Cultural Political Economy Research Articles

Strategic coupling of administrative rationality and cultural imaginaries in municipal amalgamations

Municipal amalgamations are widely applied interventions for enhancing policy delivery in a political-economic context of devolution, austerity, and decentralization of welfare states. This paper studies how public stakeholders in the Netherlands walked the tightrope between ‘hard’ political-administrative logic and ‘soft’ cultural-historical discourse to justify, institutionalize, and legitimize municipal amalgamations. It uses a theoretical approach that combines literature on the rescaling of state governance and cultural political economy. Based on a discourse analysis of amalgamation reports, the paper traces the constructed political-economic and cultural imaginaries of the 26 municipal amalgamations that took place in the country between 2018 and 2023. Imaginaries underpinning the Dutch decentralization discourse were purely political-administrative in content, both regarding the necessity to act and the solutions (i.e., municipal amalgamations). Alternative, relational forms of spatial decision-making were covered by an imaginary of inefficiency and limited democratic control. Cultural imaginaries were locally mobilized to retain the top-down political-administrative logic, and to allow the municipalities to position themselves in between the citizens and the state. The amalgamation reports reflected a sometimes-difficult discursive negotiation between administrative efficiency and culture, future and past, vigour and softness, and external and internal visibility of the new municipalities. The paper concludes that the spaces of territorially bounded ways of policymaking, including municipal mergers, are intrinsically relational, jointly material-discursive/symbolic, and fluid (i.e., process-based). The cultural political economy framework provides a useful interpretative framework for debates on politics of scale, state rescaling, and (re)territorialization.

Who Gets Paid (for) What? The Cultural Political Economy of News Content in Generative AI

One of the key controversies that generative artificial intelligence (AI) has recently stirred was whether compensation is due for the copyrighted materials used to train AI models. This article explores the logic, trajectories, and dynamics of content generation, including news, through generative AI in two distinctive yet intertwined domains. Guided by a cultural political economy approach, it examines how both the political context (validation/legitimation of AI-generated news content by established news media) and the economic context (use of unpaid and underpaid labor in the forms of freely scraped data and data annotation work) shape the deployment of news content on AI models. It further untangles how the space for serious, independent journalism may shrink, as big tech companies’ algorithmic technologies emerge as a solution to contemporary problems in journalism. A clear danger here is that AI companies’ proprietary algorithms, language training models, and value-laden parameters are incompatible with journalism's democratic obligations and responsibilities.

The rise of the owners and the neo-accumulationist imaginary: Changing perceptions of private wealth in Finnish business media, 1981–2021

The rise of the super-rich has been a defining characteristic of recent decades. This paper analyses the cultural underpinnings of contemporary private wealth accumulation, by exploring the changes in how Finnish business media has approached wealth accumulation at the top. Drawing from cultural political economy and Bourdieu’s theory of the social space, it examines how private wealth and wealthy owners have been represented in Finnish business media between 1981 and 2021. The paper argues that the changes in the representations demonstrate a rise of a new imaginary, in which private wealth accumulation is valued and perceived as a desirable goal both for individuals and the society. Finally, these cultural changes might pave the way for a new economic regime that could be called neo-accumulationist, meaning a regime characterized by specific advantages for those with accumulated economic assets.

EdTech companies and contemporary digital educational governance. Analyzing the expansion and role of the EdTech sector in the Chilean educational system

This article analyses the network of actors involved in the contemporary digitalization of the Chilean school system and the role of private EdTech corporations in this ecosystem. Using a framework based on new modes of education governance and contributions from the cultural political economy, three sources were triangulated: i) 22 semi structured interviews with key actors and policymakers, ii) a database of startups in the EdTech sector in Chile and iii) a systematization of the main digital education policies implemented in the country. The findings reveal a poorly coordinated network of actors, which has allowed the inorganic and heterogeneous growth of EdTech corporations, whose role encompasses not only the production of technology but also its articulation and management. To this form, EdTech companies play a central role not only as producers of technology, but also as articulators and administrators, illustrating a displacement of the State from some of its historic functions.

‘Panda diplomacy’ and the subtle rise of a Chinese language ecology in Qatar

ABSTRACT Over the past two decades, the Chinese language has emerged as a global language. Gulf Cooperation Council countries, such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, have integrated Chinese language into their educational systems and established Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese language and culture. In Qatar, interest in Chinese language education has risen, though not as pronounced as its neighbouring countries. This article, grounded in a Critical Cultural Political Economy of Education (CCPEE) approach, provides a comprehensive overview of Chinese language and education policy in Qatar, utilising a mix of primary and secondary sources, and insights from the second author’s role as a Chinese language coordinator in Qatar. The article examines cultural, political, and economic aspects related to Qatar-China ties and the Chinese community in Qatar, the role of China during the World Cup, Chinese language in the linguistic landscape, Chinese language education policies, and the state of a Confucius Institute in Qatar. Finally, it offers some implications in terms of the future of Chinese language education in the country and some fruitful directions for further research.

A third player: Chinese linguistic and cultural influence at a UAE university

ABSTRACT As part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a series of large-scale projects have been launched in the Arab Gulf due to its geopolitically strategic position. We examine the influence of Chinese as a third player, in addition to Arabic and English, in a UAE university educationscape together with Emirati students’ attitudes towards its influence. The study takes a case study approach, which employs open-ended questionnaires with university students (n = 40), semi-structured interviews with university students (n = 3) and a university Confucius Institute director and visual data from a walking ethnography of university social, learning, and online spaces. Data are analysed thematically via the lens of ‘Critical, Cultural Political Economy of Education’ (CCPEE), which brings together a range of concepts to interrogate globalising processes within an ‘education ensemble’. Key findings revealed a growing influence and awareness of Chinese language and culture in the UAE as well as generally positive attitudes towards such growth. There was, however, less interest in learning Chinese in comparison with other languages such as Korean and Turkish connected with soft power and media presence via dramas and music. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to informing future language policy directions in the UAE.

Explaining institutional change in Nepal and El Salvador: A cultural political economy approach to political settlements analysis

AbstractUnderstanding progressive institutional change remains a central concern in development studies. This paper examines two such cases: constitutional change in Nepal, which broadened political rights, and the outlawing of metal mining in El Salvador, which redistributed resources. To understand institutional change, this paper proposes a cultural political economy approach to Khan's ‘political settlements analysis’. Applying the proposed approach to these cases demonstrates how political movements organise around beliefs and identities as well as interests to achieve rights and status, not just material gain. Identifying cultural as well as material sources of power allows a fuller explanation of institutional change processes.

Understanding power, culture and institutional change: a revised approach to political settlements analysis

ABSTRACT The institutions that govern how we distribute resources, protect rights, and accord status are widely recognised as important for progressive development outcomes. Political settlements analysis is an increasingly influential framework for (post)institutional analysis within development studies, arguing that institutions and their outcomes are shaped by political economy relations of power. This article builds on the strengths of political settlements analysis (PSA) but argues that its strongly materialist foundations overlook the role of social identity, status and moral beliefs in shaping institutional change. Future research employing PSA needs rebalancing, incorporating an understanding of power relations as ideational as well as material and based on cultural as well as political and economic sources. Drawing on insights from cultural political economy, this article presents an alternative approach to power in PSA. This emphasises the contingency inherent in meaning-making processes and conceives of power as embedded in cultural understandings, as well as political organisation and economic control. Adopting this cultural political economy approach to power allows PSA to produce a fuller understanding of the causal mechanisms generating institutional change.

“We Are Detective”: Transvestigations, conspiracy and inauthenticity in ‘gender critical’ social media discourses

This article explores the socio-behavioral phenomenon of “transvestigations” in social media discourses. This phenomenon is most often characterized by users referring – erroneously – to apparent physiological cues of one's assigned sex at birth, which motivate their interpretation of one's transgender status, particularly among those who do not identify as transgender and focus primarily on cisgender celebrities. It is difficult to know whether these behaviors and interactions are symptomatic of an authentic “gender critical” ideology or inauthentic practices that only fan the flames of antagonism in an ongoing social struggle. In this paper, I explain how transvestigations are primarily based on transphobic “gender critical” discourses and are fundamentally underpinned by a conspiracy of transgender ubiquity. I also explain how transgender users and their allies troll transvestigators by mocking the same discourses and assumptions. To do so, I analyze social media data using methods from cultural political economy and social-cognitive discourse studies. I argue that the possibilities and uses of social media for misinformation, conspiracy, and mimetic antagonism facilitate a discursive landscape in which authentic "gender-critical" discourses are indistinguishable from potentially inauthentic conspiratorial discourses. By highlighting how social media and its users (re)construct a world without distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, this article raises questions about the im/possibilities of change in contexts of ongoing and ever-increasing antagonisms.

Caste of Marginality and Migration in Bihar

In the world of ‘global capital—peripheral labour’, multiple strategies are employed to accumulate labouring bodies to augment accumulation, the lifeline of capitalism. Relations of inequalities have historically helped capitalism to accumulate and thrive. Growth in India and its accompanied en masse informalisation of labour is located at the intersection of caste, gender and migration. Foregrounding the cultural political economy of agrarian poverty, migration and informalisation of labour, we underline the criticality of caste in reproducing a labour force that is perennially insecure, unsettled and unorganised. Based on a qualitative study in rural Araria, Bihar, we argue that informalisation of labour is institutionalisation of vulnerability, which is sustained and reproduced through caste-based social relations in. Due to the wages in kind, repressive tenancy system and low productivity, indebtedness remains an annual necessity for the lowered caste workers and tillers even when the lowered 1 castes move beyond the bounds of the village and into the wider informal economy, their lack of social capital and adverse incorporation in the urban labour market keep them off the benefits of migration and urban growth.

The revolution of values and the crisis of liberal democracy

One domain of global political economy (GPE) that warrants more serious scholarly attention is the plane of what Jessop (2010) calls ‘cultural political economy’ (CPE). This article connects GPE and CPE, through an exploration of the production and exchange of meaning (semiosis) in the global politics of ‘values’. The point of departure for this exploration is a series of overlapping crises in GPE. From the Great Recession to the global COVID-19 pandemic, these crises are often associated with the rise of dangerous new reactionary forces. Conspiracist far-right and increasingly authoritarian centre-right movements continue their ascendancy. Meanwhile, a (neo)liberal self-proclaimed ‘centre’ decries this ‘rise of populisms’, lamenting a perceived backlash against liberal democracy itself. This article offers a novel reading of the present conjunctural crisis, through the cultural theory of bell hooks. Specifically, hooks’ ([1984] 2000) identification of ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ as the real Western social model, her analyses of the political-economic crises of the 1990s and her development of Martin Luther King’s notion of a ‘revolution of values’ are all crucial to explaining the present crisis, and exploring the potential of progressive politics today. Reframing ‘liberal democracy’ as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, it is argued, enables a number of further insights. In particular, this analysis allows us to understand our present moment as a confrontation between truly progressive values – including anti-racist, anti-capitalist and feminist values – and what turn out to be the shared regressive and reactionary values of (neo)liberalism and the far right. The aim of the article is to show, in the terms of Stuart Hall’s Gramscian analysis, ‘how different forces come together, conjuncturally, to create the new terrain, on which a different politics must form up’ (Hall, 1987: 16).

The Republic of Kakao goes on hiatus: The public cost of platform monopolies in South Korea

In the wake of the recent nationwide service outage of Kakao, this article questions the cost that the Korean public may have to bear when private platform monopolies imbue all facets of public lives. Using cultural political economy as both a theoretical framework and a mode of inquiry, it seeks to unravel the ways in which platform monopolies are legitimized and defended by a mix of institutional, regulatory, and discursive forces. Findings reveal that Kakao’s proprietary digital platforms and their services are not only justified by dominant political–economic forces, but also discursively appropriated by themselves and the government for the purposes of driving innovation, elevating national competitiveness, and promoting economic growth, yet at the expense of public scrutiny and accountability. The article concludes by briefly evaluating the implications that these unwelcoming trends have for the Korean public.

Civilisational ‘ideas’, state power, and globalising ‘realities’: structuring mechanisms shaping contemporary higher education outcomes in China

ABSTRACT In this paper we ask: what does ‘the idea’ of the Chinese university mean at the current time, especially when the sector has been shaped by endogenous and exogenous globalising dynamics? We explore this question, drawing on cultural political economy as a heuristic to make visible the links between culture, economy and politics. We identify three key dynamics: the constitutive powers of civilisational ideas; the power of the Chinese state; and the ongoing integration of Chinese higher education into knowledge production and its circulation nationally and globally. We show these dynamics have the unintended consequence of accelerating global processes including: (i) outward and inward academic and student mobility; (ii) internal social stratification, education inequalities and injustice; and (iii) the instrumentalism of knowledge production and its circulation that emulates the neoliberal academy in the West. Despite invocations from President Xi to nurture the red gene, higher education in China is deeply entangled in global dynamics as well as a shaper of its trajectories.

The Cultural Political Economy of Knowledge in Neo-Liberal Indonesia

This article analyses the policy agendas and bureaucratic apparatuses that have shaped the norms and values directing knowledge production in neo-liberal Indonesia. It uses a Gramscian approach to hegemony to understand how knowledge, as power, is organised and imposed on workers. It unpacks the norms and values shaped during processes of neo-liberal capitalist reform, which are identified as knowledge imaginaries; or shared social systems that organise a field of knowledge commodities. Their mobilisation during material and discursive moments are crucial in the juncture between predatory and market interests that fundamentally benefit capital accumulation. It is argued that funding and policies serve as key apparatuses for knowledge elites to normalise and enforce notions of self-reliance, competitiveness, and entrepreneurship as common sense for their managers, which are exploitative for workers. Within the hegemony of knowledge capitalism, there are antagonisms and attempts to form alternative spaces of knowledge by using digital media. While merely leaving a dent on the surface of broader capitalist structures, its promotion of subversive ways of knowing remains no less meaningful in understanding the social positions of academic workers in an increasingly networked but fragmented neo-liberal social world.

African American Redemption in the Pan-African Metropolis: Africanized Identities, Pan-African Lives and the African World Festival in Detroit

The article is situated within the conceptual lineage of St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s groundbreaking Black Metropolis model. However, it provides a new way of considering this intellectual heritage. The analysis suggests that African American traditions of Pan-Africanism have not been expansively addressed in their magnitude on Black urban sociology. Drake and Cayton’s theorization is reconfigured as it exists within a Pan-African value system for the contemporary Black (Diasporic) city. The research presents “unsung” Pan-African tropes that are central to the maintenance of the Black city’s identity and psychological cohesion. If the mind is the “primary battlefield” as Garvey insists, then it is important to note the (beneficial) psychological impact that African American redemption and the Pan- African Metropolis can bestow on African Americans. The discussion locates Pan-Africanism as a tangible operating mechanism on African Americans’ lifestyle, mental health, and (Africanized) identities within Detroit’s Black community. Field observations of Detroit’s African World Festival connect these festival spaces as they characterize and drive the city’s identity, psychology, economic considerations, and ultimately, Pan-African groundings. The sustainability of an Afrocentric philosophy and psychology has enhanced the Black city in the manifestation of a distinctive cultural political economy. The Pan African Metropolis emerged during Detroit’s Black Arts Movement (the 1970s of my youth). To this end, the article pushes back against “the lie” which overgeneralizes African Americans in a Black deficit homogeneity, whereas the “alleged Black American monolith” is not connected to any operating African continuum in their daily lives.

European artificial intelligence “trusted throughout the world”: Risk‐based regulation and the fashioning of a competitive common AI market

AbstractThe European Commission has pioneered the coercive regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), including a proposal of banning some applications altogether on moral grounds. Core to its regulatory strategy is a nominally “risk‐based” approach with interventions that are proportionate to risk levels. Yet, neither standard accounts of risk‐based regulation as rational problem‐solving endeavor nor theories of organizational legitimacy‐seeking, both prominently discussed in Regulation & Governance, fully explain the Commission's attraction to the risk heuristic. This article responds to this impasse with three contributions. First, it enrichens risk‐based regulation scholarship—beyond AI—with a firm foundation in constructivist and critical political economy accounts of emerging tech regulation to capture the performative politics of defining and enacting risk vis‐à‐vis global economic competitiveness. Second, it conceptualizes the role of risk analysis within a Cultural Political Economy framework: as a powerful epistemic tool for the discursive and regulatory differentiation of an uncertain regulatory terrain (semiosis and structuration) which the Commission wields in its pursuit of a future common European AI market. Thirdly, the paper offers an in‐depth empirical reconstruction of the Commission's risk‐based semiosis and structuration in AI regulation through qualitative analysis of a substantive sample of documents and expert interviews. This finds that the Commission's use of risk analysis, outlawing some AI uses as matters of deep value conflicts and tightly controlling (at least discursively) so‐called high‐risk AI systems, enables Brussels to fashion its desired trademark of European “cutting‐edge AI … trusted throughout the world” in the first place.

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.

On the links between climate scepticism and right-wing populism (RWP): an explanatory approach based on cultural political economy (CPE)

ABSTRACT Various analyses show that right-wing populist parties (RWP) tend to be sceptical of climate science and policy. This points to a blank space in the dominant analyses of populism: their blindness towards society-nature relations. This paper aims to develop an approach grounded in Cultural Political Economy (CPE) that can be used to decipher the mediation of RWP within the context of economic, political, and cultural developments as well as society–nature relations. Against this background, the argument is developed that RWP is concerned not only with countering migration and processes of societal liberalisation, but also with defending an existing way of life that is firmly rooted in the destructive appropriation of nature. As a current of right-wing politics, RWP defends the imperial mode of living by expressing scepticism towards the existence of anthropogenic climate change. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the political economy of RWP by linking the dimensions of social domination with the appropriation of nature.

Carbon dioxide removal and mitigation deterrence in EU climate policy: Towards a research approach

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies are rapidly evolving from renderings in climate models towards an explicit and essential component of climate policy-making. This has raised concerns that the expectations of future large-scale availability of CDR technologies may deter mitigation, i.e., delay or substitute emission reduction efforts. Here, we develop a conceptual approach to systematically study such mitigation deterrence effects in climate policy-making processes. The approach integrates literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence with historical-materialist policy analysis. It follows within-case process tracing to uncover whether and how expectations of CDR technologies either weaken ‘conventional’ mitigation targets in policy formulation or encourage policy designs which treat ‘conventional’ mitigation and CDR as equivalent. Using critical instances of contestation in the policy process, this approach also allows us to identify nascent constellations of actors and interests as well as emerging fault lines related to CDR technologies. Empirically, the paper focusses on the EU Sustainable Carbon Cycles Strategy and the current negotiations over an EU Carbon Removal Certification Framework. We show that even though it is too early to pin-point clear-cut instances of mitigation deterrence related to CDR technologies in EU climate policy-making, critical opportunities to prevent such effects have already been missed in both climate target formulation and policy design.

Youth-led resistance to police-centred safety perpetuated by the Chicago board of education

ABSTRACT This article draws from a Cultural Political Economy framework and an abolitionist lens to examine various understandings of safety within Chicago Public Schools (CPS). We investigate how the Chicago Board of Education (BOE) uses convivial rhetoric and institutional mechanisms to erase the demands of Black and Brown students and ultimately reinforce a police-centred notion of safety. We also consider how students challenge this meaning of safety by enacting ‘generative safety,’ which we understand as rooted in an abolitionist framework that not only rejects policing but also manifests in material reinvestment and centreing the voices of Black and Brown young people.