Exploring a Role for Capability Theory in SSA Labor Process Research

Since its origins in the 1970s and eighties, Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) research has moved away from its early emphasis on organization-level dynamics of profit-making, reinvestment, and labor process (within their broader institutional setting). Recent authors have begun to explore ways of renewing this emphasis. This paper proposes using the theory of “organizational capabilities” to reinvigorate this dimension of the SSA approach. An organizational capability is the capacity to mobilize disparate resources to achieve competitively important results. Capability theory focuses on path-dependent development of the firm’s ability to survive within its competitive environment and the importance of organizational learning when that environment changes. These emphases are well suited for deepening an SSA-oriented understanding of how the institutional structure of capital accumulation reaches into, and is in turn affected by, competitive dynamics at the firm level. The argument is illustrated with a preliminary application to the emergence of a post-1970s SSA in the U.S.