Cultural Political Economy Approach Research Articles

A political economy of youth policy in Mexico

ABSTRACT This article discusses the recent adoption of a large-scale youth programme in Mexico. Political economy approaches offer a critical account of the institutional arrangements that have resulted in the emergence of specific educational, labour and, more recently, youth policies in the Latin American region. Studies of youth policies are still developing and are a multidisciplinary field. This article draws on various theoretical traditions from various fields, constituting a novel approach to studying these policies. This article combines empirical evidence drawn from interviews with policy stakeholders with the analysis of key policy documents. It employs a Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach to explain the Mexican government’s adoption of the youth programme Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro’ (JCF) in 2018, which provides paid on-the-job training to 2.3 million young people aged 18–29. The JCF’s adoption resulted from the rising to power of a left-wing political coalition presenting an anti-neoliberal alternative based on explicit notions of social justice and inclusion with a national development plan reminiscent of an inward-oriented development paradigm aimed at strengthening the internal market, reminiscent of recent ‘neo-developmentalist’ projects in the region. JCF represents a notorious case study of the political economy of youth policy in Mexico.

The spatial politics of depoliticization: Visionary planning, bioeconomy, and forest capital

Depoliticization is a pivotal political strategy that defines the contemporary governance of core capitalist democracies. This thesis asks how depoliticization manifests itself as a political strategy in the spatial restructuring of the Finnish state space. The spatial politics of depoliticization are examined by the three thesis articles, which focus on visionary planning in urban politics, the legitimation of the forest bioeconomy in the public sphere, and Finnish forest capital’s attempt to influence the state’s strategic direction. These perspectives provide a holistic view of the various depoliticizing and politicizing tendencies, as well as the political and economic contradictions affecting spatial change in Finland. The thesis examines the societal base of depoliticization by focusing on how capitalist social relations and the capitalist mode of production condition the constitution and differentiation of societal spheres. The differentiation of the economic and the political sphere and the resulting ecological dominance of “the economy” under capitalism provides a unique setting for depoliticization to appear in the form of economization. Acts of demarcation between the political and the economic spheres are based on ontological abstraction, which then faces humanity as a real and concrete product of social activity. The thesis applies strategic-relational state theory and the theories of uneven development to examine depoliticization. Depoliticization emerges in the context of competing growth models that have a diverging conception of the spatial division of labor in Finland. Amidst urbanization, the urban growth-focused city-regionalist model posits a “winner takes all” spatial structure in which a few select urban areas compete against their global counterparts to attract capital and investment. In contrast, the bioeconomy model seeks to halt the rural decline by transforming the resource-dependent regional economies into ostensibly more sustainable production models, thereby reinvigorating a dispersed spatial structure. Article I analyzes the depoliticization of visionary planning in the case of the Oulu City Center Vision 2040 project by observing and engaging with policy documentation, research reports, planning events, and the vision itself. Article II examines the depoliticization of the bioeconomy in the context of the 2019 parliamentary elections in Finland through a collection of newspaper articles and items between July 2018 and January 2020. Article III investigates the forest conglomerate UPM’s attempt to politicize the Kaipola paper mill shutdown in August 2020 by using statistical data, the public strategies of UPM, and the online and news media around the Kaipola debate. The cultural political economy (CPE) approach developed prominently by Jessop and Sum forms the overarching methodological framework of the thesis and focuses on the dialectics of materiality and discursivity in political-economic imaginaries. The thesis applies CPE-inspired critical discourse analysis to examine the spatial politics of depoliticization. The overall contribution of the thesis reveals how the material interdependence of the political sphere with other societal spheres and the social totality of capitalist society produces a specific place for politics that conditions its operational autonomy. The spatial politics of depoliticization are unfolded through the divergent political-economic imaginaries of state spatial development to which different capital fractions, political parties, and regional and class interests are attached. Conceptual stretching and expansive uses of depoliticization are recognized as key and very vexatious problems in the literature. To retain the analytical clarity of depoliticization, the thesis argues that depoliticization should be better grounded in the material developments of each context, evading pan-politicism with more exclusive notions of politics, and even radically decentering politics and the political in the analyses of depoliticization. The normative critique of depoliticization should move from the level of critiquing politics to a critique of the social totality which produces a specific place for politics.

Anti-Systemic Movements in the Attention Economy

In recent decades, anti-systemic movements feature new forms of communication for organizing efforts: the use of information and communication technologies. Research on information and communication technologies suggests that mobile phones and internet access have increasingly facilitated horizontal communication for anti-systemic movements across the world-system, creating space for rapid and instantaneous organization and mobilization. However, existing scholarship benefits from a critical evaluation of claims about horizontality by addressing the political economy of information and communication technologies from a world-systems analysis perspective. Specifically, information and communication technology devices and platforms—from cellphones to social media channels—are designed by powerful corporations that are often based in powerful core and semi-periphery nations. The majority of these corporations are based in the hegemonic core of the United States. Within the present context of waning material resources across the world-system, these corporations profit from an online attention economy. Just as traditional material economies exploit the labor and natural resources from the periphery to extract wealth for core states, the attention economy exploits the psychologies and behaviors of periphery populations to extract wealth for core countries. Thus, some of the most powerful institutions in the world-system control the algorithms and structures where anti-systemic movements compete for peoples’ attention. This study utilizes the Mass Mobilization Data Project 1990-2018 historical dataset to determine which kinds of anti-systemic movements thrive as information and communication technology access expands globally. Using population-averaged negative binomial panel models on protest counts, I determine that as information and communication technologies expand, anti-systemic movements that are unlikely to threaten U.S. hegemony thrive, and conversely, anti-systemic movements that pose serious threats to U.S. hegemony and the present capitalist world-system are stifled. To unpack these findings, I draw from the cultural political economy approach, a framework that describes how some imaginations become a zeitgeist over competing imaginations for economic and political realities.

Low-fee private preschools as the symbol of imagined ‘modernity’? – Parental perspectives on early childhood care and education (ECCE) in an urban informal settlement in Zambia

This paper explores (1) the public and private options available at the ECCE level, (2) parents’ expectation for ECCE, and (3) preferred and actual choice of preschools in an urban informal settlement in Zambia. The findings reveal strong demand for ECCE among the urban poor. This demand overwhelms low-fee private (LFP) preschool options due both to an insufficient number of public preschools as well as parents’ relative preference for the LFP options. Typically, LFP preschools offer highly academic oriented curriculum with English as a medium of instruction, divergent from the government’s play-based and mother-tongue based curriculum. By adopting critical cultural political economy approach as an analytical framework, we found that urban poor parents increasingly view investing in LFP preschools as an important household strategy to ‘transform’ their children into ‘modern’ citizens, eventually exiting from their stigmatized lifestyle and marginalized social status.

Strategic Observatory for Europe 2030: Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence SOE2030 and Its Impact

Abstract The main goal of Agenda 2030, the third and current strategic document of the European Union (EU), is to steer its development in pursuit of its Sustainable Development Goals. However, both policy research and policy practice have revealed a relatively poor implementation record of the EU grand strategy. The implementation of Agenda 2030 may be even more challenging, since it is not only an official EU grand strategy, but, more pervasively, a document accepted by the United Nations and whose implementation has global ambitions and also encounters many obstacles deriving their origin from beyond the borders of the EU. This promises that implementation and factors contributing to successes and failures of the EU grand strategies will remain an interesting research topic. In this article we present the possible application of Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach in this research and present its application in the framework of Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence titled Strategic Observatory for Europe 2030 (SOE2030).

New public management reforms and industrial relations in the Italian education system. A cultural political economy approach

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the relation between new public management (NPM) reforms and changing patterns of industrial relations (IRs) and social dialogue in the Italian education system. Drawing on data from the research project ‘Social dialogue and industrial relations in education: The challenges of multi-level governance and privatisation in Europe’ (IR-EDUREFORM), it uses cultural political economy to explore the effects of autonomy, evaluation, and management as policy technologies on teacher unions’ collective bargaining, workplace representation and industrial action. Through the Italian case, the study analyses how NPM reforms operated three distinctive transformations: decentralisation of bargaining to school level, juridification and individualisation of industrial action and a shift from collective to professional unions. Beyond critically exploring the implications of NPM reforms and the processes of decollectivation and individualisation of IRs and social dialogue in education, the study also highlights some potential for the emergence of novel sites for collective representation.

Silent struggles: women education leaders’ agency for peacebuilding in Islamic schools in post-conflict Aceh

ABSTRACT This article engages with an under-researched field that specifically looks into the gendered nature of women education leaders’ agency in the context of Islamic boarding schools in post-tsunami and post-war Aceh province of Indonesia. The key aim of this paper is to understand various ways in which Acehnese women educators’ negotiate and navigate restricted, gendered and religiously orthodox spaces. We analyse the role of grassroots education actors in processes of societal transformation and peacebuilding through a gender-specific lens, to explore our contextual understanding of agency through a cultural political economy approach, complemented with insights from critical and decolonial peace education. By presenting the often silenced and marginalized stories of women leaders, educators and grassroots actors, we explore their views and experiences in – consciously or unconsciously – transforming or reproducing existing (in)equalities and potential conflict-triggers in contemporary Aceh.

Re/diss/assembling “Educational Imaginaries” through Regionalism – The Construction of the Caribbean Education Policy Space

This paper uses a Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach to examine the rise of what we call "educational imaginaries" within the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) educational policy space by looking at how this has occurred through the four modes of selectivity – structural selectivity, agential selectivity, discursive selectivity, and technological selectivity. 
 

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

The gendered political economy of Chile’s rebellious discontent: lessons from forty-five years of neoliberal governance

ABSTRACT Chile's unprecedented citizen mobilizations of 2019, and subsequent political developments, have revealed the social and institutional limits of Latin America's paradigmatic case of neo-developmentalism. They have raised critical questions about the nature, reach and effects, of a 30-year progressive program of ‘growth with equity’ resulting in profound inequalities and political disenchantment for the majority. The article argues for a gendered cultural political economy approach to understand the impact of neoliberalism, best conceived as a governing rationality, that is now facing a generalized crisis of legitimacy. It examines the role of the Constitution of 1980 in enshrining in law neoliberal structural reforms, and setting the political and institutional bases for subordinating the substance of society and individuals to the laws of the market. The article shows that this marketization has transformed fundamental taken-for-granted social relations of reproduction which make markets possible, with harsh effects for the majority of Chilean women..

The silent expansion of internationalisation: exploring the adoption of the International Baccalaureate in Madrid

ABSTRACT The growth of the International Baccalaureate (IB) worldwide is part of a global trend towards the internationalisation of education (IE). Its implementation, nonetheless, takes different forms depending on national and local contexts. This paper examines the recent expansion of the IB in Madrid, drawing upon the sociology of education policy enactments and recontextualisations and the Cultural Political Economy approach. Combining in-depth interviews, document analysis and secondary quantitative data, this paper shows why Madrid has led the expansion of IB schools in Spain in the last decade, an expansion, which has nonetheless remained relatively unnoticed. Our findings suggest that the growth and penetration of private international education initiatives such as the IB may be related to particular social factors, education system characteristics and education policy ensembles, with a particularly intense manifestation in decentralised systems where neoliberal and neoconservative policies foster autonomy, competition, internationalisation and ‘excellence’.

Cultural political economy, crisis management, and COVID-19 in the United States

ABSTRACT The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has ravaged the world. The pace at which this pandemic spread left policy makers scrambling to understand the virus and craft ameliorative policy measures, while populations struggled to make sense of the pandemic’s impact on their lives. This opened up many opportunities for crisis learning. This article deploys the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach to analyse discursive and material ways in which the President of the United States engaged in crisis learning and crisis management during the early months of the pandemic. Although preexisting conditions structured the early response to COVID-19, contingent moments of (in)action by the President had significant, path-shaping impact on the scope and severity of the pandemic. A vignette on the functionality of the US healthcare system during the early days of the pandemic offers further clarity on the interplay between material and discursive factors impacting real-time crisis learning and management.

Understanding Vietnamese Attitudes Toward Chinese Inbound Tourism Development: A Cultural Political Economy Approach

ABSTRACT This study investigated the formation of locals’ attitudes toward Chinese tourism to Nha Trang via a cultural political economy approach. An ethnographic fieldwork was conducted, and data were analyzed via critical grounded theory analysis. It found that locals’ views on Chinese tourism were concentrated on Chinese tourism as a source of income, which, however, was somewhat challenged by their concerns about tourism investments from China. While the residents had overall mixed views on the socio-cultural impacts of local tourism development, Chinese tourism was primarily associated with negative social impacts. Although residents had overall negative or neutral perceptions of Chinese tourists, their behavioral response to them was mostly positive. The study suggests that it is the interplay of social imaginaries relating to Chinese tourism (i.e. ‘tourism as a tool of economic growth’, and ‘China as an “external enemy”’), embedded in broad social, economic, political, and historical contexts, and locals’ encounter with Chinese tourism mobility (i.e. mobility of Chinese people, capital, information etc. along with Chinese tourism) that shapes the ambiguity of locals’ attitudes.

Cultural political economy of Europe 2020: Jean Monnet Chair CPE 2020 and its impact

Abstract The main goal of the grand strategy Europe 2020 is to achieve smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Implementation of such grand strategy is an arduous process, which has so far more often than not resulted in implementation deficit. The article follows the Cultural Political Economy approach and is based on a premise that to successfully implement a grand strategy of Europe 2020 and its successor strategies, we need to construe the strategy as a hegemonic discourse that needs to pass the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection and retention. Possible mechanism of retention of Europe 2020 is the innovative educational that was developed and tested in Jean Monnet Chair project Cultural Political Economy of Europe 2020. The approach can contribute to awareness of EU grand strategies and their implementation through other programmatic documents and advance interdisciplinary EU studies dealing with the phenomenon of EU implementation deficit.

Economic and social security in EU: Reforming Slovenian law on social enterpreneurship

Abstract Europe 2020 strategy of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth also implies policies for boosting social innovations. In this context, it is relevant to encourage solutions such as social entrepreneurship as it is addressing social and environmental issues while employing entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship depends on the context of its emergence and implementation. In this regard, the context-specific factors play an important role. Following the Cultural Political Economy approach, the article examines on different factors that have influenced on the adoption of amendments of the Slovenian Social Entrepreneurship Act in 2018. Selection of the case study of Slovenia bases on the findings implying that Slovenia has still not overcome the initial phase of the development of the social entrepreneurship. The article reveals that there are still issues relevant for running social enterprises that are not sufficiently regulated by the law. One of them is a training of the vulnerable groups in terms of their technological skills in order to ensure their efficiency and productiveness in Work Integration Social Enterprises.

Impact of circular economy as the EU’s ambitious policy

Abstract The article describes the role of legislative and legal framework which brought about a new approach to waste management through the concept of circular economy, and its drivers. We explicitly focus on the impact of ambitious EU environmental policy and its financial support from the European Commission (EC) which helped social actors recognize not only the ecological, but also the economic and social benefits of the circular economy. Over 50 actions under the “Circular Economy Action Plan” launched in 2015 have been delivered or are being implemented in this period in European Union (EU). Through overview of the EU’s ambitious policy, best practice of the circular economy in the world and status quo in circular economy at EU level we also show the circular economy is nowadays a crucial megatrend and there is still needed to increase up action at EU level, provide the competitive advantage it brings to EU economy and close the loop. Beside impact of ambitious EU environmental policy article focuses on the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach as a political economy approach with the purpose for explaining the role of legislative and legal framework as a mechanism for selection and retention of the paradigm of circular economy.

Understanding Education on China’s Belt and Road Initiative: A Cultural Political Economy Approach

Abstract The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (bri) is a state-driven development campaign that promote economic integration and infrastructure building across Eurasia and beyond, aiming to reconnect countries and revive the prosperity of the historical Silk Road region. Since its inception in 2013, there has been a growing literature surrounding the initiative, yet the studies of education within the bri context remain relatively under-researched. This paper aims to explore such connection by undertaking the task through a combination of policy review, semi-structured interviews, and empirical fieldwork data. It adopts a Cultural Political Economy theoretical framework to analyzes how education policy and practice has been positioned, constructed, and coordinated in relation to the wider cultural political economy in assisting the bri planning and development. Against the background of China’s resurgence as a global power and its ambition in reinvigorating the Silk Road, I argue that the strategic positioning of education into the bri represents a constructive force in imagining, empowering, and materializing the New Silk Road Project. This reveals education and its multifaced properties in promoting cultural outreach, fulfilling political obligation, and accelerating economic growth in line with the overall bri building.

Scalar politics of urban sustainability: Governing the Chinese city in the era of ecological civilisation

Studies of urban politics have acknowledged the rescaling of state environmental regulation as a source of pressure for local growth regimes to balance their economic and environmental objectives. However, few inquiries have afforded equal attention to how these local regimes strategise their multi‐scalar context to manage urban economy–environment tensions. Informed by the cultural political economy approach to social transformation, this paper interprets urban sustainability fixes as a strategic combination of structural, discursive, technological, and agential selectivities in the scaling of urban development projects. Given their nodal position in urban governance, some actors are able to advance urban projects with conflicting environmental implications by linking them to different scalar hierarchies, each structurally prioritising different interests. These discourses are subsequently inscribed into material relations through various political technologies. This form of scalar politics is notable in the Chinese city of Guiyang, where local leaders sought to reap the policy benefits offered to cities supporting the national vision of ecological civilisation without slowing down local development. Contemporary urban politics, as Guiyang illustrates, is a scalar politics animated by competing attempts in framing and regulating urban economy–environment relations through and across a mosaic of scales and scalar hierarchies.

Revitalising place-based commercial heritage: A Cultural Political Economy approach to the renaissance of lambic beers in Belgium

ABSTRACT This paper studies the intricacies related to the revitalisation of commercial products that have recently been assigned with cultural heritage values in the context of post-Fordist consumption. Underpinned by a conceptual lens that combines reflections on heritage dissonance and Cultural Political Economy (CPE), the paper describes a qualitative study of lambic beers in Belgium. After being almost wiped out by the 1990s, lambic brewing has made a spectacular recovery due to a combination of global economic drivers and local sector-wide collaboration. However, the addition of cultural heritage values to the commercial product, which fuelled the sector’s economic regeneration, brought along challenges now there is less concern about the sector’s immediate survival. Alongside governance complexities, different interpretations among stakeholders of what constitutes ‘tradition’ have complicated defining the boundaries between collective and individual interests, which runs parallel with identifying where cultural values stop and economic values begin. Heritage dissonance, in this case, centres around struggles of finding a collective semiotic response to safeguard the sector’s agency in the context of its post-Fordist embedding, including prevailing ‘craft’ cultural/economic imaginaries. Concluding, the application of CPE to the lambic beer study reflects the framework’s value for understanding dissonant heritage values.

Cultural Political Economy and Conflicts Law – A new way to approach the Eurozone crisis

The immediate effects of the Euro crisis have been tamed but the crisis has soured the relations between Southern and Northern Member states for many years to come. Comparative political economy explains the frictions between North and South as a result of different institutional configurations of national economies (Varieties of Capitalism), different interests of capital and labor coalitions (growth model perspective) or ideational traditions (ordoliberal vs dirigisme). We argue that the exclusive focus of these approaches on either, rational institutionalism, interest coalitions or economic ideas obscures that these three factors come together in a long-term evolutionary trajectory that has formed national economic cultures within the Eurozone since the 1950s. We examplify our cultural political economy approach showing empircally how the German and Italian political economies developed in different ways since the end of WWII. In the second part of our contribution we develop a conflicts law perspective offering it as a third way that can mediate between the two extreme positions of Wolfgang Streeck (back to the nation state) and Juergen Habermas (federation) in the debate on the future of the European Union. We show how the culturally grounded diversities of European capitalisms can be accommodated through a conflicts law.