Technological solutions to sudden factor shortages are difficult and costly, hence unlikely to be sought if such easier solutions as factor substitution or factor mobility are available. When the demand does arise, a technological innovation is likelier: (a) the more intense the demand; (b) the less daunting the leap from existing technologies; and (c) the larger the pool of potential innovators. The size of that pool is restricted by language barriers but expanded by vehicles that transmit new ideas. Governments can do little to stimulate creation of a new technology but can adopt or reject the institutional changes that the new technology requires. Military technology is often seen as causative of political change, but the supporting evidence is weak. New techniques of warfare more often arise in response to changed availability of factors. A positive supply shock renders all other factors newly scarce. Thus the “China shock” of increased availability of low-skill labor has created incentives in advanced economies to develop technologies that economize on scarce human and physical capital.

This chapter describes the socioeconomic changes in the post-reform era that have contributed to growing labor assertiveness. It contends that the regime’s coercive control of migrant labor in the 1980s and 1990s created the structural conditions for labor assertiveness. As in other authoritarian regimes that faced a similar situation at the critical juncture, such as Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea, China also began to deal with unstable state–labor relations as the era of rapid economic growth comes to an end.

The Introduction outlines the book’s conceptual foundations, starting with a theory of political economy as constitution that builds on both economic and political thought to conceptualise the relationships between the economic and the political bodies. Accordingly, the body politic is an orderly arrangement of individuals and groups fitting a collective condition, or purpose, which would at a minimum include the persistence of the political body itself. Similarly, the economic body is an orderly arrangement of individuals and groups fitting a systemic condition for material sustenance and welfare, which would at a minimum ensure resilience of an organised economic sphere. The theory of political economy shows shifts between a focus on dispositional activities (such as allocation of capabilities or resources) and a focus on material and social interdependencies. This dynamic often makes it difficult to identify the underlying unity of political economy. Reductionist theoretical developments, both in economic and in political theory, have failed to address the embeddedness and mutual shaping of dispositions and structures at multiple levels of aggregation in the economy and the polity. The Introduction sketches a new theoretical framework that avoids both types of reductionism by highlighting the close integration between human dispositions and socio-economic interdependencies.

This chapter examines the relationship between sociability and interdependence. Sociability describes a fundamental feature of reality, namely the fact that individuals and groups are embedded in mutual relationships and institutions reflecting relative positions in the social domain. Interdependence encompasses both potential and actual ties involving material interests and immaterial dispositions. Sociability is a condition of relationality which develops dynamically through a complex interplay between dispositions, actions, and their consequences. This interplay tends towards either cooperation or conflict depending on whether different actors’ dispositions and actions converge towards a shared objective. The chapter explores the relationships between interdependence and congruence conditions in the social domain, building on the work of thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Paolo Mattia Doria, and Adam Smith to emphasise the relevance of the non-contractualist tradition in investigating interdependence in the social sphere. The insights of those earlier theorists help to devise a method of ‘circumscription’, which allows identifying partial similarity amid diversity and builds on that basis forms of social congruence. The relationship between partial similarity and plural mappings of interdependence leads to alternative patterns of affiliations for individuals and groups and provides a basis to discuss the likelihood of cooperation and conflict in a political economy.

Throughout our surveys and interviews, a common theme emerges: people want jobs that go to workers who live in their communities. So what happens when clean energy jobs are not local jobs? Opposition from communities, unions, and elected officials can ensue. But what can we do? This chapter tells the story of unions in Minnesota – unions that represent both fossil and clean energy workers – that tried not a strategy of darkness and denial but instead a strategy of sunlight and support. They worked with state regulators to have clean energy project proposals commit to disclose to the public how many local workers they hire. We combine this episode with internal union surveys and our surveys of elected officials and the public to show both the promises of transparency but also its limits.

The sixth chapter extends theoretical and empirical interests in understanding the role of the Chinese government through its organization of mission-oriented mega-R&D programs (MMRDs). In particular, this chapter proposes a theoretical framework with a particular focus on such programs’ three contextual characteristics – technical goal of the mission, dominant actor, and end-user. We then apply the framework to ten cases across different historical periods and sectors in different countries to test its validity. The finding suggests that exploitative R&D with a clear and singular technical goal whose performer and end-user are public actors entails government to adopt MMRDs, while in doing so the government also should take into consideration such factors as economic efficiency, national security, and public interests. In the case of China, the state-led innovation model favors to concentrate resources on initiating MMRDs.