Regulatory Capitalism: How It Works, Ideas for Making It Work Better

Contemporary societies have more vibrant markets than past ones. Yet they are more heavily populated by private and public regulators. This book explores the features of such a regulatory capitalism, its tendencies to be cyclically crisis-ridden, ritualistic and governed through networks. New ways of thinking about resultant policy challenges are developed.

At the heart of this latest work by John Braithwaite lies the insight by David Levi-Faur and Jacint Jordana that the welfare state was succeeded in the 1970s by regulatory capitalism. The book argues that this has produced stronger markets, public regulation, private regulation and hybrid private/public regulation as well as new challenges such as a more cyclical quality to crises of market and governance failure, regulatory ritualism and markets in vice. However, regulatory capitalism also creates opportunities for better design of markets in virtue such as markets in continuous improvement, privatized enforcement of regulation, open source business models, regulatory pyramids with networked escalation and meta-governance of justice.

Regulatory Capitalism will be warmly welcomed by regulatory scholars in political science, sociology, history, economics, business schools and law schools as well as regulatory bureaucrats, policy thinkers in government and law and society scholars.

John Braithwaite, PhD, Professor, Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia