Conscripts of Competitiveness: culture, institutions and capital in contemporary development

Abstract

Through the lens of the new institutional economics development is represented as a process of cultural and institutional transformation in which informal social institutions that hinder the operation of market forces are dismantled and replaced with formalised, liberal institutional frameworks to facilitate rational economic activity. The World Bank has deployed these arguments to legitimise reforms aimed at reshaping the values and conduct of postcolonial citizenries to facilitate entrepreneurship and competitiveness. To deconstruct this discourse, the article points to its underlying contradictions; specifically, to the way that the idealised formal rationality of impersonal markets is necessarily subsumed in practice within the substantive irrationalities of capitalist development. Consequently the informal social relations that the Bank deems instances of cultural atavism and a barrier to competitiveness arise as intrinsic features of global capitalism. Seemingly impervious to reform, informalised populations appear as objects to be restrained or removed by the state. Coercion, I argue, emerges as the inevitable concomitant of competitiveness.