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The Political Sociology of a Concept: Corporatism and the “Distinct Tradition”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2015

Howard J. Wiarda*
Affiliation:
University of GeorgiaAthens, Georgia

Extract

The field of Latin American Studies owes much to Professor Howard J. Wiarda, whose pioneering work on “corporatism” and political culture during the 1960s and 1970s helped establish a new conceptual paradigm for interpreting the persistence of corporately defined, institutional identities throughout Latin America, despite the purported triumph of the “Liberal Tradition.” A child of Dutch parents, his early travels throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America sparked a keen interest in the question of “third world development.” Entering graduate school in the early 1960s, Professor Wiarda gravitated to the newly emergent field of modernization studies at the University of Florida, where he received his masters and doctorate degrees in Latin American politics. It was a time of tremendous social ferment in Latin America and his early fieldwork took him to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Brazil, among other places. In each instance, he found recognizable patterns that transcended geographic locations, patterns that seemed to directly challenge the predominant arguments set forth in the modernization literature at the time.

Type
Research Note
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2009 

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References

1 Some of the books include Bowen, Ralph, German Theories of the Corporate State (New York: McGraw Hill, 1947);Google Scholar Cawson, Alan, Corporatism and Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986);Google Scholar Cox, Andrew and O’Sullivan, Noel, eds., The Colorate State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);Google Scholar Elbow, Matthew, French Corporative Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953);Google Scholar Lehmbruch, Gerhard and Schmitter, Philippe C., eds., Patterns of Corporatist Policy-Making (London: Sage, 1982);Google Scholar Landauer, Carl, Corporatist State Ideologies (Berkeley: University of California, 1983);Google Scholar Pike, Frederick and Stritch, Thomas, eds., The New Corporatism (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1974);Google Scholar and Williamson, Peter, Corporatism in Perspective (London: Sage, 1989).Google Scholar For Latin America see Collier, David, “Trajectory of a Concept: Corporatism in the Study of Latin American Politics,” in Smith, Peter H., ed., Latin America in Comparative Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).Google Scholar

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3 Newton, Ronald, “On ‘Functional Groups,’ ‘Fragmentation,’ and ‘Pluralism’ in Spanish American Political Society,Hispanic American Historical Review 50 (1970), pp. 129.Google Scholar

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5 Malloy, James, ed., Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).Google Scholar

6 Wiarda, Howard J., “Toward a Framework for the Study of Political Change in the Iberic-Latin Tradition: The Corporative Model,World Politics 25 (January 1973), pp. 206235;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wiarda, , Corporatism and National Development in Latin America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1981);Google Scholar and Wiarda, , Corporatism and Comparative Politics (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997).Google Scholar

7 I have been asked by numerous of these scholars why I never responded to the critics, provided a better and clearer definition, and explained the background of the corporatism concept. I thought I had done all those things but maybe in obscure journals or books that were not reviewed in the right places, or that these things were self-evident (they, obviously, weren’t), or by then I had gone on to other research projects.

8 I am amused today when some of my graduate students suggest that two courses on Latin America are sufficient to constitute a major field.

9 I am convinced that our training at Florida on Latin America was better than that of some of my contemporaries (who later became well known in the profession) from the more prestigious universities like Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Columbia or Stanford, which either lacked Latin American studies programs at that time or had no or weak political scientists teaching Latin America. They may have gotten better training in international relations and global politics from such renowned scholars as Samuel Huntington or Stanley Hoffman, but Florida graduates were better trained on Latin America.

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30 Wiarda, Howard J., Adventures in Research, Vol. I: Latin America (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2006).Google Scholar

31 Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955).Google Scholar

32 Wiarda, Howard J., Corporatism and Development: The Portuguese Experience (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977).Google Scholar

33 Wiarda, Howard J., Transitions to Democracy in Spain and Portugal: Real or Wishful? (Washing-ton, D.C.: University Press of America, 1988), with lèda Siqueira Wiarda.Google Scholar

34 Wiarda, Howard J., From Corporatism to Neo-Syndicalism: The State, Organized Labor, and the Industrial Relations Systems of Southern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Center for European Studies, 1981).Google Scholar

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36 A Japanese colleague, Hiroshi Matsushita, who serves as an unofficial biographer and is the fore-most exponent chronicler, and popularizer of corporatist theory and approaches in Japan, told me that he was studying Peronism in Argentina in the early 1970s when he first came across my World Politics article on corporatism. At that time he was taking two graduate seminars at the University of Mendoza, one on systems theory and the other on Catholic political thought. He saw immediately that what I had done was to wed systems theory to the foundations of Catholic political theory and culture in a way that provided a unique Latin American model of development. When he later read my work on ethnocentrism and the need for non-Western theories of development, the circle was complete in Prof. Matshushita’s mind: he now had not only a model of Latin American development but a method for constructing a distinctive Japanese or Asian one.

37 Wiarda, Howard J., Ethnocentrism and Foreign Policy: Can We Understand the Third World? (Washington, D.C. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1985).Google Scholar

38 Wiarda, Howard J., ed., Non-Western Theories of Development (Fort Worth, Harcourt Brace, 1998);Google Scholar and Wiarda, , ed., Comparative Democracy and Democratization (Forth Worth: Harcourt Brace, 2001).Google Scholar

39 I first published these ideas in widely accessible form while a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (ΑΕΙ) in the early 1980s. Because ΑΕΙ and some of its scholars did have what they saw as a universal model of development (free markets) and democracy (American-style pluralism), these writings got me in bad trouble with my colleagues and the Institute, and almost cost me my job there.

40 Wiarda, The Methods of Control.

41 Wiarda, The Brazilian Catholic Labor Movement.

42 Wiarda, Howard J., “Elites in Crisis: The Decline of the Old Order and the Fragmentation of the New in Latin America,Presentation at the Mershon Center, Ohio State University, 1970.Google Scholar Half of that pape became the World Politics article of 1973; the first and introductory part, “Elites in Crisis,” was incorporated as the introductory theoretical chapter in Wiarda, Dictatorship, Development, and Disintegration, and was later published as a separate chapter in Wiarda, Corporatism and Development in Latin America.

43 Howard J. Wiarda, “Toward a Framework for the Study of Political Change in the Iberic-Latin Tradition.”

44 Wiarda, Howard J., “Corporatism and Development in the Iberic-Latin World,Review of Politics 36 (January 1974), pp. 333;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wiarda, , “Corporatism Rediscovered,Polity 10 (Spring 1978), pp. 416–28;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wiarda, , “The Corporative Origins of the Iberian and Latin American Labor Relations Systems,Studies in Comparative International Development, 13 (Spring 1978), pp. 337;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wiarda, , “The Corporatist Tradition and the Corporative System in Portugal,” in Graham, Lawrence and Makler, Harry, eds., Contemporary Portugal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), pp. 89122;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wiarda, , Transcending Corporatism? The Portuguese Corporative System and the Revolution of 1974 (Columbia, SC: Institute of International Studies, University of South Carolina, 1976);Google Scholar and Wiarda, “Corporatist Theory and Ideology.”

45 Howard J. Wiarda, Corporatism and National Development in Latin America.

46 Howard J. Wiarda, Dictatorship, Development, and Disintegration.

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48 Howard J. Wiarda, Transitions to Democracy in Spain and Portugal.

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58 In my files I have a thick manila folder of letters from Latin America scholars telling me how much they appreciated the corporative focus, that it opened their eyes to new research possibilities, and, most importantly for the argument presented here, that it made what they saw as a critical connection tying the field of Latin American studies (7,000 members of the Latin American Studies Association) together with mainstream political science and comparative politics.

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61 Space considerations rule out a longer treatment here, which in any case focuses on the anatomy and political sociology of the corporatism concept. Readers interested in more detailed exposition can pursue the items referenced above.

62 Wiarda, Howard J., Corporatism and Comparative Politics, p. ix.Google Scholar

63 It was hard to write about corporatism as a neutral, social-scientific term because of its widespread association with 1930s fascism and World War II. That was brought home to me after a lecture in the Netherlands when an elderly gentleman came up to me afterwards and said he had “fought” corporatism in World War II. “And now you’re asking me to accept that as a neutral, descriptive term as applied to certain countries,” he went on; “I cannot accept that.”

64 Hammergren, Linn, “Corporatism in Latin American Politics: A Reexamination of the Unique Tradition,Comparative Politics (July 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar My response was entitled “Corporatism in Iberian and Latin American Political Analyses: Criticisms, Qualifications, and the Context and ‘Whys’ of the Debate,” Comparative Politics (January 1978), pp. 307-312.

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100 Markus Crepaz, “Corporatism in Decline?”; also Adams, Paul S., “Corporatism and Comparative Politics: Is There a New Century of Corporatism?” in Wiarda, Howard J., ed., New Directions in Comparative Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), pp. 1744.Google Scholar

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