The CLPE forum organizes its work as a series of projects within one or more of three related but distinct Research Nodes. These Research Nodes are clusters of related problems and issues within major institutions of modern democratic capitalism; firms, workers and markets, from different cross-disciplinary perspectives.

Firms. The CLPE develops projects to investigate the law and political economy of the firm in several dimensions, including prospects for corporate social responsibility, the “responsibilization” of financial sector actors, cross-disciplinary approaches to the analysis of corporate decision-making, the role of private firms in the delivery of privatized public goods and services, and large corporations as key actors in transnational context.

Workers. The CLPE develops projects examining the history and future of collective representation and action of workers in several dimensions, including alternative modes of collective representation, formal and informal regulatory responses to precarity, comparative collective bargaining regimes, the relationship of collectivities to assertive social democracy, prospects for workers' capital and worker-owed business formations.

Markets. The CLPE develops projects examining the role of markets in modern democratic capitalism from a variety of perspectives, including the emergence of financial markets and dimensions to markets, crisis theory, regulatory approaches to labour markets and financial markets, pension funds and other institutional actors as intermediaries in financial markets, the privatization of delivery of formerly public goods and services and the redevelopment of public production of goods and service options.