Cultural Political Economy Perspective Research Articles

The EF English Proficiency Index as an international large-scale assessment: a critical cultural political economy perspective

ABSTRACT This paper employs a Critical Cultural Political Economy of Education perspective to examine how, why, and to what effect the English proficiency rankings of a for-profit edu-business acquire the authority often granted to international large-scale assessments. Analysing the EF English Proficiency Index in the context of Ecuador illustrates how the global trend to quantify and compare outcomes can impact an area of education not directly touched by traditional large-scale tests. I argue that this index disseminates a falsely objective negative judgement of Ecuador’s English proficiency, and advances private interests under the guise of a quest for improvement and social good.

Researching Teacher Well-Being in Protracted Crises: A Multiscalar Cultural Political Economy Perspective

Research on teacher well-being that works from a localized socioeconomic perspective tends to neglect the nestedness of teacher well-being within wider systems. Randomized controlled trials are illustrative of such decontextualized ontological and epistemological foundations. In this article, we demonstrate the benefits of a system dynamics cultural political economy–informed analysis for research on teacher well-being in protracted crises. Zooming into teacher contract and salary policies in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we compare our largely qualitative research with two randomized controlled trials. Our article yields two insights for future systemic analyses of teacher well-being in protracted crises. First, such research necessitates a methodological design that captures the multiscalar systems in which teacher well-being is embedded. Second, such research requires an exploration of cultural, political, and economic dynamics that affect teachers and establish boundaries for teacher well-being.

Overtime: The Cultural Political Economy of Illicit Labor in the Electronics Industry

This article investigates the relationship between overtime and corporate codes of conduct in the global electronics industry through a cultural political economy perspective. First, drawing on examples from China, it considers how the changing political economy of global production has contributed to the emergence of illicit overtime in the electronics industry. The article examines the endemic use of excessive working hours at the first-tier supplier level and explains it as a systemic method to sustain competitive accumulation in a sector characterized by tight production cycles. Second, the article analyzes the economic imaginary that supports the use of overtime and the accompanying mechanisms that institutionalize it as a material practice. It shows that the Responsible Business Alliance Code of Conduct plays a crucial role in reproducing illicit conditions. Conclusions explore the potential of reorienting geographic understandings of illicit practices within the mainstream economy.

Beyond the jobs-versus-environment dilemma? Contested social-ecological transformations in the automotive industry

The transport sector is the major contributor to accelerating CO2 emissions, with the highest proportion stemming from road transport and passenger cars. At the same time, the automotive industry drives economic growth, contributes to state revenues and is an important employer. This article departs from this so-called jobs-versus-environment dilemma to discuss barriers and potentials for transformative change in the Austrian automotive (supplier) industry with a special focus on workers and trade unions. Based on a Cultural Political Economy perspective, we firstly analyze the materiality of the Austrian automotive industry and secondly link these structural features to meaning-making and the articulation of crisis construals and imaginaries by workers and their representatives. This analysis helps to better understand the challenges for more transformative change but thirdly also to examine entry points for such a transformation from a labor perspective. We characterize the materiality of the Austrian automotive industry around six interconnected features and identify an improvement, a diversification and a transformation imaginary. Despite a widespread perception of incremental change among the workforce in the automotive industry, we find that there is strong confidence in their knowledge and expertise that could also support a more systemic mobility transformation. As such, the transformation of the Austrian automotive industry exemplifies both the strategic dilemmas and potentials of social-ecological transformations.

Economic imaginaries and beyond. A cultural political economy perspective on the League party

ABSTRACT In the face of enduring crisis phenomena, quantitative evidence of the renewed salience of socio-economic agendas advanced by radical right populist parties calls for more qualitative research work and in-depth case studies. The present paper aims to contribute to filling this gap through a cultural political economy (CPE) investigation of the Italian League (Lega) party that foregrounds its socio-economic positioning by reconstructing the party’s ‘economic imaginary’. The suggested synergy between CPE and a critical discourse analysis of the League’s practical argumentation in the 2013 and 2018 electoral manifestos points to a composite economic imaginary that prioritizes: 1) production (vs financialization); 2) support of internal demand; 3) lowering of fiscal pressure; 4) protectionism and 5) welfare. The analysis shows how, under Salvini’s leadership, the party’s practical argumentation in EU matters has become constitutive of its overall political strategy and so exacerbated the claims at the core of the respective economic imaginary. In this vein, the League’s Euroscepticism has also polarized the relationship between the party’s socio-economic and socio-cultural stance, thus urging to go beyond the focus on economic imaginaries and sketch out a CPE research agenda on the League’s more encompassing struggle for hegemony in the Italian political economy.

Discorsi emergenti nelle politiche di Lifelong Learning per i giovani adulti: riflessioni su due casi studio in Italia

The article presents a selection of the main results of the project “YOUNG ADULLLT. Policies Supporting Young People in their Life Course. A Comparative Perspective of Lifelong Learning and Inclusion in Education and Work in Europe” funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme. The project has involved research teams from 9 countries and its main focus was on the policy-making patterns, the aims and the implementation of the Lifelong Learning (LLL) policies targeting young adults at regional/local level. By the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods, the project has investigated the compatibility among the aims of the LLL policies, also in relation to their capacity to grasp the actual needs of their target. Further, the potential gap between intended and unintended effects of the policies has been explored in relation to the broader structural and cultural changes which prompt the biographical de-standardisation and affect the labour and skills market. Drawing from the main results of the analysis of two Italian case studies by a Cultural Political Economy perspective (Sum, Jessop, 2013), the article explores the discourses underlying the processes of policy-making and implementation of the analyzed LLL measures, with particular regard to the discourses on activation, needs and vulnerability of the target groups.

Lifelong learning policies for vulnerable young adults in post-recession Scotland

This article shows how the Scottish Government’s (SG) political management of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has reinforced the economic goals of lifelong learning (LLL) under the skills for work agenda. Youth unemployment has been prioritized as the main social problem to be addressed, and most of the limited public resources for LLL have been targeted towards youth at risk of unemployment at the expense of the rest of the adult population. The article adopts a Cultural Political Economy perspective to examine LLL policy discourses contained in 12 policy documents published by the SG during the period between the Scottish National Party’s arrival in power and the Independence Referendum (2007–2014). The analysis draws attention to the fact that the GFC has been used by the SG to legitimize selective cuts to the further education sector as well as a stronger labour market orientation within LLL provision.

Ordoliberal Authoritarian Governance in China since 1978: World Market, Performance Legitimacy, and Biosovereign Ordering

My contribution has six parts. First, starting from the Harvey-Ong debate on the ‘strange case’ of neoliberalism in China, it proceeds to the wider discussion of the path-dependent, geographically-conditioned variegation of neoliberalization. Second, it suggests how a meso-level cultural political economy can mediate between abstract-simple and concrete-complex analyses. Third, it proposes making ordoliberal and authoritarian turns to examine (non-western) cases where sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical power coexist and co-evolve. Fourth, it deploys the concept of ordoliberal authoritarian governance to examine China since Deng’s opened it to the world market in 1978. Specifically, it describes a hybridized ensemble of meta-governance ground rules (e.g., GDPism), socialist statecraft, the bio-sovereign ordering of the population through hukou (household registration system) and suzhi (human quality), and the politics of desire/morality (e.g., consumption and neo-Confucianism). These governing techniques and strategies have strengthened China’s national growth and entrepreneurial potential; but they have also weakened them through exclusionary practices that generate inequalities and social unrest. Fifth, it considers the new subaltern resistance identity of Diaosi, which has emerged since 2011. Diaosi live in marginal and subaltern conditions but also aspire to gain urban hukou and embrace suzhi consumption. To re-establish control in response to these challenges, the government has intensified Internet surveillance, censorship and the use of a “social credit” system. Sixth, the article offers some conclusions on the cultural political economy perspective on variegation and heuristic potential of the ordoliberal and authoritarian turns in examining variegated neoliberalization/ordoliberalization in non-western settings.

TVET policy reforms in Chile 2006–2018: between human capital and the right to education

ABSTRACTHuman development and rights-based approaches to education have been gaining support among international organisations and development agencies as alternative frameworks to human capital orthodoxy. While these global trends have been well-documented in the international development literature, there is little empirical evidence into what extent, and through which mechanisms, alternative development paradigms in education are influencing Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) reforms. Chile provides an excellent opportunity for this kind of research given the long cycle of political contestation of neoliberal education policies in the country during the last decade. The article analyses TVET policy discourses for the last three government administrations (2006–2018) from a Cultural Political Economy perspective. The adoption of the rights-based approach in Chile shows its potential to mobilise greater involvement of the state in the funding and provision of TVET and in the support to secondary TVET students who want to continue their studies in tertiary education. However, the rights-based approach to education falls short when it comes to problematising political economy structures that shape TVET policymaking and the precarious labour market opportunities available to TVET graduates. These shortfalls show the need to incorporate more fundamental critiques of the neoliberal paradigm into the formulation of alternative policy agendas for TVET.

Constituting financialized subjectivities: cultural political economy of financial literacy in Turkey

ABSTRACTFinancial literacy is defined as the knowledge, skills, and ability to navigate increasingly complex financial markets, and is considered to empower consumers to make responsible financial decisions. It has been widely promoted as a crucial life skill following the 2008 financial crisis. This study critically analyzes financial literacy education initiatives in Turkey through ethnographic research. Financial literacy curricula provide the basic knowledge of finance as well as instruct subjects ways to conduct financial planning, budgeting, debt management, creditworthiness, saving, and investment. Financial literacy agenda deepens neo-liberal governmentality by promoting an entrepreneurial subjectivity and making individuals more aware and responsible for social risks. The cultural political economy perspective of this study analyzes financialized capital accumulation dynamics together with the reshaping of culture and the constitution of financialized subjectivities.

Interpreting business mobility through socio-economic differentiation. Greek firm relocation to Bulgaria before and after the 2007 global economic crisis

This paper explores the roots of firm relocation through the lens of the differentiation of economic and institutional framework across countries. Specifically, it examines movements of small- and medium-sized enterprises from Greece to Bulgaria, by comparing the pre- and post-crisis socio-economic conditions between the two countries. A cultural political economy perspective facilitates a firm-focused approach to the analysis of distinct political economies by examining the business decisions for relocating. Drawing upon original data from a fieldwork survey conducted in 2014, it is demonstrated that firm relocation from Greece to Bulgaria has recently increased due to the divergence of the socio-economic conditions between the two countries in the aftermath of the 2007 global economic crisis. Firm relocation was not perceived as a solely economic decision; rather, it reflected several aspects of the Greek political economy. Overall, this paper highlights the crisis-driven disruption of the differentiation of distinct political economies through the study of business mobility.

Geopolitics: Putting geopolitics in its place in cultural political economy

This comment explores the relation between geoeconomics and geopolitics from a critical realist, strategic-relational, and cultural political economy perspective. We disambiguate the ‘geo-’ family of concepts; introduce a more complex view of sociospatiality that enables a taxonomy of approaches to geopolitical analytical objects and inquiries; and illustrate this from China’s Belt and Road Initiative seen as a complex geopolitical imaginary and linked modes of multi-spatial metagovernance.

Labour Networks under Supply Chain Capitalism: The Politics of the Bangladesh Accord

ABSTRACTThe Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety is a transnational governance approach towards implementing factory safety standards in the Bangladeshi garment sector. Some commentators argue that the Accord is a ‘game changer’ in times of corporate social responsibility (CSR), especially because it includes transnational buying companies in a legally binding contract with union federations. This article takes the Accord as an interesting case for how labour networks become part of a transnational governance arrangement. Taking a cultural political economy perspective, the author assumes that the Accord marks a practice of implementing ethical demands under conditions of supply chain capitalism and argues that calling the Accord a paradigm shift would be overly optimistic: while labour networks were able to use a crisis in the regime of CSR policies, they could not challenge the managerial culture of translating political demands according to the conventions of supply chain management. These conventions separate the sources of profit from the political claim for decent labour standards. In a transnational governance initiative, labour networks rely on such management conventions, since they are constitutive of the production network. From this perspective the Accord is an impressive reaction to the Rana Plaza disaster, but not a game changer.

Negotiating varieties of capitalism? Crisis and change in contemporary British and German labour migration policies

ABSTRACTJust a decade ago, the liberal British and cautious German approaches to labour migration policy (LMP) counted as institutional spillovers of two opposed varieties of capitalism. Since 2014, however, Germany has offered one of the most liberal labour migration legislations across the rich world, while the Coalition government in London has severely curbed the rules of admission. Is the explanatory power of capitalist variation already exhausted for comparative labour migration policies? To what extent has the economic crisis disrupted policy paths? By adopting a cultural political economy perspective, this paper examines the interaction of crisis discourses and capitalist varieties in explaining LMP changes. A comparison shows that Britain treats the liberal market economy’s openness to foreign workers as a root cause for a deeply felt migration control crisis and seeks to tame firms’ profitability strategies with restrictive policies. By contrast, German decision-makers have come to view the skill provision mechanisms of the coordinated market economy as key cure to the perceived demographic crisis, liberalising migration routes alongside this economic coordination model. Overall, the paper dethrones capitalist varieties as seemingly deterministic informants of labour migration policies. Instead, policies have both the aim and capacity to negotiate national capitalisms according to shifting notions of crisis.

EU governance in crisis: A cultural political economy perspective on European crisis management 2007–2014

The article investigates the character of economic and financial crisis management dynamics in the European Union (EU) between 2007 and 2014. In particular, it explores the main actors and imaginaries structuring European governance processes in reaction to the North Atlantic financial crisis. First, a Cultural Political Economy perspective on power and discourse is developed by drawing on concepts from Neo-Gramscian International Political Economy and Critical Discourse Analysis. Second, concrete EU policy reactions to the crisis are distinguished into three main policy fields of crisis management, with each being examined in terms of the dominant economic forces, policy discourses and political actors that shape them. The article shows that pre-crisis modes of accumulation and regulation of the European economy have been broadly maintained and even sharpened by the crises in Europe. This consolidated reproduction is especially fostered by the evolutionary interplay of dominant transnational social forces from European export- and finance-oriented industries as well as of the established economic imaginary of competitiveness on the EU level. As such, the article argues for a rediscovery of transnational dynamics in European studies of the crisis as these dynamics play a crucial role in coordinating spatial, temporal and institutional varieties in European reactions to the crisis.

The Paradoxes of Decent Work in Context: A Cultural Political Economy Perspective

Scientific discourses of decent work can be roughly grouped into two main lines of interpretation. The first, optimistic line sees the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) decent work agenda as indicative of counter-hegemonic forces successfully injecting post-neo-liberal norms into global labour regulation. Specifically, feminist scholars have welcomed the emergence of decent work, because of its explicit concern with non-standard work, informal labour and care work. The second, more pessimistic line is critical of the decent work agenda, seeing it as compatible with or even reinforcing neo-liberal hegemony, especially because of its embrace of soft labour regulation and corporate social responsibility. This article aims to analyse the paradoxes of decent work by putting this discourse in its historical and theoretical context. The article first draws on the framework of Cultural Political Economy (CPE) to identify competing ‘economic imaginaries’ of decent work. Two prominent interpretations will be juxtaposed to outline a ‘feminist’ and a ‘business case’ decent work imaginary. Second, the article interrogates two different ILO initiatives, each of which is underpinned by one of these decent work imaginaries, in terms of the ways they may challenge or reinforce neo-liberal hegemony – the Domestic Workers Convention and the Better Work Programme.

Leveraging finance capital: Urban change and self-empowerment of real estate developers in India

This paper questions the effects of the financialisation of Indian real estate markets with a focus on the Bangalore city-region. Research on Southern cities has concluded that globally connected but locally embedded real estate developers contribute to anchoring transnational investment. Yet, the acknowledged dearth of studies on the real estate industry in post-liberalisation India limits our understanding of the ongoing empowerment of local urban actors, including developers. Adopting a cultural political economy perspective, the paper analyses how developers leverage finance capital to achieve greater economic and political agency and thus contribute to the material, symbolic and political transformations of cities. It first demonstrates that finance capital has sustained Bangalore-based developers’ growth strategies throughout Southern India. Subsequently, developers shape the materialities of metropolises via a piecemeal juxtaposition of medium-sized developments. Although this may occasionally meet government strategies for modernising their cities, it more often than not constitutes an understudied obstacle to States’ mega-projects that are outdone by developers’ ability to work through the intricacies of local land markets and bureaucracies. Furthermore, having become dominant city-builders, developers are in a situation to circulate representations concerning what the desirable city should be. Such narratives aim at inserting local real estate markets into globalising financial commodity chains while also legitimating developers’ own role. Consequently, developers attempt to promote – with some success – prescriptions in favour of State reforms and the adoption of pro-urban growth policies. The ongoing financialisation of urban production thus participates in the self-empowerment of developers in India’s cities.

Limits of the competition state? The cultural political economy of European labor migration policies

Labor migration has been revitalized as part of economic competition and growth strategies across Europe over the last decade. Scholars have framed policy changes towards more liberal recruitment as a turn towards ‘competition state’ and Schumpeterian innovation goals. This article evaluates the extent to which British, French and German labor admission policies are dominated by competition state logics. I apply a cultural political economy perspective, thereby substantiating this relatively new approach analytically and testing its usefulness for capturing the economic governance of labor migration. I argue that the highly selective arrangement of admissions – with regard to skill-level targeted, and causal, spatial, and operational foci of recruitment – creates a fragmented cultural political economy of labor migration. While competition state logics shape the economic imaginary of ‘high-skilled global labor competiveness’, rival logics dominate the imaginaries of ‘skilled national labor shortages’, and ‘lower skilled EU labor self-sufficiency’. Findings pinpoint limits of competition state theory in explaining contemporary labor migration policy. I demonstrate that semiotic and regulatory selectivity is a key remedy for coping with competing state projects and associated policy tensions. The political ordering of labor migration simultaneously entails amplification and silencing of competition state logics in policies.

A Comedic Practicum: Molière and Terence Revisited

Viewed in retrospect, the concept of 'financialization' highlights the massive growth in the issue and trading of ownership claims on all manner of instruments. It has also opened the way for research linking these changes in the financial markets to disciplinary transformations in corporate management and governance. There are, however, future prospects for financialization research once the concept is re-worked from a cultural political economy perspective and changes in the financial markets are linked to the consumer credit boom in Anglo-American economies. Grounded in the calculative creation and management of default risk by lenders, markets for asset-backed securities and credit derivatives have emerged that trade claims on the future repayments of borrowers on car loans, credit cards and so on. Disciplinary transformations also arise in everyday financial self-government. Thrift and prudence are no longer paramount in extending individual freedom and security, but are displaced by the responsible and entrepreneurial meeting, management and manipulation of outstanding obligations.

Class Voting and the Orange Revolution: A Cultural Political Economy Perspective on Ukraine's Electoral Geography

The coloured revolutions in the post-communist countries are widely regarded as bourgeois democratic breakthroughs in a classical liberal tradition. Statistical analysis of the structural side of the Orange electoral success in Ukraine – examining in a range of regions the effect on electoral support for an anti-regime candidate of a district's class composition, the activity of non-governmental organizations, ethic-linguistic characteristics, the prevailing mode of human settlement, the church influence, and economic links with Europe – shows the class composition of an electoral district to be the single most important factor behind Viktor Yushchenko's electoral success. However, the Orange victory in 2004 was achieved with support from the least bourgeois areas rather than those where the urban capitalist class had been the most developed.