Cultural Political Economy Research Articles

Crisis theory and the historical imagination

ABSTRACTThis article makes a theoretical contribution to the constructivist and cultural political economy literatures on crisis. While these new approaches have highlighted the imaginary dimensions of crisis, they have neglected the specifically historical forms of imagination through which events are construed and constructed as crises. In particular, they have yet to adequately theorise how the recollection of prior crises might interact with efforts to diagnose and resolve a crisis in some later present. I respond to this lacuna by developing a novel set of tools for analysing the meta-historical dimensions of crisis. These include a typology that identifies three distinct ways of recalling past crises, and a concept of ‘history-production’, which captures how different interpretive practices feed into the diagnosis and negotiation of crisis episodes. Taken together these tools help illuminate a complex interaction not only between historical analogies, narratives, and lessons, but also between these representational modes and the imaginary dimensions of crisis.

Cultural Production and Urban Latinidad: Retelling Urban History and Reconfiguring the Future of Cities

Cultural Production and Urban Latinidad:Retelling Urban History and Reconfiguring the Future of Cities Mary Thomas (bio) The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City. By Eric Avila. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 228 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy, and Redevelopment. Edited by David R. Diaz and Rodolfo D. Torres. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 240 pages. $79.00 (cloth). $24.00 (paper). Struggles over culture, politics, and commerce adopt the urban landscape as their battleground, whether in nineteenth-century Paris or 1980s New York City. More recently, a renewed emphasis on cities has been driven by urban growth through migration and population increases that intensified during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Within this context, the terms by which urban space is produced are being altered in light of neoliberalism’s expansion, in which the world of the public has diminished in favor of privatized alternatives. Meanwhile, skepticism about the value of studying humanistic disciplines in the university has grown, not only in terms of the “return on investment” for undergraduates who major in these subjects, but whether scholastic attempts to advance these fields remain pertinent in contemporary society. Although these two sites, the city and the humanities, initially appear to bear little relevance to each other, Eric Avila’s Folklore of the Freeway and David Diaz and Rodolfo Torres’s Latino Urbanism reconsider the perceived gulf between these fields by foregrounding culture as a tool for dissecting the complex dynamics that undergirds urban space and its ongoing transformation. The Folklore of the Freeway and Latino Urbanism present multisited examinations of issues central to Latina/o urban spatial practice that explore race and ethnicity as intertwined in culture’s significance within urban spatial practice and question the ethnically homogeneous visions that determine the futures of cities. The Folklore of the Freeway inquires into a range of sites corresponding to thematic [End Page 231] chapters on gender, historical memory, race, and cultural reclamation, whereas Latino Urbanism’s essays individually examine a range of cities. This has the effect, in Avila’s case, of encountering each city fleetingly, as if viewed from a car window, whereas in Latino Urbanism, the authors extensively detail the specific contexts of each city. The contributors to Latino Urbanism explore the mechanisms, processes, politics, and histories embedded in planning, policy, and redevelopment; attend to the visibility of cultural difference in the urban environment; and examine its role in remaking cities. Several essays note how cultural difference can operate as a strategic tool, for both opposing the reshaping of urban space and as an accessory to the interests of capital. For example, the final chapter, by Victor Valle and Rodolfo Torres, calls for sustained engagement with the concept of “cultural political economy,” a term advanced by the authors, which “[attempts] to resolve lingering theoretical tensions between socioeconomic (structural) and culture-based (semiotic) approaches to our neoliberal present” (181). This frame and the analytic project that it evokes—reevaluating humanistic scholarship’s capacity to generate compelling and useful critical work on contemporary urban life—characterize much of the work in Latino Urbanism. Diaz and Torres’s introduction critiques the exclusionary history of urban planning and urban studies for their frequent omission of the contributions and spatial practices of communities of color—in this case, Latina/o communities. The authors reframe the contemporary trend of New Urbanism, an urban planning zeitgeist that privileges the neighborhood as a social unit, walkable streets, public spaces, and sustainable practices, as a reaction against, and implicit admission of the failures of, the modernist city in the United States. That city, of course, displaced and spatially isolated numerous Latina/o communities and other communities of color. The authors point out New Urbanism’s inability to recognize that the attributes it privileges have long been central to Latina/o urban spatial practices and call for a more inclusive narrative that encompasses a greater variety of practices and actors. This call to action strongly resonates throughout the text, and it is in those essays that describe particular everyday practices and ordinary spaces as terrains of transformation that the...

Crisis construal in the North Atlantic Financial Crisis and the Eurozone crisis

Cultural political economy integrates research on sense and meaning-making into analysis of the basic features of capital accumulation, including its contradictions, crisis tendencies and crisis dynamics. This article applies this approach to the objective overdetermination and subjective indeterminacy of economic crises. This dual character means that struggles over crisis construal shape the nature and relative success, if any, of efforts at crisis management. An important aspect of this process is the nature of learning in, through and from crisis. The article illustrates the cultural political economy (CPE) approach by examining crisis construals and crisis management in the North Atlantic Financial Crisis and the Eurozone crisis. It ends with some general remarks on the CPE approach to the articulation of crisis construals and crisis management.

When ties don't bind: smuggling effects, bazaars and regulatory regimes in postrevolutionary Iran

This paper examines how participation in smuggling restructures existing commercial regulatory systems and subjectivities. It does so through an analysis of the illicit commercial practices that mushroomed in postrevolutionary Iran and the ambivalent participation of established merchants (bazaaris) in the import and export of commodities through these circuits during the 1979–2005 era. Following two independent research projects on the Tehran and Qum bazaars, we adopt a multidisciplinary and relational approach to bazaars and smuggling to decipher the multiple logics. This process is assembled through networks of established bazaaris, new commercial actors, far-flung transnational buyers and diverse state officials, who both regulate trade and facilitate exchanges that are at times interpreted as smuggling by the participants themselves. Building on the growing literature on smuggling in cultural anthropology and political economy, our account demonstrates how commodities travel through channels that ultimately transgress categories such as licit and illicit, state and society, and ‘honorable bazaari’ and ‘smuggler’. The postrevolutionary Iranian regime is a case that challenges us to examine this quasi-formal economy in the context of an institutionalized and centralized state that has adopted both state-led and neoliberal economic policies. It also forces us to situate the phenomenon of smuggling within the context of existing commercial networks and moral orders. We further reveal how bazaaris have been subjects of and subjected to the hybrid commercial order, which has both displaced the social networks that underpin bazaaris' communal obligations and norms and cast doubt on the merchants' claim to ethical standing in the eyes of one another, and left them vulnerable to criticism by leaders of the Islamic Republic.

Of Gardens and Gates in (International) Political Economy: A Rejoinder

Volumes as insightful as Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate and Dissensus (edited by Stuart Shields, Ian Bruff and Huw Macartney) and Cultural Political Economy (edited by Jacqueline Best and Matthew Paterson) are likely to be read differently by different audiences. The editors’ astute responses thus allow us to better appreciate their original objectives and address their shared concern: a too narrow reading of the volumes. Within the limited space of this rejoinder, I engage with this particular concern to clarify that there is no one right way to think about the global political economy or global political economies in the plural.

Towards a ‘critical cultural political economy’ account of the globalising of education

This paper outlines the basis of an alternative theoretical approach to the study of the globalisation of ‘education’ – a Critical, Cultural Political Economy of Education (CCPEE) approach. Our purpose here is to bring this body of concepts – critical, cultural, political, economy – into our interrogation of globalising projects and processes within what we will refer to as the ‘education ensemble’ as the topic of enquiry, whose authoritative, allocative, ideational and feeling structures, properties and practices, emerge from and play into global economic, political and cultural processes In the first half of the paper we introduce and develop the concepts that will underpin our approach. In the second half of the paper we explore the explanatory potential and epistemic gain of a CCPEE approach by examining the different manifestations of the relationship between globalisation as a political, cultural and economic project and an education ensemble. We conclude by reflecting on the possibilities this perspective offers.

Making connections between global production networks for used goods and the realm of production: a case study on e‐waste governance

AbstractRecent scholarship on waste within economic geography and global production network (GPN) studies has identified several unique characteristics of networks for used goods vis‐à‐vis ‘traditional’ GPN studies focused on production, exchange and consumption. However, in un‐bracketing GPNs to include analysis of post‐consumption activity, identifying how the distinct moments of production, exchange, consumption and disposal/recycling are related becomes a crucial task. Towards this end, I present a case study on the governance of e‐waste networks that draws upon discussions of performativity and Hudson's cultural political economy approach to GPNs. In my analysis, I demonstrate how multiple factors, such as ideological differences over how to handle e‐waste, the non‐standardized nature of used goods, as well as production factors such as design choices and planned obsolescence, all shape and disrupt efforts to standardize and coordinate resource recovery and hazard mitigation in the post‐consumption phase of electronic goods. Such analysis moves past the novelty of GPNs for used goods toward a more integrated understanding of GPNs as a whole.

Towards a Cultural Political Economy – Not a Cultural IPE

This short article provides a response to Matthias Kranke’s review in this journal (vol. 42, no. 3) of our book Cultural Political Economy. Although we recognise the good intentions behind Kranke’s attempt to bring our book into ongoing ‘trans-Atlantic’ debates about the definition of International Political Economy (IPE) as a field, the very effort to define what IPE ‘is’ and ‘is not’ is precisely the kind of reifying move that our volume was trying to avoid. Our project is principally an ontological one: we try to make sense of what political economy would look like if we took seriously the role of culture. This allows us to cut through the epistemological debates that have historically defined IR and the methodological ones that have recently dominated IPE.

Governing Mobilities, Mobilising Carbon

This paper explores the governing of climate change via the lens of mobilities. It argues that the central dynamic of the relationship between these two phenomena is that while the logic of governing climate change entails the management, shaping and ultimately reduction of a whole range of physical mobilities, climate change politics has been precisely organised around the generation of newly mobile objects – specifically the rights to generate carbon emissions, as mobilised via carbon markets. This reinforces the importance of cultural political economy to mobilities research. Mobile subjects and objects are to be understood thus as effects of power, mobilised in the pursuit of the reproduction of certain sorts of social order, and for the purposes of capital accumulation.

Putting the Power in ‘Socio-Technical Regimes’ – E-Mobility Transition in China as Political Process

A mobility low-carbon transition is a key issue both socially and for mobilities research. The multi-level perspective (MLP) is justifiably a leading approach in such research, with important connections to high-profile socio-technical systemic analyses within the mobilities paradigm. The paper explores the key contributions that a Foucauldian-inspired cultural political economy offers, going beyond central problems with the MLP, specifically regarding: a productive concept of power that affords analysis of the qualitatively novel and dynamic process of transition; and the incorporation of the exogenous ‘landscape’ into the analysis. This move thus resonates with growing calls for attention to power dynamics in mobilities research and a ‘structural’ turn. In making this case, we deploy the key case study of contemporary efforts towards mobility transition in China. This not only sets out more starkly the importance of MLP’s gaps but also provides an empirical case to illustrate, albeit in the form of informed speculation, possible routes to low-carbon urban mobility transition and the inseparability from broader qualitative power transitions at multiple scales, including the global.

Transnational Firms and the Knowledge Structure: The Case of the Walt Disney Company

This paper demonstrates how the study of knowledge can strengthen the analysis of transnational corporations and globalisation through the case of the Walt Disney Company. Disney is emblematic because its prosperity is founded on both global and intergenerational reception, integration and consumption of its products and its imageries. Its transnational preponderance is observed by taking into account its socio-economically grounded power, its intertwined material and ideational universes and its multilayered knowledge structuring. Based on cultural studies methods, world-economy theories and sociological conceptual tools, we assess the Disney Company's ability to structure collective imagination, to orient behaviour and to favour new practices through its media contents, its entertainment activities and its diversified by-products. Consequently, this makes it possible to consider the material and ideational extent of the power of the company. Finally, the specific aspects of the knowledge structure are stressed, particularly its inherent inertia, its geo-cultural dynamics, its co-evolution with material structures and its polarisation around specific symbols, narratives and objects. By doing so, this research contributes to the intersection between the new field of Cultural Political Economy and International Political Economy in the context of globalisation of ideas and identities.

Fishing Livelihoods, Seashore Tourism, and Industrial Development in Coastal Rio de Janeiro: Conflict, Multi‐Functionality, and Juxtaposition

AbstractCritical global political ecology and critical cultural political economy approaches are used in a study involving decades of research to evaluate the changing relationship between fisher livelihoods, seashore tourism, and urban industrial development in an economically dynamic region of coastal Brazil. As the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro expanded and encompassed fishing communities, socio‐environmental transformations created threats to fisher ways of life, opened new multi‐functional opportunities, and also introduced unrelated juxtaposed activities. As stocks fell due to overfishing and urban industrial pollution over the last two decades, small‐scale inshore fishing declined in the bay–lagoon systems located to the east and south‐west of Rio de Janeiro. Tourism increased but proved to be a poor substitute for declining fishing activities because it and other new multi‐functional activities rarely aggregated significant value to local livelihoods. Consequently, only a small minority of fishers benefited and remained on the islands and sand spits, while the great majority left for the mainland. New cultural and environmental functions were also absent, so that of the types of multi‐functionality identified by Wilson and Holmes, those present in the study area are weak and basically serve outside urban production and consumption interests.

Cultural Practices, Market Disorganization, and Urban Regeneration: Royal Court Theatre Local Peckham and Peckham Space

Cultural activities are increasingly emerging alongside or in response to urban regeneration. This is perhaps inevitable in a capital city such as London, particularly in the lead up to and following the 2012 Olympic Games, as well as other large cities nationally and internationally. The arts are increasingly positioned as a valuable asset that can help mobilize urban renewal and alleviate social deprivation whilst continuing to contribute to the nation’s gross domestic production (GDP) and its status in the global market economy. In this article I use a cultural economic framework to explore the relations between cultural activity and regeneration in Peckham. Peckham offers an example of an inner city area in which the cultural economy and political economy have often coalesced. Despite a relative lack of changes in poverty indicators over the past decade Peckham has emerged as a ‘cultural hub’. Here, I explore two organizations in Peckham: Royal Court Theatre Local and Peckham Space. I suggest that in order to understand how cultural and arts activities negotiate and potentially intervene in regeneration and gentrification, they need to be reconfigured culturally. Doing so, however, requires a turn to an economic model of interaction and exchange. Attention to the ways in which culture operates economically reveals alternative ways to protect against market disorganization. Systems of collaboration and support that reconceptualize the infrastructural systems and networks that sustain socially-engaged works and the wider social welfare of makers, participants and spectators.

Making (more) sense of political-economic geographies of continuity and change

In view of persisting and multiple ‘crises’, coming to grips with sociospatial change is one of the key tasks in geographical political economy today. However, to date, philosophical misunderstandings and the related lack of productive scholarly exchange has prevented this task from being satisfyingly addressed. In this paper I discuss the Cultural Political Economy approach and discourse theory in order to expose some key misunderstandings and to argue in favour of more philosophical awareness. By setting up a dialogue between the two approaches I aim to demonstrate the benefits of a constructive engagement between perspectives rooted in ontologically different positions.

Sum, Ngai-Ling und Jessop, Bob. Towards a Cultural Political Economy. Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy.

PVS Politische Vierteljahresschrift , Seite 764 - 765

Architecture, Economic Imaginaries and Urban Politics: The Office Tower as Socially Classifying Device

AbstractIn recent studies on the role of architecture in urban restructuring, city marketing and the related struggles for meaning, there has been a focus on high‐profile architects and iconic architecture. In this article I wish to examine architecture and building types as ‘socially signifying devices’, in order to take more everyday buildings and their images into account as well. Using Vienna as a case study, I explore how the commercial office tower is utilized to represent the internationalization of the local economy and render new urban political‐economic strategies socially meaningful. This is done by examining recent shifts in urban policy, and the means, channels and practices of discursive and visual representation of the local office architecture. Connecting the concept of economic imaginaries from cultural political economy (CPE) with a sociological approach to building types, I argue that economic imaginaries gain in plausibility if they are discursively and visually anchored in urban space. However, it is also shown that this kind of spatialization of new economic imaginaries is constructed on a selective visual representation of buildings: the assignment of international economic activities to local office towers is revealed to be only partially true in the case of Vienna.

Acknowledging a Global Shift: A Primer for Thinking about Religion in Consumer Societies

The starting point of this article is the observation that the new form of cultural political economy, which has emerged in the last half of the twentieth century and become dominant since the 1980s, has had profound consequences for religious belief, practice and expression worldwide. The rise of consumerism in the post-Second World War years, accompanied by the ever-growing and globalizing media-sphere, as well as the growing influence of neo-liberalism, have been pivotal in religious change. The article calls for work in this direction, and starts by a critical review of classical works on religion and economy, before surveying contemporary works, in a four-fold typology. Centering on consumerism, the article then argues that the rise of consumerism as a dominant cultural ethos, radicalizes the dynamics of identity and recognition that are typical of modern subjectivisation and community, which in turn shape contemporary religious phenomena.

Transition to Science 2.0: “Remoralizing” the Economy of Science

The present is a moment of crisis and transition, both generally and specifically in “knowledge” and its institutions. Acknowledging this elicits the key questions: where are we? Where are we headed? What, if anything, can be done about this? And what can the “economics of science” contribute to this? This paper assumes a “cultural political economy of research & innovation” (CPERI) perspective to explore the current upheaval and transition in the system of academic knowledge production, at the confluence of accelerating commercialisation and the seemingly opposing movement of “open science.” This perspective affords a characterisation of the core of the current crises as a crisis of moral economy; an issue to which a political economy of epistemic authority is in turn crucial. A “remoralizing” of knowledge production is thus a matter of key systemic importance, though it is important to understand such developments in power-strategic, and not explicitly moral, terms. Much of the current moves towards “open science” and “massively open online courses” (MOOCs) can also then be seen as self-defeating developments that simply exacerbate the crisis of a viable “economy of science” and in no sense its solution. Their lasting significance, however, is more likely to lie precisely in their effects on the construction of a new moral economy of knowledge production.

Contested imaginaries and the cultural political economy of climate change

This article analyses the evolving cultural political economy of climate change by developing the concept of ‘climate imaginaries’. These are shared socio-semiotic systems that structure a field around a set of shared understandings of the climate. Climate imaginaries imply a particular mode of organizing production and consumption, and a prioritization of environmental and cultural values. We use this concept to examine the struggle among NGOs, business and state agencies over four core climate imaginaries. These are ‘fossil fuels forever’, ‘climate apocalypse’, ‘techno-market’ and ‘sustainable lifestyles’. These imaginaries play a key role in contentions over responses to climate change, and we outline three main episodes in the past two decades: the carbon wars of the 1990s, an emergent carbon compromise between 1998–2008 and a climate impasse from 2009 to the present. However, climate imaginaries only become dominant when they connect with wider popular interests and identities and align with economic and technological aspects of the energy system to constitute ‘value regimes’.

Critical discourse analysis and critical policy studies

This article presents the contribution that critical discourse analysis (CDA) can make to critical policy studies through comparison with two other approaches which also advocate a ‘discursive turn’ in policy studies and that have been discussed in the journal: cultural political economy (CPE), and poststructuralist discourse analysis (PDA). I suggest that there are significant differences between CDA, CPE and PDA in their view of the discursive turn, and that a version of CDA which integrates argumentation theory and analysis with CDA can add significantly to the contributions that CPE and PDA might make to policy analysis. In the Conclusion, I address a suspicion that using argumentation analysis entails a commitment to Habermasian/Rawlsian ‘deliberative democracy,’ suggesting that argumentation analysis is also not only consistent with but also necessary for Gramscian approaches to political and policy analysis, including CPE and PDA.