Political Economy Dimensions Research Articles

Toward a political critique of reification: Lukács, Honneth and the aims of critical theory

This article engages Axel Honneth’s recent work on Georg Lukács’ concept of reification in order to formulate a politically relevant and historically specific critique of capitalism that is applicable to theorizing contemporary democratic practice. I argue that Honneth’s attempt to reorient the critique of reification within the terms of a theory of recognition has done so at the cost of sacrificing the core of the concept, which forged a connection between the socio-political analysis of capitalist domination and an analysis of the unengaged, spectatorial stance of human beings toward the world, showing how they together impede emancipatory social transformation. In order to accomplish the unfinished task of rendering the critique of reification applicable to contemporary critical theory, I seek to synthesize the advantages of Honneth’s approach, which focuses on the normative aspects of the critique of reification, with Lukács’ emphasis on the practical, political-economic dimensions of reification and the historically specific pathologies of the capitalist social form.

Economics are too important to leave to economists: The everyday – and emotional – dimensions of international political economy

John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke (eds) (2007) Everyday Politics of the World Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, US$36.99, ISBN 0521701635. Meg Jacobs (2005) Pocketbook Politics: Ec...

Addressing the HIV/AIDS—food insecurity syndemic in sub-Saharan Africa

Recently a few vocal health experts have suggested that some of the billions of dollars currently used to prevent and treat HIV and AIDS be reallocated to address more basic problems such as malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria, and enteric and diarrheal disease caused by lack of access to clean water. While not universally agreed upon, this reassessment of policy priorities acknowledges that there are multiple other health problems that deserve renewed attention from the international community. It also highlights the fact that the impacts of the HIV pandemic are exacerbated by widespread poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition, and gender inequality. Nowhere is this more evident than in sub-Saharan Africa, where multiple epidemics conflate and seriously compromise the survival of individuals and communities. Given the widespread occurrence of famine in sub-Saharan Africa, issues of food and economic security become of paramount importance in efforts to address the region's HIV epidemics. This paper examines the historical, political-economic, and cultural dimensions of the HIV epidemic in the context of the growing problem of food and economic insecurity. Furthermore, using theoretical frameworks that emphasize the dynamic interrelation between HIV/AIDS and food insecurity, we present suggestions for combining traditional HIV-prevention strategies with food production and nutritioneducation programming. In light of the complex interactions between HIV/AIDS and food insecurity and the lack of accessible treatment modalities, such programming could potentially reduce the risk for transmission of HIV through behavioural changes and improved nutritional and immune status, and increase the life expectancy of people living with HIV or AIDS.

The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research: An Editorial Statement

The first issue of IJURR was published more than 30 years ago, in 1977. It opened with a brief editorial statement in which the journal’s founders defined their project. IJURR would be interdisciplinary. It would be open to diverse theoretical approaches and methodologies, whilst seeking to understand urban and regional development in terms of the ‘fundamental economic, social and political processes which operate at local, national and international levels’. Such an understanding should inform ‘social action’ and not be confined to intellectual debate. The tone for the new journal was set by the inaugural issue, which opened with four articles (by Ray Pahl, Jean Lojkine, Enzo Mingione and Richard Child Hill) on ‘urbanism and the state’. Other contributors to the first volume of IJURR included Manuel Castells, Edmond Preteceille, Chris Pickvance, Patrick Dunleavy, Doreen Massey, Martin Ravallion, Roger Friedland, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Alford, Josef Gugler and William Flanagan. Pahl, Mingione, Preteceille, Pickvance, Piven and Castells were all founding members of IJURR’s editorial board, together with Michael Harloe (the editor) and S.M. Miller. The founders of and initial contributors to IJURR comprised a remarkable generation of scholars concerned with the development of a radical or critical approach to urban and regional issues that would be relevant to political and social change. Indeed, IJURR included a section on ‘Praxis’. In the first issue, this section comprised articles on social or popular movements in the USA, Mexico and Spain, and on the civil war in Beirut. The impetus behind IJURR came mostly from sociologists, and there was a considerable overlap between IJURR and Research Committee 21 of the International Sociological Association, but IJURR also drew on the efforts of political scientists, planners and geographers. Change was central to IJURR’s identity. Drawing on egalitarian conceptions of social justice, IJURR’s founders sought to show that cities and regions could change in a variety of directions. Marxist theory was especially appealing to scholars who combined activist and scholarly missions, although Marxist theory certainly did not go unchallenged (not least by Ray Pahl and Patrick Dunleavy) and was never a precondition for publication. The scholarly practice of the journal was unambiguously embedded in an overall surge of radical and even revolutionary politics across the world. The 1970s were the morning after the 1960s explosion of critical theory and revolutionary practice. Student rebellion and scholarly debate fed and radicalized each other. IJURR was both a product of and protagonist in this important shift, and was seen by its editors, authors, reviewers and readers as such.

Christianity, Relationality and the Material Limits of Individualism: Reflections on Robbins's Becoming Sinners

In his 2004 monograph, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society, Joel Robbins argues that the Urapmin, a small group of newly converted Chistrians in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, are trapped between two conflicting systems of values, namely the relationality of indigenous culture and the individuality of Christian culture. Yet, Robbins suggests that the Urapmin are troubled not only by conflicting values, but also by the fact that they have embraced a new ideological system without changing the material base of their lives, that is, subsistence agriculture on land owned by kin groups. Drawing on Robbins's work on the Urapmin and my own research on two different Christian denominations in the Western Solomon Islands, I bring a political–economic dimension to discussions of subjectivity, cultural change and ideologies of modernity that have arisen within the anthropology of Christianity.

The emergence of genetic rationality: space, time & information in American biological science, 1870-1920

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction I. Harnessing Heredity: Middle Class Mores and Information Management in Large-Scale Breeding Prelude 1. Middle Class Mores: Beaufort's Bastards2. Breeding True: Processing a New Elite Conclusion-A Backward Glance: Corporate Inheritance as Bastard Birth II. Fish-Market Phenomenology: The Habits of Thought and the Space of Exchange in Late Nineteenth-Century Natural History Prelude 3. The Political Economy of Natural History4. Homologous Networks of Exchange: The Intersubjective Infrastructure of Scientific Exchange5. Categorizing Experience: Space and Time in Nineteenth-Century Natural History6. The Pacific Railway Survey: The Subject in the Panoramic Mode III. History Writing Great Men Writing History: Recapitulation Narratives and Stories as Scientific Models Prelude 7. Storied Pasts8. The Plot Thickens: The Political Economic Dimensions of Biological Stories Conclusion-Osborn and the Horse: The Conservative Literary Inheritance of Evolutionary Stories IV. The Poetics of Wandering: Time, Narrative, and the Affective/Phenomenological Body Prelude 9. Wandering and Narrative10. Wandering and Inheritance in Light of the Sensory-Motor Complex11. Writing, Goods, and Memory Conclusion-New Folds in Space and Time V. Hybrid Space, Hybrid Time: Record Keeping and the Indexing of Genomic Space and Time Prelude 12. Industrial Perspectives: Luther Burbank13. Record Keeping: A Post-Hermeneutic Means for Charting the Space of Flows ConclusionThe Different Domains of Life NotesBibliographyIndex

Harnessing the Power of Incentives: A Framework for Increasing Aid Effectiveness by Design

Before it reaches the targeted beneficiary, a successful development assistance activity has to pass through the hands of many actors, including a slew of administrative and specialist individuals and committees within USAID, the implementing agent (which could be a government, private sector or non-profit agency), the recipient government political and administrative levels, and potential recipient country facilitators, to name but a few. Each of these actors has her own objectives and therefore idiosyncratic incentives, perhaps only incidental to those of USAID. On the other hand, many of these agents possess skills and information that could contribute to the success of the activity. How does one encourage these actors to enthusiastically provide their contributions without at the same time allow them to engage in potentially opportunistic behavior, which might derail the overall activity? Likewise, how can strategy, program, and activity designers at USAID not just avoid the pitfalls of these incentive conflicts and information asymmetries but explicitly harness them for the good of the intervention? We begin by describing the nature of these challenges. We then present a conceptual framework called Harnessing the Power of Incentives (or HPI, pronounced hippy). Based on the new institutional economics, it includes techniques that USAID may use both to reduce the risk of having their interventions hijacked or blunted by uncooperative collaborators as well as to turn these embedded incentives to their own advantage.The framework comprises several levels of analysis, each addressing different aspects of the aid program cycle. The macro level looks across activities and countries and identifies donor, recipient country, implementer, and activity characteristics that enhance the probability of a successful intervention or increase the likelihood of failure. The meso level, corresponding to the political economy dimension, identifies the interests of actor organizations and the games they play. With it, USAID can better manage its interactions with other organizations. The micro level elucidates the games and incentives facing the individual decision-makers within each organization and how these internal incentive structures may ultimately lead to stable but inefficient - and even perverse - aid outcomes. These three levels also provide guidance on improving incentives and collective action within and between USAID and its field missions and on the design of governance struc tures to improve implementer and USAID staff performance. Finally, we suggest the rudiments of an evaluation process comprising indicators and an experimental design, which would support aid effectiveness incentives at each of the three levels. We close by laying out a series of practical steps to implement an HPI application, with special attention to the different internal objectives and requirements of USAID administrative processes and their time and human resource constraints.

Recovering a sense of political economy

Political economy remains a pressing agenda for political geography and human geography more generally. This is evident from recent exchanges between (variously defined) Marxists and post-structuralists on the nature of society and space, via themes such as scale, space, region, public policy, being political, etc. The paper explores imaginative spaces for discussing differences and considers the potential of cultural political economy (CPE)—being advocated by amongst others Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum—to deliver on this. I highlight some of CPEs strengths and weaknesses, identify missing links, and then make recommendations on how to develop the geographical dimensions of cultural political economy, and, finally, urge serious engagement with the sited complexities and contradictions of re-presentations and material practices. This is done via a study of the ‘skills society’ in the UK.

The Earth of the Modern

One of the central questions in comparative studies of colonialism is what makes more recent variants of imperial extension so culturally distinctive, aside from the more obvious political-economic dimensions? This set of papers focuses on how European and Euro-American promulgated variants of colonialism can be viewed as embodying central tenets of modernism, such as progressivism, technocentrism, and hybridity. Moreover, the authors demonstrate how colonial practices in the era of the modern were not merely the result of policies emanating from imperial capitals, but were an outgrowth of conflict, mediation, and accommodation between colonizer and colonized. Thus, archaeological research is important for stressing that the past five centuries have seen a time of contested modernities, rather than the growth of ‘a’ modernist sensibility.

Toward a Critique of Latin American Neostructuralism

AbstractThis article offers a critical assessment of the first postneoliberalism development framework that emerged in Latin America after 1990. The ability of neostructuralism to present an attractive narrative about a twenty-first-century “modernity with solidarity” is based on abandoning key tenets of ECLAC's structuralism and the thinking of Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado; namely, a focus on the distribution and appropriation of economic surplus and a framing of Latin American development problems in a world capitalist system. This article argues that Latin American neostructuralism's discursive strengths, as well as its analytical weaknesses, stem from the marginalization of power relations from key dimensions of the region's political economy. Since 2000, neostructuralism has exacerbated its descriptive, short-term perspective, further dulling its analytical edge, by focusing on policies that promote social cohesion and state intervention in the cultural and the socioemotional realm.

Cultural political economy: On making the cultural turn without falling into soft economic sociology

This article explores the implications of making the cultural turn in the engagement of economic and political geography with issues of political economy. It seeks to steer a path between a fetishistic, reified economics that naturalizes economic categories and a soft economic sociology that focuses on the similarities between economic and other socio-cultural activities at the expense of the specificity of the economic. We show how combining critical semiotic analysis with an evolutionary and institutional approach to political economy offers one interesting way to achieve this goal. An evolutionary and institutional approach to semiosis enables us to recognize the semiotic dimensions of political economy at the same time as establishing how and why only some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate actually come to be selected and institutionalized; and Marxian political economy enables us to identify the contradictions and conflicts that make capital accumulation inherently improbable and crisis-prone, creating the space for economic imaginaries to play a role in stabilizing accumulation in specific spatio-temporal fixes and/or pointing the way forward from recurrent crises. The paper illustrates these arguments with a case study on the Flemish ‘anchoring strategy’ as a specific regional economic development strategy. It concludes with a set of guidelines for the further development of cultural political economy.

Civic Engagement and Older Adults: A Critical Perspective

The aging of the baby boom generation, together with research that links volunteerism and positive health outcomes in later life, has contributed to a burgeoning of interest in initiatives and programs promoting civic engagement among older adults. Although useful in potentially expanding role options in later life, this growing attention also underscores the importance of stepping back to critically examine frequently overlooked questions concerning the framing and potential consequences of the new emphasis on civic engagement. Following a brief review of semantics and definitional issues in this area, we use a critical gerontology framework, emphasizing both political economy analysis and perspectives from the humanities, to explore underlying questions such as these: What roles are older adults being encouraged to play in civic life? What meanings are implied by these roles? What political and economic forces underlie these roles? What types of civic engagement are left out of the conversation? Our goal is to encourage a broadening of the dialogue to include potentially problematic normative and political economic dimensions of civic engagement, particularly volunteerism, as they pertain to older adults.

La responsabilidad social corporativa como criterio de gestión empresarial

The first years of the 21st century has witnessed a far-reaching debate, in all spheres of society, about Corporate Social Responsibility. Even though this debate has been going on for much longer, it was confined to academic circles and very specialised forums. However, the rapid globalisation process of the economy, has led to a notable increase in the companies' transnational activity, which today, and not just in the case of the large corporations, surpasses the sphere of the States in their legal and political economic dimension. This together with the development of the Information Society, which allows these activities to be rapidly known and bring into contact all the subjects involved in or affected by it, explain the interest and the rapid spread of the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility, as a reaction to the new role of globalised companies in society and its relation with the different groups of interest that are interrelated with it. This dynamic concept is far from being a precise definition and is a concept being constructed, with a high degree of complexity, ambiguous and sometimes contradictory. This paper, based on the definition of greater acceptance at this time which can be seen in the green paper of the European Economic Community, tries to establish its scope and foreseeable evolution, not as a simple concept of altruistic and voluntary action, but as a management criteria of the companies, which is what will give it importance, beyond passing fashions. On the other hand, if CSR effectively forms part of business management, it will require constant verification and evaluation. It will also need generally accepted criteria and instruments to be developed that enable that. Finally, several considerations are made about the situation of the question in our country.

M. Anne Pitcher. Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. 293 pp. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $60.00. Cloth.

M. Anne Pitcher. Transforming Mozambique: Politics of Privatization, 1975-2000 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. 293 pp. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. As a self-described Afro-Marxist state, Mozambique became one of the most heavily statist economies in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet between its official abandonment of socialism in 1990 and 2001, the country had privatized more than 80 percent of some one thousand state-owned enterprises. Thus it appears that Mozambique has fully embraced the neoliberal prescriptions calling for privatization and market liberalization. This was guided by Frelimo, the same party that once ardently championed state socialism, providing some indication of the complex and sometimes contradictory dimensions of political economy in contemporary Mozambique. Of course, the discontinuities of this history are obvious. Indeed, rapid and aggressive privatization by a pluralist (if not wholly democratic) state would seem to signal a significant break with past economic dirigisme and one-partyism. Yet M. Anne Pitcher argues that this twenty-five-year period of transformation was also marked by significant continuities, despite the apparent triumph of the neoliberal privatization agenda. In what she calls interrupted continuities (237), many colonial-era firms and capitalists have reasserted themselves by reclaiming former holdings or investing anew in Mozambique. predominance of multinational, local non-African (Portuguese and Indian), and South African capital has also squeezed out most blacks, along with vestiges of the revolution. Nonetheless, important aspects of the Marxist era also persist. Notably, the state maintains a significant shareholding, and, contrary to facile arguments about the inexorable march of neoliberal globalization that sees all influences as external, the state (and Frelimo party elites) has in many ways shaped the process of liberalization and privatization. book is divided into seven chapters, with the greatest attention devoted to the historical and analytical frameworks and to the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. Pitcher draws chiefly on Peter Evans's work on the role of the state to derive her analytical framework; however, she prudently eschews some of the contradictory aspects of Evans's embedded autonomy approach, which are hard to disentangle and increasingly appear grounded in the East Asian experience. Instead, she sticks to his more replicable and generalizable framework, which sees the state in a variety of development(al) roles vis-a-vis the private sector, acting alternatively as demiurge or midwife, engaging in husbandry of business, and so on. In postcolonial Mozambique the state played the demiurge, directly involving itself in the production process in order to transform the economy. This explicit hostility to the private sector has today been replaced by elite opportunism and pragmatism. But since both eras saw the enrichment of an elite few and the exploitation of small farmers, laborers and others, Pitcher characterizes the contemporary phenomenon as one of transformative preservation (6 and passim). final chapter, The End of Marx and the Beginning of the Market?, provides a particularly intriguing treatment, through examination of a series of commercial advertisements, of how various companies, some still state owned, have adapted to competition. …

The discursive spaces of global politics

Beginning with a description of the Bhopal disaster, when a leak at the Union Carbide company killed thousands, this essay turns to the issue of the politics of discursive practices. The discussion focuses at first on a genealogy of environmental discourses— ranging from conservation to sustainability and then proceeds to a treatment of the way various dimensions of political economy constitute events of ethnic exclusion. The essay ends with a juxtaposition of traditional ethics and a politics of aesthetics.

The Political‐Economic Dimension of Pensions: The Case of Japan

This article examines how pensions are interwoven with the public and private financial system in Japan and the consequences for pension reform. A growing literature focuses on the multifaceted ways in which pensions are interwoven with the larger political economy. This study builds on this literature and finds that (a) public and private pensions have been integrated deeply into Japan's system of developmental finance, (b) this integration has created new economic and political problems as governments have attempted to shift away from its developmental model through deregulation, liberalization, and administrative reform, and (c) because pension reform is intimately linked with these reforms, it involves addressing fundamental issues regarding the role of the state, finance, and firms. These findings collectively illustrate that pension reform is not only driven by issues of fiscal viability and benefit levels, but also by the nature of the way in which pensions are integrated into a country's system of finance.

Facing the Second Worl War. Strategy, Politics, and Economics in Britain and France 1938-1940

Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Introduction Introduction to Chapters 2 and 3 2. The Strategic Dimension in France 3. The Strategic Dimension in Britian Introduction to Chapters 4 and 5 4. The Domestic Political Dimension in France 5. The Domestic Political Dimension in Britain Introduction to Chapters 6 and 7 6. The Political Economic Dimension in France 7. The Political Economic Dimension in Britain 8. Conclusion Bibliography Tables

Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics, and Economics in Britain and France, 1938-1940 (review)

Reviewed by: Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics, and Economics in Britain and France, 1938–1940 Eugenia C. Kiesling Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics, and Economics in Britain and France, 1938–1940. By Talbot C. Imlay. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-19-926122-9. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. vi, 393. $99.00. This lucid and tightly argued book offers a comparative account of French and British preparations for World War II. The bulk of the book comprises three pairs of chapters respectively discussing French and British performances in what Imlay labels the strategic, domestic-political, and political-economic dimensions. Though told separately, the three stories are closely interrelated. Thus, political strife within France impeded the organization [End Page 990] of a proper war economy, a problem which, in turn, forced France to attempt to win the war before Germany's economic weight decided the issue. The milder political climate in Britain, on the other hand, conduced to a greater degree of cooperation between labor and management and, consequently, to acquiescence by both parties in a degree of government planning unattainable in France. This is a refreshingly contrarian book. Where recent scholarship emphasizes growing French confidence and domestic discord in Britain, Imlay underscores the discouraging defects in French industrial mobilization and identifies long-term sources of social cooperation within Britain. Most strikingly, he attacks the orthodox view that France (and Britain) went to war in September 1939 confident that their superior resources promised victory in a protracted conflict. Imlay argues instead that France abandoned the "long-war" strategy as unworkable both in the absence of a strong eastern ally and in view of Germany's economic and demographic strengths. Britain followed suit, briefly yielding to the temptations of offensive operations on the continent. Indeed, Imlay argues that only France's rapid defeat saved Britain from the consequences of its dangerous flirtation with a short-war strategy. Although Imlay supports his narrative with solid documentary evidence, there remains much to be said in defense of the alternative points of view, and his package of strategic, political, and economic analysis seems just a little too neat. His denial that France undertook any serious effort at economic planning requires, for example, that he deal with the 1938 Loi Paul-Boncour "On the Organization of the Nation for War" whose fraught history illuminates the complexities of the story. Some of Imlay's conclusions stem from his definitions. His assertion that France abandoned the canonical "long-war" strategy to seek a military panacea in the Baltic or the Balkans is less revolutionary than he supposes. Since the "long-war" strategy was largely a set of concepts serving in the interwar period to shape the structure of French military forces and to reassure her citizens that they had little to fear from the next war, one should not be surprised that it became increasingly irrelevant once the war began. This reviewer also feels that Imlay's analysis depends too heavily on a facile distinction between "total" and "limited" war. This is a judgmental book, centering on the (rather too sweeping) question "How well have nations and societies met the test of modern war?" Too many repetitions of the phrase "failed to meet the test of modern war," makes one feel sympathetic to two countries forced to face not only the Axis threat but such an implacable critic. Such questions suggest that Imlay has written a thought-provoking book, one valuable especially for its detailed description of the political and economic underpinnings of military strategy. It is to be recommended both for the story it tells and for the debates it will spark. Eugenia C. Kiesling U.S. Military Academy West Point, New York Copyright © 2004 Society for Military History

Ijun in Hawaii: The Political Economic Dimension of an Okinawan New Religion Overseas

With reference to an Okinawan new religion called Ijun and its branch on the island of Hawaii, this article analyzes the international expansion of new religious organizations from the perspective of political economy. I develop questions concerning the flow of capital and the relationship between central church and branch by the application of a center-periphery model. I argue that the development of an international organization allows the Okinawan group to become a center with respect to its overseas branches, replicating the centern

Political Economy Influences Within the Life‐Cycle of IMF Programmes

Increasing attention is being paid to political economy dimensions of the IMF's operations. However, up until now, the literature has lacked a systematic overview of how politics and economics interact in this context. This paper sets out to fill the gap. Its conceptual basis is that of the ‘life cycle’ of an IMF programme. What determines the decision to turn to the Fund for financial assistance, what determines the outcome of negotiations, what determines whether a country will come back to the Fund? Answers to these questions cannot be satisfactorily given by examining economics alone. The paper draws on existing evidence to provide an empirically based discussion of the issues involved. It also points the direction in which future research needs to go. Some of the policy implications of the analysis are also examined.