post-Fordist Accumulation Regime Research Articles

Smart Cities in the Global System of City-Regions: The French Regulation School’s Perspective

The study aims to analyse the rise of the smart city as part of the global trend of the rise of city-regions in late capitalist society. By using the methodology of the French Regulation School (FRS), the authors show that political and economic significance of smart city projects are based on their unique role in revamping the failing consumption characteristic of the ongoing crisis of the late capitalist, or as the FRS theorists call it, the post-Fordist regime of accumulation. Through the analysis of the smart city’s role in stimulating innovations and maintaining the consumption patterns needed for the continuing market growth, the present research postulates the hypothesis of the rise of the city-centred system of global developmental governance as a necessary move along the existing trajectory of transition toward the post-Fordist system of production and regulation. The authors argue that the worldwide rise of the smart city movement should be seen through the lens of stabilization of the late capitalist mode of development. A key shift in evolution of the existing global political and economic system is the formation of networked organizations that connect smart cities of the first, global, and the second, regional, echelon into a unified system of governance, which represents a new mode of regulation for the post-Fordist society.

A Critical Reflection on Neoliberalism

: In this interview, we first scrutinise the meaning of classical liberalism and its revision by New liberalism in the twenties as social liberalism to demonstrate the conceptual confusion in using the term ‘neoliberalism' as an economic doctrine. We then discuss the emergence of American neoliberalism as developed by the economic and law departments of the University of Chicago in the seventies notably by the Monetarist school. The anti-inflation program of Milton Friedman and Washington consensus provide a particular version of neoliberalism as economic policy. However, neoliberalism also pertains to a transitional, and non viable post-Fordist accumulation regime that has collapsed by 2007-2008 crisis. We also demonstrate the opposition against neoliberal economic policy not only by left critics but also by many right and center economists, politicians and scholars. Finally, we refute the idea of considering the political economy of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) as neoliberal. Borrowing Vahabi’s theoretical framework, we characterise parallel institutions and foundations as political capitalism with the predominance of predatory para-statal sectors. The limits of reformist and transformationalist discourses are revisited in light of political economy of the IRI, and the need for a social and political revolution is concluded.

Гериатрический капитализм: стагнация и кризис постфордистского режима накопления

Гериатрический капитализм: стагнация и кризис постфордистского режима накопления

Smart city in the global system of developmental governance

The study aims to analyze the rise of the smart city as a global project for the improvement of the territorial governance of social and economic development in late capitalist society. By using the methodology of the French regulation school, the author shows that political and economic significance of the smart city projects is defined by their role in the global network of information exchange characteristic of the post-Fordist regime of accumulation. Through the analysis of the smart city’s role in stimulating innovations and maintaining the consumption patterns needed for the continuing market growth the present research demonstrates the objective necessity of installation of the city-centered system of global developmental governance.

ПРАКТИКИ ТА РЕЖИМИ БАЧЕННЯ СУЧАСНОГО УРБАНІСТИЧНОГО ПРОСТОРУ

The article is devoted to the cultural analysis of the influence of the theory of postfordism, which considers post-Fordist production with post-industrial technology as the basis of industrial reproduction at the global level and the reproduction of capitalist social relations after the crisis of the Fordist mode of production and consumption. The abstract social space of the city is studied, which is formed by abstraction of labor and fetishization of things at the level of practice and the formation of a visually geometric representation of space with sign power re- pressive in relation to reality. The basis of the concept of sociality as the basis of a unified theory of space was developed by the French philosopher and sociologist A. Lefebvre and further developed by American social geography and urban studies, in particular in the works of D. Harvey, E. Soggy, D. Gottdiener and others. The followers of Lefebvre (apart from those important are F. Jameson's influence) refer in particular to the interdisciplinary trend of post-Fordism, within which postmodernism is considered in connection with the post-Fordist regime of accumulation (a concept developed by the Marxist regulatory school). S. Lesch focuses on the cultural mode of signaling. Likewise, D. Hartmann considers the influence of postmodernism on the post-Fordist regime of capitalism. Paolo True and Pascal Gillen consider within the limits of post-Fordism the existence in modern conditions of the plural. V. Martyanov examines the links between post-Fordism and the post-industrial / information society conceptualized by D. Bell, E. Toffler, M. Castels and others. The article deals with the reconstruction of the theory of social space and post-Fordism and outlines the social transformations of the twentieth century. In essence, it was a search for confirmation that the accumulation mode produces and reproduces social space. Architecture and urban space have become an important structural link through which to consider this connection and justify the invariance of the basic mode of accumu- lation through the reproduction of abstract social space and vice versa. The analysis of the discourse around the urban abstract space associated with the identity of the bourgeois class and the need for the for- mation of a hierarchized homogeneous spatial texture of production is carried out. As well as post-Fordist globalization and post-industrialization, which led to a change in the function and structure of the city with the main role of the post-modernist regime of signification as the logic of late capitalism in the context of programmed consumption.

La no-ciudad posmoderna en "El Jardí del Set Crepuscles" de Miquel de Palol

El Jardi del Set Crepuscles –the first novel of Catalan writer and architect Miquel de Palol– gives us the opportunity to reflect on the metamorphosis of western cities in the early seventies of the last century. According to authors such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Giandomenico Amendola or Edward Soja, the emergence of the postmodern city during the transition to the post-Fordist regime of accumulation occurs accompanied by a weakening of the public sphere. The objective of this paper is to illustrate the narrative and rhetorical strategies used by Miquel de Palol to represent and analyze this transformation.

Disaffection in the Post-Fordist Workplace: Figurations of ‘Immaterial Labour’ in Recent French Theory and Literature

Between them, André Gorz and Yann Moulier Boutang have offered some of the most persuasive theorisations of what is at stake in the shift from a Fordist to a Post-Fordist regime of accumulation. Despite the various theoretical and political differences between Gorz and Moulier Boutang, both share the assumption that the affective, cognitive, and immaterial forms of labour on which Post-Fordism depends constitute, by their very nature, a fundamental challenge to the labour theory of value and hence may yet herald the advent of a new era of genuinely cooperative and creative labour. This article seeks to question that shared assumption. In the first instance, it focuses on a corpus of recent French representations of the realities of Post-Fordist labour to suggest that the dominant experience of affective, cognitive, and immaterial labour, far from being one of creative cooperation, is one of disaffection and refusal. Secondly, the article moves on to question the theoretical assumptions behind Gorz's and Moulier Boutang's accounts. It proposes that rather than being taken to be natural, inherently human characteristics, external and hence resistant to the workings of the market, the cooperative, affective capacities exploited under Post-Fordism might be better understood as the products of that economic conjuncture, the expressions of the specific mode of subjectivity Post-Fordism works to produce.

An Operationalization of the Strategic-Relational Approach: The Contested Privatization of the Mexican Oil Sector (1982–2006)

This article is based on the strategic-relational approach developed by Bob Jessop and investigates the contested privatization of the Mexican oil industry. Privatization has been rampant all over Latin America throughout the 1980s and 1990s. There are, however, some important exceptions from this general trend towards privatization which go widely unnoticed within the academic debate. The Mexican oil sector is one such exception as steps towards its privatization have been undertaken since the 1980s but until today ownership-rights for the enterprise remain with the Mexican state. The strategic-relational approach assumes that despite the pressure exercised by a post-Fordist accumulation regime towards privatization, the contingent interaction of actor strategies and institutions allows for alternative historical paths and may lead to the collapse of privatization processes. In order to conduct a detailed case study, an operationalization of the strategic-relational approach is necessary. Following this path, virgin soil is entered as date only a few attempts have been made to operationalize strategic-relational categories. The case study of the privatization conflict over the Mexican oil industry reveals that in this specific case decisive resistance against privatization stems from the Ministry of Finance, which is normally considered the most important institutional basis of neoliberalism in Mexico. Este artículo se basa en el enfoque relacional estratégico desarrollado por Bob Jessop, e investiga la controvertida privatización de la industria petrolera mexicana. Durante los años 80 y 90, la privatización ha sido dominante en toda Latinoamérica. Sin embargo, hay algunas excepciones importantes de esta tendencia general hacia la privatización, que han pasado desapercibidas en el debate académico. El sector petrolero mexicano hace parte de tal excepción, en la medida que los pasos hacia la privatización se iniciaron en los años 80, pero los derechos de propiedad de la empresa son del estado mexicano. El enfoque estratégico relacional asume que, a pesar de la presión ejercida por un régimen de acumulación hacia la privatización posterior a Ford, la interacción contingente entre las estrategias del actor y las instituciones permiten vías históricas alternas y pueden conducir al colapso de los procesos de privatización. Con el fin de llevar a cabo un estudio detallado del caso, es necesario adoptar un enfoque operacional de las relaciones estratégicas. Continuando con esta idea, hasta la fecha, muy poco se ha hecho para establecer categorías relacionales estratégicas de operación, ejemplo, las tierras vírgenes. El estudio del caso del conflicto de la privatización de la industria petrolera mexicana, revela que en este caso específico, la resistencia a la privatización del petróleo se origina en el Ministerio de Hacienda, considerado como la base institucional más importante del neoliberalismo en México. 本文是以鲍勃·杰索普所发展的战略-关系路径为基础，考察有争议的墨西哥石油工业私有化。在整个20世纪80年代和90年代，私有化在全拉美盛行。然而，在这一私有化的大趋势中，也存在一些重要的例外，它们在学术辩论中未受关注。墨西哥石油部门就是这样一个例外，因墨西哥石油部门的私有化20世纪80年代即开始着手，但至今公司的所有权仍掌握在国家手中。 战略-关系路径假定，尽管后福特主义的资本积累机制对私有化施加了压力，但行为体战略与机构之间有条件的互动提供了可供选择的历史路径，并可能导致私有化进程的瓦解。为了进行详细的案例研究，对战略-关系路径进行操作化是必要的。沿着这条路径，把未开垦的土地纳入了进来，因迄今为止只进行了个别尝试把战略-关系分类可操作化。 对墨西哥石油工业的私有化冲突案例研究表明，在这一特定例子中，反对私有化的决定性阻力来自通常被认为是墨西哥新自由主义最重要制度基础的财政部。

Hedonistic Consumerism: Patterns of Consumption in Contemporary Capitalism

The post-Fordist accumulation regime has drifted toward hedonistic consumerism: a mix of highly unequal and bourgeoning consumption. Since World War II, cultural and structural elements have led to a situation in which consumption, fostered by induced wants, far exceeds levels of basic need and tends to be monopolized by the wealthiest, both among and within nations. I suggest that a possible solution to these tensions may be found by applying Sen's notion of equality of opportunity to modern patterns of consumption.

Agricultural policy discourses in the European post-Fordist transition: neoliberalism, neomercantilism and multifunctionality

A renewal of academic interest in agricultural restructuring in western Europe raises questions about causality, processes and outcomes. In particular, the relationship between deep-set structural tendencies and policy trends and the way these are constituted in relation to, and mediated through, the agency of individual land managers and other actors is emerging as a central research concern of rural social scientists. In this paper we focus on the first part of this equation, arguing that international and European agricultural restructuring needs to be rediscovered as an essentially sociopolitical project, the outcome of a struggle for influence and power between different class fractions of capital during a long and contested transition to a post-Fordist regime of accumulation. Rather than witnessing the shift towards a postproductivist agriculture anticipated by some recent commentators, we argue that the dominant framing is in favour of a neoliberal regime of market productivism, leading to the further integration of large parts of European agriculture into agro-food circuits of capital. While the neoliberal discourse which provides the intellectual justification for this process is heavily contested by advocates of a long standing form of neomercantilism and by a more recently invented discourse of agricultural multifunctionality, the entrenched position of neoliberal ideas and framings within the World Trade Organization (WTO) means that the ideology of the free market is coming to define the terms of international, and thus European, agricultural policy reform. The recent history of reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and wider rural policy reform in the European Union (EU) nevertheless suggests that the European policy stance is one of partial resistance to unfettered liberalization, policy-makers apparently having embarked on an attempt to combine elements of the neoliberal programme with continued commitment to state assistance in various forms. This sets the frame for the regulation of an increasingly bimodal agricultural industry, in which spaces for postproductivism and rural development are being defined and defended in public interest and public good terms but where there are few opportunities to question the enforced segregation and commodification of rural space and environmental provision that this implies.

Renegotiating Culture and Society in a Global Context

Renegotiating Culture and Society in a Global Context Stacy Takacs Anthony King, ed. Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci is credited with offering the first full-fledged analysis of Fordism as both an economic and a cultural system. His major insight was to recognize that the “rationalization of work” entailed by the reorganization of the productive processes under Fordism necessitated a certain reorganization of social behavior as well. For Gramsci, Fordism was more than a technological paradigm; it was “the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man” (302). One cannot help but hear the echo of Gramsci in the recent plethora of Marxist accounts of the contemporary transition to a so-called post-Fordist regime of accumulation.[1] Clearly, contemporary cultural critics have learned from Gramsci which questions about culture and society are worth posing. Gramsci’s analysis of Fordism asks not whether, but how social transformation occurs. In linking the rationalization of work to the regulation of social bodies, he focuses less on the nature of productive relations than on how those relations are reproduced over time and across space. This means introducing into the science of political economy questions about the role of politics, culture, ideology, and identity in the regulation of a given set of capitalist relations. Finally, Gramsci seeks to understand the relationship between the economic base of capitalist society and these airy superstructures without reducing the latter to mere expressions of the former. In this sense, he should be seen as an intellectual forefather of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies, which takes this task as its guiding problematic. Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, edited by Anthony King, fits squarely within this growing body of material designed to apply Gramsci’s insights to the emerging post-Fordist[2] socio-cultural complex. As the serial form of the title indicates, the text attempts to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. The first part of the title offers a broad outline of the terms of engagement, so broad as to be disorienting, I would argue. The second part seems designed to temper the excesses of the first by establishing identity as the primary vehicle through which to pursue the study of culture, globalization, and the world-system. The implicit question it poses is: how do structural changes in the organization of society impact the ability to locate oneself vis-à-vis others in the world? This is a provocative question. Unfortunately, as I will demonstrate, the text fails to fulfill the promise of its subtitle. Instead of charting a course through the maze of the global via an examination of lived identity, Culture, Globalization and the World-System ends up reinscribing disciplinary boundaries in a defensive attempt to ward off the cognitive disorientation unleashed by the widespread social transformations it describes. The text’s production history provides some insight into why the title of the volume appears so expansive as to be virtually meaningless: the organizers of the original symposium were attempting to provide an introduction to the history of study in these areas. As King explains in his introduction, each term in the title is designed to connote an entire body of theory connected, for the sake of convenience, to a single theorist who becomes the representative of this body of theory within the space of the symposium/text. The term “culture” is intended to reference the works of Cultural Studies guru Stuart Hall and anthropologist Ulf Hannerz; “globalization” refers to the work of Roland Robertson; and “the world-system” refers to Immanuel Wallerstein’s ground-breaking work in international political economy. Hall’s two lectures were presented prior to the symposium while Robertson, Wallerstein, and Hannerz’s lectures served as the focal points for the symposium itself. Respondents included Janet Abu-Lughod, Barbara Abou-El-Haj, Maureen Turim, King, John Tagg, and Janet Wolff, who provided the (admirable) summation of the proceedings. As I will show...

Public education and the post-fordist accumulation regime: A case study of Australia

Public education and the post-fordist accumulation regime: A case study of Australia

Public education and the post-fordist accumulation regime: A case study of Australia

This paper discusses the current radical changes in the Australian education policy. Central to the argument is the claim that the radical restructuring of the public sector hastened the loss of the possibility of any critical evaluation of national policy.

Social, political and spatial dimensions of Korean industrial transformation

Abstract Underlying the current process of industrial restructuring in Korea is the weakening of the social and political comerstones of Korea's “miracle” economy: low wages maintained through labor market segmentation and suppression of labor movements, state leverage over the chaebol and labor, the containment of the middle class through a state-of-war mentality, and the decentralization of industry away from the capital city through the creation of countermagnets and growth poles. Korea's success in generating its own version of a post-fordist regime of accumulation will depend as much on changes in social and political institutions as it will on pursuing an industrial path of flexible specialization.