Contemporary Political Economy Research Articles

Rentier capitalism in question

Rentier capitalism is an idea that has been drawing increasing attention. This article identifies the incoherence of the idea and then addresses its weaknesses as a critique of contemporary political economy. In the first place, it derives from a view of capitalism which privileges exchange rather than production. This explains its view of the relation between the monopoly control of assets and competition. While there may indeed be a current tendency to invest in assets, that does not necessarily act as a deadweight on production; rather it can act as an incentive to rationalize the labor process with a view to increasing the extraction of surplus value. It is suggested that one of the ways in which industrial capital accommodates itself to increasing rents, license fees and the like, is through a turn to extracting value in its absolute form; which may in then shed light on the stagnation of wage levels that has accompanied the turn to investing in assets.

Global Inequality, Mobility Regimes and Transnational Capital: The Post-Graduation Plans of African Student Migrants

Employing a theoretical framework that draws on the concept of global regimes of mobility and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this article seeks to analyse how African student migrants in China navigate global structural inequalities in planning for post-graduation mobility, while strategising to overcome barriers to mobility and capital accumulation. It argues that China’s position within the contemporary global political economy is reflected in the ways these student migrants navigate intersecting global mobility regimes. Moving beyond the ‘stay/return’ binary common in student mobility research, the article delineates three post-study trajectories: returnees, deterred by structural barriers from staying in the host country; those who stay in China, overcoming these barriers by opening businesses, with plans to return home later; and those who plan to accumulate capital in China to meet the requirements of more stringent mobility regimes in the Global North.

Defining Industrial Heritage in the Indian Context

The narrative of Indian industrialization is unique, a country that is both industrializing and de-industrializing simultaneously and that is struggling in the discovery of its own identity within the myriad political, ethnic, social and economic discourses. The massive push given to industry in this contemporary era has a definitive impact on the urban landscape. The contemporary political economy is in the process of disinvestment of State assets, which are cornerstones of the narratives of Indian industrialization, their loss and comprehensive redevelopment have a significant impact on place identity in urban areas. While the idea of urban heritage conservation is very nascent, the concept of industrial heritage conservation is largely non-existent in India. The industrial timeline of India is different from the global timeline; the lack of an official definition, and therefore a lack of an official legislation, for recognition and legal protection of industrial sites in India has an impact on the perception of what constitutes Indian industrial heritage. Most industrial heritage sites are vulnerable to loss or replacement on the pretext of being considered too ordinary to be preserved. This article presents a chronological narrative of industrialization and defines a framework for identifying typologies of industrial heritage sites in the Indian context, building a case for recognizing, protecting and sustainable development.

The Belt and Road Initiative as Ten Commandments: Revisiting Xi’s Launch Speeches and the Washington Consensus

In 2019 Foreign Policy described China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as “the most talked about and least defined buzzword of this decade”. Given that confusion and the importance of leader political speeches in China - especially those of current President Xi Jinping - it is surprising that the BRI literature has little studied the two launch speeches of 2013. This article seeks to fill that gap, with study of those speeches and focus on the five cooperation-oriented areas announced in each. In comparative context those ten pillars appear not to be descended from new heaven but rather demonstrate overlap with the ten pillars of what was once relatively mainstream macroeconomic development policy, the Washington Consensus. In forward context of contemporary global political economy tensions, the need to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, the G7’s Build Back Better and the European Union’s Global Gateway ambitions also, this article may offer a timely fresh and comparative lens on the BRI.

‘The power to burnish and renew’: porno-accumulation, fascism, and surplus populations in Don DeLillo’s Running Dog

ABSTRACT Don DeLillo’s conspiracy novels Players, Running Dog, and The Names respond to, and imaginatively frame, what Giovanni Arrighi calls the ‘signal crisis’ of US hegemony. Despite mapping the spatio-temporal unfolding of US capital as it financialises accumulation, commodifies visual attention, and imposes neo-colonial economic reforms on ‘underdeveloped’ nations, Marxist critics have dismissed DeLillo’s pastiche thrillers as politically disappointing texts ‘constrained’ by an inability to supply alternative models of reality. In contrast, this article argues that DeLillo’s so-called formal defeats register a ‘discord’ between history and its conceptualisation, an enigma related to their discovery of ‘edge zones of modernity’. Drawing on ideas of historical lateness, the article re-situates DeLillo’s poetics through the optics of uneven and combined development, reflecting on the significance of surplus populations – both for DeLillo’s off-kilter conspiracies but also contemporary Marxist political economy. The article offers a close reading of Running Dog, a porno-political caper in which non-synchronicity manifests itself through the appearance of an object, perhaps the object: an adult film starring Hitler. Running Dog juxtaposes commodity frontiers based on violent appropriation with frontiers of immiseration where labour-power has been exiled from social reproduction altogether. In doing so, DeLillo refunctions romance into a genre of secular stagnation.

AFRICA AND THE ‘GLOBALIZATION BARGAIN’: TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE ECONOMIC SOVEREIGNTY

Africa’s existential situation in the prevailing global order is such that no state thereof can afford to take national sovereignty too seriously. Apart from the myriad of structural challenges imposed on the continent by globalization, Africa is faced with a gamut of political and economic problems that can only be meaningfully addressed through some form of strategic multilateral collaboration. Africa’s aspiration to economic sovereignty has been constrained by the structural conditionalities of globalization, which have kept the continent overly weak, dependent and underdeveloped. The constraint is so immanent that individual African states can hardly afford even the relative sovereignty to harness a strategic balance in the fast ossifying asymmetries of interdependence that characterize the contemporary global political economy. It is posited in this paper that the remedy for Africa lies in the ability of her states to transcend their disempowering territorial-cum-nationalistic divides and capitalize on the existing continental multilateral mechanisms towards mainstreaming collective sovereignty, based on the principle of pan-African supranationalism. To that end, leveraging and maximizing the gains and prospects of extant regional and continental supranational organisms would become both salient and expedient.

21st Century Capitalism and Innovation for Health

Abstract21st century capitalism undermines health outcomes in myriad ways. Structural economic changes have had negative effects on medical innovation and public health and are poorly aligned with social goals. Key features of the contemporary political economy include both monopoly capitalism, based upon stringent intellectual (IP) protection that suppresses economic competition, and Wall Street capitalism, or financialization, that prioritizes value extraction over value creation to maximize shareholder value. Contemporary trends in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, digital health, and regulatory change demonstrate some of the negative impacts of 21st century capitalism on public health.

Eurobonds versus Coronabonds: Same Idea, New Context, Different Outcome?

Since the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the European Union has taken tentative steps toward the issuance of joint debt. This progress is significant but puzzling: the technical value of such instruments has never been in doubt; however, the political will to move forward has always been lacking. What changed? This short article argues that contemporary political economy research points us toward the role of ideas and identity in explaining this shift.

Skill-Biased Liberalization: Germany’s Transition to the Knowledge Economy

This article conceptualizes the evolution of the German political economy as the codevelopment of technological and institutional change. The notion of skill-biased liberalization is introduced to capture this process and contrasted with the two dominant theoretical frameworks employed in contemporary comparative political economy scholarship—dualization and liberalization. Integrating theories from labor economics, the article argues that the increasing centrality of high skills complementary in production to information and communications technology has weakened the traditional complementarity among specific skills, regulated industrial relations, and generous social protection in core sectors. The liberalization of industrial relations and social protection is shown in fact to be instrumental for high-end exporting firms to concentrate wages and benefits on increasingly important high-skilled workers. Strong evidence based on descriptive statistics, union and industry documents, and twenty-one elite interviews is found in support of the article’s alternative perspective.

A Gentle Book by a Gentleman


 
 
 Issue: Mar-Apr 2021
 This book is a useful read, despite its moderation, because, so few books have been written about India’s contemporary political economy. Montek’s book Backstage offers a clearer picture of an important time and fills in the gaps on some of the characters involved. Montek’s penchant for comprehensive rather than piece-meal reform is a good takeaway for a younger generation of economic policy makers.
 
 

COVID-19 and the U.S. Health Care Industry: Towards a “Critical Health Criminology” within State Crime Studies

The core claim of this article is that critical criminology offers us an especially potent framework for interpreting state-corporate crime with the health care industry in the United States as one illustrative case, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. The unprecedented, surreal pandemic crisis that surfaced in 2020 brought into especially sharp relief many of the core claims of critical criminology in relation to domination, inequality and injustice within a contemporary capitalist political economy, while it also raised the need to broaden critical criminology studies to incorporate the specificities of the health care systems and the pharmaceutical industry. Following this challenge, the article proposes to foster a “critical health criminology” within state-corporate crime research. To do so, this article explores the “big picture” in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and reveals how it can be understood as a criminological phenomenon. Such a project incorporates the identification of some conceptual issues requiring attention in relation to advancing an enriched form of criminological analysis in these times, and toward building a foundation for a more fully realized twenty-first century criminology.

Seismic Shifts: Recentering Geology and Politics in the Anthropocene

A strident focus on atmospheric carbons and on climate change as its distinguishing feature has seen much debate and research surrounding the Anthropocene stray from its conceptual grounding in geology. Yet new research argues that hallmarks of the Anthropocene such as sea-level rise, melting ice sheets, and environmental engineering projects designed to mitigate chronic shortages of potable water all increase the potential of seismic activity, placing geological forces back at the center of conversations on planetary futures. Following calls to consider the political dimensions of environmental change in the Anthropocene, this article examines the multiple layerings of natural hazards, political crises and transformations, and mega-urbanization through the lens of catastrophic geological events, drawing evidence from an ongoing longitudinal study of the devastating Mexico City earthquakes of 1985 and 2017. This case suggests that such events intersect with contemporary political economy in a variety of ways, from the disruption of urban investment patterns and the initiation of processes of mass abandonment or of creative destruction and gentrification to the exacerbation of political crises at scales from the submunicipal to the supranational, the facilitation of social movement formation, and the acceleration of political revolutions such as Mexico’s democratic transition of 2000. These insights offer productive avenues for engaging with the political economies of geological events and processes and the prescriptive powers of geology as a field of knowledge production and political power that increasingly demand attention across an urbanizing planet.

Experiencing service learning partnership: A human development perspective of community members

Service–learning has, arguably, gained significant currency as a pedagogical and engagement mechanism within the broader discourse of universities and their role in community development. However, less emphasis has been placed on the human development dimensions of service–learning for community members, with the focus largely being on students’ experiential learning and other academic outcomes for the university. Though usually conceived as an integral part in university–community partnerships, community members’ role in the conception and implementation of service–learning initiatives is from a peripheral position. In this paper, we interrogate this lacuna by applying core tenets of the human development approach to document the experiences and perceptions of community members within a university–community service learning partnerships. From the analysis of qualitative data n = 22, we demonstrate that while service–learning enhances agency, it continues to operate within a historical context and contemporary political economy of South Africa, which obscure community members’ active participation and empowerment towards inclusive and sustainable valued outcomes.

The Aging Enterprise: A 40-Year Retrospective

Dr. Carroll Estes has long been recognized as one of our most influential social gerontologists beginning with the publication of the Aging Enterprise over 40 years ago. This book quickly achieved iconic status among gerontologists and other social scientists as one of the founding texts in critical gerontology, which Dr. Estes has played a leading role in developing with numerous publications over the course of her illustrious career. The panelists will focus on Dr. Estes’ application of the theoretical frameworks offered by the social construction of reality and the political economy of aging to a critique of federal and state policies designed to improve the quality of life of older Americans. Many of the programs and policies included in Dr. Estes’ critique are still in place, including the Older Americans Act and the nonprofit aging network. On the other hand, much about the aging enterprise has changed since 1979. The panelists, Drs. Chris Phillipson, Pamela Herd and Larry Polivka, will discuss the value of and challenges to these theoretical and empirical perspectives within the current contemporary neoliberal political economy that has gradually displaced the welfare state capitalism of the postwar period. As this shift has occurred in the political economy, a neoliberal policy agenda featuring for-profit privatization of public services, including aging services, has become dominant at the federal and state levels. Dr. Estes will respond to the panelists’ presentations and discuss the future of critical gerontology. Women's Issues Interest Group Sponsored Symposium.

South Africa’s Shrinking Sovereignty: Economic Crises, Ecological Damage, Sub-Imperialism and Social Resistances

The development of contemporary South Africa political economy occurred within the context of a global capitalist order characterized by increasingly unequal political and economic relations between and within countries. Before liberation in 1994, many people across the world actively supported the struggle against apartheid, with South Africa’s neighbouring states paying the highest price. The ‘sovereignty’ of the apartheid state was challenged by three processes: first, economic, cultural and sporting sanctions called for by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and other liberation movements, which from the 1960s-80s were increasingly effective in forcing change; second, solidaristic foreign governments including Sweden’s and the USSR’s provided material support to overthrowing the Pretoria Regime; and third, military defeat in Angola and the liberation of neighbouring Mozambique (1975), Zimbabwe (1980) and Namibia (1990) signalled the inevitability of change. But that state nevertheless maintained sufficient strength - e.g. defaulting on foreign debt and imposing exchange controls in 1985 - to ensure a transition to democracy that was largely determined by local forces. Since 1994, the shrinkage of sovereignty means the foreign influences of global capitalism amplify local socio-economic contradictions in a manner destructive to the vast majority of citizens. This is evident when considering economic, ecological, geopolitical and societal considerations.

Seeing and Not-seeing Like a Political Economist: The Historicity of Contemporary Political Economy and its Blind Spots

ABSTRACT Contemporary political economy is predicated on widely shared ideas and assumptions, some explicit but many implicit, about the past. Our aim in this Special Issue is to draw attention to, and to assess critically, these historical assumptions. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a political economy that is more attentive to the analytic assumptions on which it is premised, more aware of the potential oversights, biases, and omissions they contain, and more reflexive about the potential costs of these blind spots. This is an Introduction to one of two Special Issues that are being published simultaneously by New Political Economy and Review of International Political Economy reflecting on blind spots in international political economy. Together, these Special Issues seek to identify the key blind spots in the field and to make sense of how many scholars missed or misconstrued important dynamics that define contemporary capitalism and the other systems and sources of social inequality that characterise our present. This particular Special Issue pursues this goal by looking backwards, to the history of political economy and at the ways in which we have come to tell that history, in order to understand how we got to the present moment.

The New Economy and Youth Justice

This article focuses on the shape of the contemporary political economy and its effects on the young people and adults who are involved in the ‘deep end’ of the youth justice system – youth prisons. This ‘deep end’ arguably represents the end of the road for young people and adults who have found themselves adrift in the context of the contemporary capitalist model, and who have passed through existing social systems intended to offer them a safety net. After examining the consequences of the economy for these individuals, the article looks to new economic models and processes and their possible implications for a research and reform agenda.

What COVID-19 Reveals About Twenty-First Century Capitalism: Adversity and Opportunity.

Twenty-first century capitalism features financialization and monopoly power. A structural perspective of contemporary political economy illuminates how these aspects shape the COVID-19 response. COVID-19 has exposed failures across health care systems, working conditions, supply chains, the depth of inequality, systemic racism, and features of globalization that exacerbate negative outcomes for the many. Examining access to medicines, personal protective equipment and vaccines, inequality and working conditions highlights just some of what is broken and what needs to be fixed. The unsparing challenge and immiseration of COVID-19 offer an opportunity to re-think basic structures of contemporary capitalism and re-imagine a more compassionate future.

The Constitutive Performativity of the Law of Capital

This is a discussion of Pistor's work on the code of capital and more generally on the approach taken by the new legal institutionalists on law and political economy. In particular, the intervention focuses on the central idea according to which law is constitutive of the contemporary political economy.

THE DYNAMICS OF DIGITAL CAPTURE: HOW INDUSTRIES TIE AUDIENCES TO EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Few studies examine “digital capture,” forces that get people to adopt digital technologies which, on balance, benefit organizations more than the publics. Using various perspectives on this topic, the panel will explore the ways four industries are rolling out digital technologies that have captured audiences in long-term relationships. One paper will use a “digital colonialization” perspective (Ricaurte, 2019) that highlights the influence of capitalist imperialism within contemporary political economy. A second paper demonstrates how network effects fueled adoption of the Common Application laying the groundwork for higher education marketing that fetishizes customer relationship marketing (CRM) technologies to the point of constructing teenage college prospects as sales leads and “yields.” A third presentation explores how companies seduce people to use smart devices that can infer information about the ways they talk and sound while the companies play down the surveillance aspects of the technologies, ultimately eroding their freedom to make choices under the guise of giving them new ways to choose. The fourth contribution presents the growing convergence between emerging technologies and the health sector from the perspective of political economy, demonstrating through case studies how audiences are captured through ambiguous framings that highlight the advantages of health information sharing, but obscure the exploitative nature of pervasive data collection and its use for commercial purposes. Together, the panel points to research needed to understand the emergence of various surveillance regimes before they become taken-for-granted parts of the cultural landscape when changes to them can be made mainly at their margins.