of tabulae rasae and ‘smooth surfaces’, research sites and situations are strategically identified as loci of concern; searching, unbounded inquiries, spiraling out from and back to sites and situations; accent on combination and interlocal relations.

Scalar relations: Multiscalar rather than monoscalar analyses, attending to cross-scalar articulations and mutual constitution; transcending methodological nationalism/globalism/localism, focusing instead on ‘critical junctures’ or hinge points.

The remainder of the article turns to the task of mobilizing this approach in conversation with the problematic of Chinese capitalism, probing some of the differences that conjunctural analysis might make. It could be said, in fact, that this category-confounding case almost demands some form of critical-conjunctural treatment. There have been repeated attempts, for decades now, to define the ‘China model’ according to internal and sui generis characteristics, often in opposition to a (similarly essentialized) ‘Western’ model, few of which fare well in the face of critical scrutiny (see Jones and Hameiri, 2021, McNally, 2019). These and other debates have been bedeviled by oppositional formulations and conceptual dyads – like plan versus market, public versus private, capitalism versus socialism, liberalism versus authoritarianism, East versus West – which in the context of ‘post-Mao China continue to lose meaning’ (Pearson et al., 2020: 7, emphasis added). Truthfully, only the partisan or dogmatic will insist on classifying China, unequivocally, on one side or another of such coarsely drawn, binary divides, while conventional transition theories have been increasingly questioned too. The situation is further complicated by the fact that any credible rendering of the Chinese mode(l) of development must take account of the world-historical terrain on which it has been dialectically (re)produced, balancing a critical assessment of ‘internal’ capacities and strategies with an array of ‘external’ or offshore sources of codetermination, including the incomplete liberalization of world trade, the uneven and somewhat fragile transnationalization of corporate supply chains, and freeze-thaw cycles in geopolitics (see Rolf, 2021; Rosenberg and Boyle, 2019). There is no meaningful way hermetically to seal off or sequester the nominally interior features of this model (pragmatic governance, experimental gradualism, the social market economy, and so on) from a host of ‘external’ sources of interdependency and mutual determination.

In other words, it seems to be increasingly unclear what, exactly, the ‘China model’ is a model of, the direction in which it is traveling, and its relation to others on the world stage. The apparent inscrutability of the Chinese case in the face of extant (or ‘Western’) theories has created not just an opening for claims to exceptionalism, but a six-lane highway, with explanations trafficked in all directions, some of them stalling. There are those that are content to occupy the slow lane of descriptive idiosyncrasy and cultural exceptionalism, gesticulating at the juggernauts of so-called Western Theory. Others have been switching not only lanes but occasionally even directions. David Harvey, having previously been convinced that reform-era China had comprehensively crossed the threshold (or Rubicon) to neoliberal capitalism, albeit as a ‘special case’, has since come (all the way) around to the view that the Xi regime could be engineering a ‘fundamental reset’, possibly even a ‘revolutionary configuration’, conceivably on the path to some hitherto-unseen variant of socialism (Harvey, 2005: 137, 121; 2021).

States of theoretical and political ambiguity such as these need not be a deterrent to conjunctural analysis. On the contrary, they invite just this kind of exploratory approach. Primed to begin with the contestable interpretation of actually existing circumstances and unfolding situations, conjunctural analysis might cut into the problematic of Chinese capitalism in any of a number of ways. But it must also begin, in some way or another, with plausible theories of these actually existing conditions, not by sticking pins randomly into the map. Those following Burawoy's advice will begin with a theorization in which there is some degree of confidence (if not conviction), albeit with an eye to potential anomalies and opportunities for stress-testing and eventual reconstruction. The choice itself, needless to say, is going to be project-specific, and one among many. Pre-empting the strategy of simple induction, the admonition to ‘begin with’ a preferred theory reduces the scope for equivocation, fence-sitting, or ambivalence. It means taking a position, if not a stand, albeit one married to a critical orientation, beginning with conceptualization and research design and running through an iterative process of empirical investigation, methodological adaptation, and (multi)causal explanation. For conjunctural analysis, while ‘starting’ theories ought to have explanatory potential, they need not denominate a fixed or watertight framework. Instead, as provisional formulations they are a source of generative propositions, provocations, and principles of (expected) explanatory pertinence – all subject to interrogation, revision, and reconstruction.

One such candidate as a starting-point theory is the appropriately compound notion that is party-state capitalism (PSC). For present purposes, what is pertinent from the perspective of conjunctural analysis is not so much the veracity of this particular conception, relative to other contending accounts of Chinese capitalism, but rather the kind of concept that PSC can be said to be. While the term has been in circulation for a while, largely in a theoretically unprincipled way, PSC has gained a certain currency as an emergent concept in heterodox political science, while also serving as a nascent category in interpretative practice, as a formulation favored by critical think tanks in Berlin and Washington, DC (see Blanchette, 2021; Grünberg, 2021; Pearson et al., 2020). In their succinct statement of the thesis, Pearson et al. explain that PSC can be considered a subspecies of state capitalism (which they regard as something of a chaotic concept), the distinctive shape of which has only begun to stabilize in the period since 2008, this apparently sui generis form evidently becoming ‘less comparable’ with the capacious and inchoate genus itself:

China's post-Mao economic reform process has always been multifaceted, nonlinear, and contested. It has not followed a singular established blueprint … Under Xi's rule, the [Party] has … extended its authority and reach – organizationally, financially, and politically – into China's domestic and foreign economic relations. Although prior developmental goals remain intact, they have been overshadowed by initiatives that place politics in command with the objective of mitigating perceived risks to the party's political survival … [P]arty-state capitalism displays a novel blending of state power and firm organization, funding, and activities. (2021: 207, 208, 209)

Three-dimensional in a somewhat ungainly way and multicausal in origin, rather than a singular model, PSC signals a contradictory unity at best, (Communist) ‘party’ being interdigitated and coproduced with (Chinese) ‘state’, although not in a seamless or synonymous fashion; ‘capitalism’ in its tacitly variegated form fusing, interacting, and jarring with both. The three constituent elements of this compound, combinatorial formulation – party, state, capitalism – are neither synchronous nor coterminous, and they are not attributed functional integrity or institutional coherence as such. Extant discussions of PSC have tended, in practice, to be preoccupied by the initial P in its Chinese form, having less to say in an explicit and conceptually rigorous way about this configuration of the state and capitalism (and less still about how these might relate to their others elsewhere). What is potentially generative here, in fact, is this very condition of incompleteness and provisionality. There is an invitation to theorize P, S, and C each on their own terms as well as in conjunction, none of these mutually articulated constituents being reducible to, or subordinated to, the others. Not least, the ‘compound’ form of capitalism itself is rendered as a question. On the ‘outside’, there is neither a priori indexing to a cross-sectional taxonomy of capitalist ‘variety’, nor to any complete map of the world system. The mutual constitution of PSC with the global capitalist system is consequently problematized (see Franceschini and Loubere, 2022; Lee, 2017), with implications for its articulation and representation on the ‘inside’. In the authorized discourse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it should be noted, the nomenclature of the socialist market economy is preferred, ‘capitalism’ having no recognized domestic presence, with the conspicuous exception of Hong Kong and Macao.

The crystalline composite that is the PSC may exhibit a degree of instituted integrity (and political stability), including some capacity to hold together a certain patterning of uneven spatial development and central-local relations, but it is shot through with internal fractures and stresses. No less significantly, it is shaped by causal dynamics, pressures, and counter-pressures that are multiple, not singular, and which together constitute a multidimensional force field (and political terrain) that is unlikely to be dominated by any single axis of transformation, force-resistance, or action-response. Furthermore, the preliminary theoretical construct that is PSC is sufficiently capacious as to demand attention to ‘internal’ discontinuities and heterogeneities, in contrast to ‘tight fit’ formulations configured in reference to a single, paradigmatic, or ideal-typical case. ²

This is not the place to delve too deeply into the specificities of the provisional, working theoretical proposition that is PSC. Suffice it to say that this portrayal of a hybrid and heterogeneous social formation – linked to a tacit periodization (post global financial crisis, in the wake of the ideological and political contest between the Chongqing and Guangdong ‘models’, through the evolution of Xiism, and so forth) – prompts demanding questions about antecedents and inflection points, uneven development, incipient contradictions, and more. Once again largely for methodologically illustrative purposes, the discussion here is introduced through three axes, or dimensions, of conjunctural analysis – historicization and temporality, uneven development and regionality, and scale and scalar relations. These axes are isolated for heuristic reasons, not because they are separate or sequential maneuvers within the practice of conjunctural analysis. The following discussion of how the GBA region of southeast China might be framed as a site for conjunctural analysis is intended to indicate how they might be combined.

Conclusion: A method without guarantees

This article set out to explore what it might mean to mobilize conjunctural analysis in economic geography, linked to a methodologically framed discussion of Chinese party-state capitalism in one of its megaregional sites. Witnessed mainly in exemplary practice, and usually after the fact, conjunctural analysis remains a somewhat elusive approach, and one that has rarely been subject to methodological codification. To be sure, conjunctural analysis is not reducible to a particular methodological formula, nor to a standardized package of portable routines, although the approach does entail significant epistemological orientations and obligations. Relational by definition, conjunctural analysis is incompatible with methodological internalism or the delimitation of ring-fenced case studies; with presentist or ahistorical inquiries; nor with the refinement and ‘cleaning up’ of monocausal explanations, heuristic models, or ideal types. Instead, with defining commitments to deeply contextualized investigation and explanation, conjunctural analysis focuses critical attention on the ongoing work of situated theorization, beginning with conceptualization, problem specification, research design, and case selection; on the dissection of multiple, coexistent, and intersecting sources of ‘articulated’ causality; on the elevation of spatiotemporal relationality to a constitutive rather than background condition; and on the rigorous interrogation, stress-testing, and reconstruction of midlevel theory claims. Its rationale for casing is fundamentally exploratory, teasing apart and opening up complex questions of tangled causality and strategic agency; while seeking to generate new insights and understandings, it is not about stylized heuristics or explanatory closure.

In principle, conjunctural analysis appears to promise a lot. It seeks productively to explore the middle ranges of the analytical register, avoiding the excesses of unmoored and context-lite abstraction, on the one hand, and merely descriptive inductivism, on the other. It proactively engages theorization as a necessary but iterative practice, working to enrich the repertoire of situated, midlevel concepts. It works on (and from) the terrain of the real, the experiential, and the concrete, purposefully extending cases and contextualizing all the way out to situated theory claims, always in dialogue with questions of political strategy and social agency. It confronts multiple determination and congealed causality in their tangled, real-world forms, insistently engaging the economic (in its widest sense), while refusing both essentialism and economism. Its relational investigations are characteristically unbounded in spatial, temporal, and scalar terms, and yet they remain anchored to sites, situations, and moments of concern. With its critical and disruptive disposition, it favors lines and sites of inquiry that have the potential to trouble, disorientate, and remake received explanations, norms, and understandings (including ‘favored’ ones), privileging anomalies over archetypes, the off-kilter over the on-brand, and contestation over confirmation. Conjunctural analysis refuses to let go of the so-called structural, the systemic, the hegemonic, and the macro(economic), but will not do so in the name of structuralist pessimism, moving instead to mobilize the weight of such overbearing formulations against them, pulling them to Earth and into the domain of the political. And not least, it provides a licence for the exploration of open horizons and indeterminate futures.

If economic geography has made a significant virtue of eclectically theorized, real-time investigations, grounded in the restructuring present, the embrace of conjunctural analysis might be said to entail a measure of change as well as consolidation. The emphasis on rigorous historicization beyond the scope of received transition models can be seen as a constructive challenge to the subdiscipline's generally presentist orientation and its tolerance of abridged histories. The fact that economic geographers are characteristically wary, often for good reason, of Big Concepts and large-scale, overarching categories of analysis, often tending to the view that explanatory truths are to be found closer to the ground, in more localized settings, in the proximity of social actors, and with more snugly formulated concepts, exists in creative tension with conjuncturalism’s implicit critique of methodological internalism and ‘localist’ explanation, as well as with its embrace of more expansive, often fractured, and less local domains of inquiry, in which the charge is to work not only across but with difference, discontinuity, and heterogeneity. On the other hand, economic geography's often contrarian disposition and its eye for rule-challenging exceptions might be said to complement the conjuncturalist orientation to engage in midlevel theory-building in high-stakes sites and political-economic hotspots, those in which extant social settlements and models of development might be encountering their limits. This said, economic geography arguably has something to bring to conjunctural analysis too, which in practice has had less to say about spatial and scalar relations than it has about historicization and temporality.

A methodological rubric that could guarantee all of these things would, of course, be too good to be true, and probably too much to be tractable as well. In part by virtue of its very elusiveness, conjunctural analysis has acquired a certain methodological allure, not to say mystique, as if a secret practice to be shared only among the already-initiated. As a critical disposition and mode of inquiry, conjunctural analysis cannot be shoehorned into a formalized canon or sure-fire procedure. It comes, as Stuart Hall would say, with no guarantees. Consequently, it is perhaps a little counter-culturally that this article has attempted to specify some of the underlying obligations, customary practices, and procedural implications of conjunctural analysis qua methodology. It has drawn passing contrasts with conjunctural analysis's methodological ‘others’, such as those that regard context as something to be controlled, rather than the terrain of investigation itself; those concerned with the refinement and purification of one-dimensional models and parsimonious explanations; those that invoke received theories as mere foils or in a spirit of ambivalence; and those that silently sever relational ties and (pre)conditions of existence by transposing local or national cases into free-standing ‘models’. Advocating a series of alternative methodological maneuvers, not as a wholesale substitute for other approaches but (at least) as a distinctive and viable strategy alongside them, the article has made the case for robust forms of (geographical and historical) contextualism, for the exploration of anomalous (rather than ‘typical’) sites and situations, for the pursuit of constitutive connections and relations, wherever they happen to lead, and for more active practices of ‘thickened’ theorization, grounded and contextualized in category-challenging research sites. There may be no guarantees here, but there is promise.