Scholars have used the term corporatism or associationalism to describe an economic and political system that is characterized by certain organizational forms, by a certain ideology, and by a certain trend in the development of public policy. Organizationally, corporatism refers to a system that is founded on officially recognized functional groups, such as labor, business, agriculture, and the professions. In such a system, institutional regulating and coordinating mechanisms seek to integrate the groups into an organic whole; elites in the private and public sectors collaborate to guarantee order, stability, and progress; and this collaboration creates a pattern of interpenetration and power sharing that makes it difficult to determine where one sector leaves off and the other begins. Ellis W. Hawley defined corporatism in these terms, his work building on the insights of historians, such as Alfred D. Chandler and Robert H. Wiebe, who identified the organizational revolution and the search for order as major themes in the history of modern industrial society.

Still other scholars delineated the ideology and political culture of the associative state and its champions among progressive political leaders and their counterparts in the private sector. They uncovered a body of liberal thought that celebrated such virtues as voluntarism, managerial expertise, and enlightened self-regulation and cooperation, all in the service of liberal capitalism. They explored the many programs to promote social welfare, tame the business cycle, nurture growth at home, and promote economic development and modernization abroad. They demonstrated how these programs often sought to contain the state by entrusting much of the responsibility for public policy to semi-autonomous agencies, to supposedly nonpartisan experts, and to collaborative systems of economic planning and voluntary regulation. According to most of these studies, those who championed the associative system saw it as a “middle way” between the laissez faire capitalism of a bygone day and the paternalistic statism of an Orwellian nightmare. In this system, partisan politics would supposedly give way to scientific management, public legislatures would yield some of their functions to private forums, and redistributive battles would dissolve in a material abundance in which all could share.

The portrait drawn in this scholarship is fluid rather than static; the relative weight assigned to various components of the associational system, particularly to public versus private power, varies according to historical circumstances, the political power of the groups involved, and the national system under discussion.