An interesting (open access) paper “Public and Private: Change and Continuity in Economy through Two Meta-fields in Society” offers a structural general framework to analyse continuity and change in the economy based on the idea that there is a double movement between the public and the private meta-fields in society.
The current literature on comparative political economy does not seem to consider unifying under a single theoretical framework the analysis of continuity and change in different economic systems. On the one hand, major comparative works derive their theoretical propositions from dynamics in the Western world. On the other, studies that are focused on national trajectories of development are concentrated in cross-national comparisons involving countries with similar characteristics in what concerns strategies of development. In this paper, Vinicius Rodrigues Vieira (University of Oxford) argues that all fields in the world of social action are pervaded by two major fields, hereby dubbed ‘meta-fields’: public and private. Both are in a ‘double movement’ to shape each other’s boundaries through the definition of social and property rights that regulate access to human capabilities and capital. Public and private are meta-fields because they constrain human action and the organization of social configurations on state and non-state levels.