Cultural Political Economy Research Articles

Capital, inequality and education in conflict-affected contexts

Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century has brought the issue of inequality to the centre of political debate. This article explores contemporary research on the relationship between education and inequality in conflict-affected contexts with a view to seeing how Piketty’s work speaks to these issues as a field of research and practice. The article provides a critique of Piketty’s approach, arguing for a broader, interdisciplinary and holistic approach to exploring and addressing inequality in education in conflict-affected contexts in their multiple economic, cultural and political dimensions. In doing so the article also lays out an analytical framework inspired by cultural political economy for researching education systems in conflict contexts which seeks to go beyond narrow human capital framings of education and address the multiple potential of education to promote sustainable peace and development in and through education.

Complexity reduction and policy consensus: Asylum seekers, the right to work, and the ‘pull factor’ thesis in the UK context

Since the early 2000s, asylum policy in Western states has become increasingly dominated by the concept of the ‘pull factor’—the idea that the economic rights afforded to asylum seekers can act as a migratory pull, and will have a bearing on the numbers of asylum applications received. The pull factor thesis has been widely discredited by researchers but remains powerful among policymakers. Through an analysis of the pull factor in the UK context, and drawing on insights from Cultural Political Economy, this article argues that the hegemony of the pull factor thesis is best understood as a ‘policy imaginary’ which has become sedimented through both discursive and extra-discursive practices and processes. The article offers a means of understanding how a common sense assumption—which is challenged by a large body of evidence—has come to dominate policymaking in a key area of concern for politicians and policymakers.

English as a medium of instruction in East Asia’s higher education sector: a critical realist Cultural Political Economy analysis of underlying logics

ABSTRACTAs discourses of globalisation and the knowledge-based economy become increasingly influential in both policy-making and in public debates about education, employability and national competitiveness – the choice of language in the classroom takes on a strategic importance. The paper employs a critical realist Cultural Political Economy lens to explore the use of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) at tertiary level in the East Asian context. The discussion builds on existing theoretical framings and on empirical research into the language–globalisation nexus, as well as on language-in-education policy and practice. By doing so, the paper seeks to develop a theoretical account of historically and spatially situated socio-political and socio-economic processes that have favoured the use of EMI in the region. The focus here is on the dialectical relationship between hegemonic imaginaries (semiosis) and material practices in relation to the value attached to particular linguistic resources, where value is understood in both economic and symbolic terms, and how this is often tied to neoliberalism and discourses of competiveness.

Global Sociology: Towards an Alternative Southern Paradigm

The project to (re)construct a global sociology is one where there is no agreed paradigm or even a shared understanding of the main issues that would be needed to secure a new robust and credible paradigm. What I seek to do here is to simply clarify the terms of the debate so as to establish whether we might pursue the quest for an alternative paradigm with some conviction. I first consider the ‘strong case’ for a global sociology based on the assumptions of globalisation theory which, overall, seems to suffer from economism in my view. Next I present a postcolonial perspective which posits a fundamental division between the global South and the North, an enterprise I find to be marked by a certain culturalism. I then present elements for an alternative approach towards a new paradigm based on an understanding of complexity, uneven development and the politics of scale. A brief Latin American excursus at the end seeks to provide some texture to the overall argument that a new global sociology could develop through a critical Southern lens and a focus on cultural political economy.

Putting Culture in its Place? A Critical Engagement with Cultural Political Economy

ABSTRACTNgai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop present Cultural Political Economy (CPE) as a project that seeks to deepen Critical Political Economy (C*PE) through an engagement with the cultural turn. This article critically assesses their success in such an enterprise. It begins by framing CPE within Jessop and Sum’s previous work on the Regulation Approach, in order to show why the former can only be understood as the result of a critical dialogue with the latter. Next, my reconstruction of the main elements of Sum and Jessop’s CPE is presented. After having carefully examined its main assumptions and concepts, I criticise CPE’s main novel element, an ontological cultural turn, due to the culturalist risks it engenders. In order to substantiate and exemplify that theoretical criticism, I review CPE’s application to the analysis of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis. This article concludes by showing the main difficulties that CPE faces as an alternative for deepening C*PE and proposes the Amsterdam School of Transnational Historical Materialism as a more suitable direction in which that initiative could be advanced.

The evolution of coastal tourism destinations: a path plasticity perspective on tourism urbanisation

ABSTRACTEvolutionary and relational approaches to economic development are gaining ground in geography as a discipline, although in the subfield of tourism geography, their potential is only just becoming recognised. This article focuses on the evolution of mature tourism destinations, taking the path dependency concept forward from the notion of path creation into the new domain of path plasticity. Drawing on the notion of cultural political economy, we examine how tourism destinations can break with path dependency routines incrementally and move steadily towards different future paths, which may recast tourism in a different light in the overall “urban” context of the destination. Using a case study of a Mediterranean coastal destination on Catalonia's Costa Daurada, we explore the inter-tangled tourism and urban development processes in relation to the socio-spatial dimensions of urban change. The article argues for a wider range of social and cultural criteria in the analysis of tourism evolution – advocating the use of path plasticity and a cultural political economy approach – to offer an alternative perspective on shifting tourism situations, reflecting the inherently “urbanising” nature of tourism development in the traditional coastal resort context. It adds to the growing literature on governance and strategy-making in sustainable tourism.

Biofuel imaginaries: The emerging politics surrounding ‘inclusive’ private sector development in Madagascar

Biofuels are just one of a host of bioeconomy initiatives which promise to deliver ‘inclusive’ sustainable development through innovations in bio-based products and services in the global south. Yet to critics, biofuels are seen as prime drivers in a global ‘land grab,’ rainforest clearance, and the dispossession of farmers. Responding to these concerns, firms in Madagascar have shifted production away from large plantations to small-scale production of the more ‘environmentally-friendly’ biofuel crop Jatropha curcas. Using a political ecology lens and building upon critical discourse analysis found in cultural political economy, I analyse perspectives of on the material effects and emerging politics surrounding a case of a British-biofuel start-up firm in the northwest Madagascar. I demonstrate that access to biofuel land and labour is dependent upon the inclusion of Malagasy in rural development projects. However, rather than delivering on the promises of biofuels, jatropha has largely emerged as a failed development strategy. This article examines the unaccounted for power that varied and diverse actors derive by promoting the inclusion of individuals and groups to share in benefits, and the material consequences of private sector development in the global south.

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

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

Future imaginaries of urban school reform

Drawing on analytic heuristics from critical discourse analysis and cultural political economy (Jessop, 2010; Wodak, 2002), this article examines the temporal premises and “futures” embedded in a report and reform proposal created in a mid-sized, American city, Columbus, Ohio, in 2013. The product of a city-wide commission appointed in response to a school ‘cheating’ scandal, the report is both a condensation of key premises and claims circulating through national education policy discourses, and an effort to fit those ideas to a particular urban locale. This fitting involves aligning the city with a particular neoliberal representation or “imaginary” of the future that pervades current education policy discourse and planning. The article unpacks the temporal premises associated with this imaginary and shows their influence on the city’s planning. Among other things, the discourse individuates scholastic time and subordinates the present to a distant future that is represented as an already-known or predictable state of affairs. It positions practices such as standardized testing as temporal technologies for predicting the child’s position in the imagined future, and reframes racially- and class-based inequalities as differences in the kinds of futures towards which groups are oriented. The effect is to overwrite political questions of what kind of future we might want to create with technical questions of how best to prepare for an inevitable future we can’t avoid.

Future imaginaries of urban school reform

Drawing on analytic heuristics from critical discourse analysis and cultural political economy (Jessop, 2010; Wodak, 2002), this article examines the temporal premises and “futures” embedded in a report and reform proposal created in a mid-sized, American city, Columbus, Ohio, in 2013. The product of a city-wide commission appointed in response to a school ‘cheating’ scandal, the report is both a condensation of key premises and claims circulating through national education policy discourses, and an effort to fit those ideas to a particular urban locale. This fitting involves aligning the city with a particular neoliberal representation or “imaginary” of the future that pervades current education policy discourse and planning. The article unpacks the temporal premises associated with this imaginary and shows their influence on the city’s planning. Among other things, the discourse individuates scholastic time and subordinates the present to a distant future that is represented as an already-known or predictable state of affairs. It positions practices such as standardized testing as temporal technologies for predicting the child’s position in the imagined future, and reframes racially- and class-based inequalities as differences in the kinds of futures towards which groups are oriented. The effect is to overwrite political questions of what kind of future we might want to create with technical questions of how best to prepare for an inevitable future we can’t avoid.

Inercia y resistencia al cambio en las políticas de drogas: El caso del desarrollo alternativo en Satipo-Perú

Alternative Development (AD) policies are initiatives aimed at controlling illicit cocaine supply coming from the Andean region. While Andean states have created a great number of AD projects and programs, these have been object of harsh criticism given their limited impact on the reduction of global cocaine supply and their harmful consequences for local communities. In spite of criticism, AD policies have been implemented over the last thirty years. This article provides an account of this contradiction by explaining the workings of Alternative Development’s inertia or its continuous reproduction in Peru. By drawing on the case of a particular Alternative Development program that is currently being implemented in the province of Satipo, the article analyzes how policy inertia is experienced and perpetuated at the local level. Using the theoretical approach of Cultural Political Economy, the article concludes that policy inertia is the result of vested particular interests and everyday practices carried out by a wide variety of actors who are anchored in structures of material inequality.

‘Playing on the break’: Karl Polanyi and the double-movement ‘Against Modern Football’

While the popularity of English football increases worldwide, there has been a marked rise in the discontent expressed by a small but growing group of domestic fans. This dissent has led to the emergence of a movement broadly defined as being ‘Against Modern Football’ (AMF), a banner under which fans of rival clubs have gathered in an attempt to challenge the poor governance, commercialism and greed that has come to dominate the English game. This article offers a conceptualisation of what it means to be ‘against modern football’ based upon Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the market society. Developing the dialectic of the ‘double-movement’ that appears in Polanyi’s most famous work, The Great Transformation, this article demonstrates how these governing principles might be useful in explaining both the complex cultural political economy of English football and the possibilities that exist for the AMF movement to socially re-embed the modern game.

The affective imaginary: students as affective consumers of risk

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the purpose of higher education (HE) for students in Ireland in the context of the dominant narrative of the knowledge-based economy (KBE). It argues that the KBE is one of the most recent of economic imaginaries devised by governments to manage the population [Hay, S., & Kaptizke, C. (2009). ‘Smart’ state for a knowledge economy: Reconstituting creativity through student subjectivity. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30(2), 151–164; Jessop, B. (2008). A cultural political economy of competitiveness and its implications for higher education. In B. Jessop, N. Fairdough, & R. Wodak (Eds.), Education and the knowledge-based economy in Europe (pp. 14–39). Rotterdam: Sense; Loxley, A., Seery, A., & Walsh, J. (Eds.) (2014). Higher education in Ireland: Practices, policies and possibilities. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan; Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul; the shaping of the private self (2nd ed.). London: Free Association Books]: HE institutions have been assigned a key role in promoting economic growth in the competitive space of the global economy. HE is also represented as an insurance against the risk of under-employment or unemployment from a student perspective. The paper examines to what extent students ‘buy’ into this official imaginary and how it affects their decision to go to college and select a particular course. The research methodology involved a large-scale survey of three major HE institutions in Ireland. Questionnaires were completed by 4265 students. The results challenged the prevailing assumption that students’ decisions to go to college or select a particular course are driven solely by economic goals. The findings indicate that while the majority of students attributed a great deal of importance to market (employment) considerations, their employment imaginary was balanced against an affective imaginary, showing high levels of concern about care relations at an individual level. Risk is not only framed in terms of securing an economic future but also securing a relational future, the risks and opportunities for care and love relationships that particular careers or jobs entail are part of students’ imaginary. HE students, especially female students, can be conceptualised as affective consumers of risk, offering a counter-narrative to the market ideology.

Operationalizing cultural political economy: towards critical grounded theory

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to take conceptual and methodological steps towards the elaboration of the critical grounded theory (CGT) method.Design/methodology/approach– Starting from conceptual issues with mapping everyday discourses and practices in their broader societal context in organisational ethnography, cultural political economy (CPE) is proposed as a suitable theoretical framework for integrating the cultural dimension of discourses and imaginaries into political-economic analyses of organisation and management. The CGT method is introduced for empirical operationalisation.Findings– Grounded theory tools for working with ethnographic data can be employed within critical approaches such as CPE although they originate from positivist social science. The need to combine ethnographic fieldwork with substantial theoretical work and/or critical discourse analysis may be met by CGT, which affords the ethnographic strengths of grounded theory without, however, bracketing the critical-theoretical insights of CPE.Research limitations/implications– The usefulness of CGT has been tentatively tested, but requires thorough meta-theoretical and methodological development, which is what is undertaken here.Social implications– CGT expects and takes account of the social implications of its employment in the field.Originality/value– First steps towards a new critical method for organisation and management studies are taken. Although originating from concern with CPE, the CGT method may appeal to a wider audience of critical scholars across the social sciences.

Public Policy and the Idea of the Vietnamese State: The Cultural Political Economy of Domestic Water Supply

Using Rural Water Supply (RWS) policy practices as a case study, this article shows that the disjunction between implementation as formally conceived and informally practised is not a question of ineffective policy cycle dynamics, but rather an inherent feature of Vietnam’s Cultural Political Economy. Drawing on critical realist approaches to social and state theory, we argue that formal and informal RWS policy practices, as a set of two interconnected spheres, serve as key, separate but connected, mechanisms for reproducing the distribution of material resources (primarily through the informal sphere) and the hegemony of ideas (primarily through the formal sphere) in Vietnamese society. We conclude that the formal, administrative practices of RWS policy are primarily to be understood in their function of reproducing the idea of the state and state legitimacy. RWS administrative practices function to sustain the core social and political order in Vietnam as institutionalised in “the state”, rather than being primarily oriented to improving rural water supply. The findings raise questions for donor-supported programs that focus on formal administrative institutions and practices for improving the performance of the water sector.

‘Benefits broods’: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense

In the aftermath of the global banking crises, a political economy of permanent state austerity has emerged, driven by and legitimated through a hardening anti-welfare commonsense. We argue that, while there is an excellent evidence base emerging around solidifying negative public attitudes towards welfare, critical policy studies needs to attend to the cultural as well as the political economies through which an anti-welfare commonsense is formed and legitimated. We adopt a ‘cultural political economy’ approach to examine the cultural and political crafting of ‘benefit brood’ families within the wider public sphere, to examine the mechanisms through which anti-welfare sentiments are produced and mediated. Through a case study of Mick Philpott, we demonstrate how ‘benefits broods’ operate both as technologies of control (through which to manage precariat populations), but also as technologies of consent through which a wider and deeper anti-welfare commonsense is effected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural political economy of competitiveness, competition, and competition policy in Asia

This article employs cultural political economy to explore, interpret, and explain the articulation of competition, competitiveness, and competition policies in Asia in the current neo-liberal era. It describes how this approach explores social order and change in terms of the interaction between semiosis and structuration in the context of four types of selectivity: structural, agential, discursive, and technological. It then outlines an analytical framework and methodology to apply this approach to the chosen case study. This concerns how these modes of selectivity have operated since the 1997 ‘Asian Crisis’ to produce changes in the policy discourses and practices of the World Bank and its Asian regional agencies with the declared aim of reducing poverty, enhancing competitiveness, and promoting corresponding forms of competition policy. Next it examines how these discourses and practices are assembling a new dispositive around an emerging disciplinary and governmentalized socioeconomic-cum-legal order in the wake of the Doha conjuncture in Asia. The concluding remarks address some tensions and challenges in the making of this competitiveness order in Asia.