Cultural Political Economy Research Articles

Libertecture: A catalogue of libertarian spaces

In this article we identify spaces and built environments that have the effect of placing libertarian thinking in urban contexts, using the term ‘libertecture’ to refer to the way that these architectures convey principles of personal liberty and unfettered market activity. These ideas are thus embedded in cities via the design, architecture, management and function of an emerging array of buildings, districts and infrastructures. Locating our analysis in cultural political economy, we believe that these libertectures are important because of the way that they refract and amplify divisive ideas into the social spaces and thinking of residents and citizens. Whereas neoliberal urbanism was seen as undermining socially just cities, libertarian ideas amplified by new built environments may presage more atomised, unequal and unsustainable urban conditions, potentially foreclosing the identification of more just alternatives and democratic forms. We offer a ‘catalogue’ of seven forms of libertecture: private cities, residential exits, portal spaces, fiscal lockers, pioneer exclaves, infinity spaces, and necrotectures. We conclude that the manifestation of libertarian thinking in spaces and city forms is an important object of study for urban studies as it considers challenges to inclusive and sustainable forms of urban governance.

Medicalized Motherhood and Normalized Autism: A Legacy of the Eugenic Ideology in Media Stories in Authoritarian Vietnam

This article examines a mother's stories which might have prominently set the tone for the narratives about autism in Vietnam. The study analyses the media representation of her family life with a child on the autism spectrum with the terrified and anguished experience of coping with the severe autistic behavior of her son and triumphantly helping him to become a human (sic). The article critiques the medicalization, normalization, eugenicism, and responsibilization ideologies embedded in the media frames that autistic challenges belong to the individuals and must be fixed, through the family's efforts, without holding state institutions accountable for addressing this public health issue. The episodic frames to represent autism as a personal medical issue and family problem demotivated the urgency of advocating for a right-based social policy to accommodate individuals with autism, while the warrior-hero's narratives driven by fears might backfire when other parents cannot afford to do the same. The combination of framing analysis and critical discourse analysis with an emphasis on the cultural political economy fills the gap in global media and communication studies to contextualize how pervasively the structural factors in an authoritarian country might impact the media framing practice.

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

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

Anti-Systemic Movements in the Attention Economy

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

Situating the Atrium: A Cultural Political Economy

Effectively a double-height or larger void internal to a building, the atrium is a familiar architectural feature the world over. The global popularity of the space in contemporary urban buildings – including hotels, shopping malls, casinos, hospitals, museums, galleries, libraries, schools, office blocks, and universities – is a somewhat puzzling development, and one ripe for sociological analysis. Cultural political economy (CPE) helps to explain this affinity. Using this perspective guards against reductionisms of various stripes, while rigorously situating the atrium vis-a-vis the production and circulation of material and symbolic surplus value. By facilitating inquiry into how this architectural form stabilises and furthers capitalist arrangements, CPE allows for interrogation of the atrium’s distinctive role in adding momentum and cultural meaning to contemporary urban accumulative strategies. In particular, the article draws out the atrium space’s paradoxical relationships to (i) the intensification of rentiership in very tall buildings, and (ii) with respect to the demarcation of insider–outsider boundaries underpinning elite consumption. Positioning the atrium as being reflective of attempts to both intensify and embed capitalism in the built environment, key arguments concern the meaningful, experiential and out-of-the ordinary nature of the space, As such, the article contributes to and draws from sociologies of architecture, reconciling the atrium’s materiality and meaning in a way that does not reduce either to the other.

“Why Change?” Monopoly and Competition in the Southeastern U.S. Electricity System

Although much of the U.S. electricity system moved to deregulated markets in the late 1990s, states in the southeastern United States—home to the nation’s largest, most valuable, and most polluting utilities—chose to retain regulated monopolies. In this article, we draw on interviews with regulators, environmental organizations, lobbyists, and utility executives to examine how utilities in the southeastern United States have maintained their position as monopolies in the face of calls for competition in the 1990s and again in the 2020s. We ground our inquiry in geographical political economy, with attention to the role that law plays in balancing monopoly and competition in electricity provision and capitalism more broadly. Our research suggests that the cultural political economy of energy regulation in the Southeast has played a central role in enabling electric utilities to maintain their monopoly position, with utilities using their relationships with regulators to parlay their monopoly preference into narratives of monopoly-as-consumer-protection. We therefore offer insights regarding long-debated mechanisms of regulatory capture, highlighting how the structure of public utility law creates opportunities for political and personal relationships to overpower general ideological commitments to competition. These findings demonstrate how law is deployed as a mediating tool of capitalist relations.

Frames of war and welfare

Frames of war and welfare

Examining non-Indigenous teacher perceptions of Indigenous students in Taiwan through a Strategic Relational Approach

This article examines non-Indigenous teachers’ expectations of, perceptions of, knowledge about, and attitudes towards Indigenous students in Taiwan using a Strategic Relational Approach. Drawing on survey data that combined Likert-scale responses with reflexive, open-ended questions, we found that whilst teacher survey responses indicated a normatively positive view of Indigenous students, this was troubled by their open-ended answer responses which included many negative perceptions of Indigenous students’ behaviours, family backgrounds, and capacity for educational achievement. We argue that this indicates an underlying tension held by non-Indigenous teachers of Indigenous students, constructed through contradictory perceptions of self (open to and encouraging of Indigenous learners) and of Indigenous students (as less capable than non-Indigenous students, and uninterested in educational success). Using the Strategic Relational Approach’s notion of a context conduct dialectic, we offer an explanation of this tension by positioning teachers centrally within Taiwan’s cultural political economy, before considering implications for teacher education.

Karl Polanyi’s theory of fictitious commodification as a cultural political economy of institutionalization

ABSTRACT This paper aims to offer a new reading of Karl Polanyi’s political economy by reinterpreting and reconstructing his institutional analysis as a cultural political economy that critiques capitalism as a historically specific symbolic system. For this purpose, it will draw on his earlier concepts from the socialist calculation debate to reinterpret Polanyi’s theory of fictitious commodification. In particular, it will examine how Polanyi conceptualized the symbolic structure of capitalism as an institutional articulation of particular economic facts, accounting concepts, and economic theory. Polanyi not only critiques the intrinsically cultural nature of foundational categories of the capitalist market economy such as profits, factors of production, and fictitious commodities but also shows how the gap between these categories and ‘the reality of society’ eventually brings about crises and crisis tendencies expressed in the ‘double movement’ and the ‘self-protection of society’. In this sense, Polanyi is a critical cultural political economist with contemporary relevance for the analysis of capitalism as a historically specific symbolic system in which culture plays both constitutive and ideological roles.

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

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

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.

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

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

Private-led policy transfer: the adoption of sector skills councils in Chile

ABSTRACT This study investigates the adoption process of a TVET policy, usually driven by the state, by private actors. Considering a Cultural Political Economy analytical approach, we use the adoption of Sector Skills Councils in three Chilean sectors (mining, wine, maintenance) to examine the different factors that explain the process. We draw on interviews with key informants at the sectoral and national levels, sectoral documents, and press articles. Our analysis shows that the framing actions of a local policy entrepreneur and their interaction with neoliberal political-economic institutions were key to explaining the policy’s attractiveness for private actors. Furthermore, economic and organisational conditions at the sectoral level explain why these three sectors adopted SSCs. We offer further insights about the TVET policy transfer process from the perspective of local and sectoral actors, and in particular, the role of non-state actors.

Return to ‘the poor man’s country’: Crofting and Empire in Rayne, Aberdeenshire

An examination of the available evidence for the parish of Rayne, Aberdeenshire, in the nineteenth century indicates the enduring place of crofting in the agriculture of northeast Scotland. The continuing existence of the crofts emerging from pre-improvement fermtouns is linked to estate policy, which in turn was, in the case of the two major estates in the parish, based on resources drawn from participation in British imperial enterprise. The account complements and extends that provided by Carter, stressing the importance of cultural political economy.

Singapore’s educational export strategies: ‘branding’ and ‘selling’ education in a favourable global policy marketspace

ABSTRACT Since the 1990s, Singapore has firmly established its reputation in the global education policy space as one of the best education systems in the world. However, existing policy transfer literature on Singapore has been mainly interested in Singapore as a decontextualised, ahistorical case, rather than as a unique player in the global education policy sphere. Analysis of how Singapore’s educational policies and lessons have been exported to other countries tends to focus on the mediating roles of international assessments and global policy actors like the OECD or McKinsey consultants. What has been much less clear is Singapore’s own proactive branding and education export strategies. Guided by the Cultural Political Economy framework, this paper draws attention to how an enabling global education policy context with an insatiable appetite for fast policy lessons has aligned with Singapore’s own initiatives to cultivate and export its brand of educational success.

Producing and Contesting Meanings of Participation in Planning: The Case of Singapore (1985–2020)

This paper examines how the concept of participation in planning has been constructed by state and nonstate actors in the politico-institutional context of Singapore. Our objective is to gain a deeper understanding of the political dynamics shaping ideas about participation, and the impact of these contested constructions on the perpetuation of the ruling party's political control. Drawing on strategic-relational institutionalist planning and cultural political economy theories, we analyze 312 documents including government and civil society periodicals, parliamentary debates, and academic publications, focusing on the planning and participatory practices of Singapore's national planning agency from the mid-1980s to 2020. The findings reveal that state-led coalitions continuously reframed participation as an instrument of economic growth, nation-building, and activism-management, while nonstate-led coalitions emerged to transform state-civil society relations through promoting and materializing alternative meanings of participation. These dynamics demonstrate the potentialities and limitations of democratizing urban planning and governance in Singapore's hybrid regime.

Game Playing in the Platform Society: A Cultural-Political Economy Analysis of the Live Streaming Industry in China

Abstract With the continuing innovation of digital technologies and mobile multimedia terminals, the live steaming industry still has its relatively enormous market share in China. However, the aura of the platform profit-making period seems to glow faintly after 2016, the year regarded as “the booming year of the Chinese live streaming industry”. As the user bonus fades, the growth of the online live broadcasting industry becomes stable, and the industry development returns to rationality. This work poses several questions: in what ways can the survived platforms move forward to seek profits? What type of potential transformations have happened during the monetization for capital accumulation in the digital economy blended with diverse cultures? How can the labor rights of common people be ensured among the persistent chess-play in the virtual live streaming world? By jumping out from techno-optimistic research rhetoric and orthodox political economy discourse, this study stems from a macroscopic perspective of cultural political economy (CPE) with systematical consideration of broader functional factors. Netnography, online in-depth interview, and walkthrough qualitative methods are also conducted to analyze the transformation development in China’s live streaming industry. Results disclose that a gameplay still exists at the core of the dystopian cyberspace, especially residing among different context factors in the platform society, and this academic disclosure can be viewed from cultural and political economy dimension.

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

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