Trends In Political Economy Research Articles

On ‘the Politics of Repair Beyond Repair’: Radical Democracy and the Right to Repair Movement

AbstractThis paper analyses the right to repair (R2R) movement through the lens of radical democracy, elucidating the opportunities and limitations for advancing a democratic repair ethics against a backdrop of power imbalances and vested interests. We commence our analysis by exploring broader political-economic trends, demonstrating that Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are increasingly shifting towards asset-based repair strategies. In this landscape, hegemony is preserved not solely through deterrence tactics like planned obsolescence but also by conceding repairability while monopolizing repair and maintenance services. We further argue that the R2R serves as an ‘empty signifier’, whose content is shaped by four counter-hegemonic frames used by the R2R movement: consumer advocacy, environmental sustainability, communitarian values, and creative tinkering. These frames, when viewed through Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy, reveal different potentials for sustaining dissent and confronting OEMs' hegemony in the field of repair. Analysed in this way, an emerging business ethics of repair can be understood as driven by the politics of repair beyond repair. This notion foregrounds the centrality of non-violent conflict and antagonism for bringing radical democratic principles to repair debates, looking beyond narrow instrumentalist conversations, where repairability is treated as an apolitical arena solely defined by concerns for eco-efficiency and resource productivity.

Housing, place and populism: Towards a research agenda

This exchange considers the unrecognised interplay between two major political–economic trends shaping contemporary Europe, namely the upward trend in housing-induced inequalities and rising support for populist politics. Europe's housing systems have undergone dramatic transformations in recent decades that are exacerbating housing precarity, wealth inequalities and socio-spatial polarisation. At the same time, European politics has witnessed a growing acceptance of populist political rhetoric, values and policies as populists exploit citizens' economic anxieties and perceived cultural grievances. Yet, existing research overlooks the connections between housing system dynamics, housing precarity and political disaffection. In response, this exchange proposes a new approach – housing discontent – to capture how deepening housing precarity and place inequalities are influencing social attitudes, political values and preferences and resulting in a more polarised contemporary politics.

Producing local neoliberalism in a Leftist regime: neoliberal governmentality and populist transition in West Bengal, India

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a theoretical reassessment of a contentious chapter in India’s economic liberalisation – the case of West Bengal, a state ruled by the pro-labour ‘Left Front’ coalition, led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPIM) from 1997 to 2011. The onset of neoliberalism in India had naturally created a serious political dilemma for the CPIM, but it eventually transitioned to a private-industrialisation agenda, thus prompting serious questions of ideological deviation. While the political-economy of the CPIM/Left Front and its industrial fortunes have been extensively scrutinised, this study introduces a rather different theoretical perspective to the story. Going back to the initial period of policy transition (c.1994), it uses the analytical categories of local neoliberalisms and populist transition to show how the state of affairs in West Bengal under the CPIM was demonstrative of a particular variant of interventionist neoliberal governmentality, characterised by a gradual intensification of pro-market impulses. Furthermore, the study also contextualises West Bengal within wider political economic trends, arguing that pro-market transitions by populist regimes tend to be characterised by a series of mobile calculative techniques of governing, embedded in local historical and geographical specificities and localised relationships.

Ruptures revoked: why the Central African Republic's unprecedented crisis has not altered deep-seated patterns of governance

AbstractThe Central African Republic experienced unprecedented violence between 2012 and 2014. We analyse three recent ruptures that developed as a result of this crisis, suggesting a break with the country's past. First, the Séléka rebellion that started in 2012; second, the establishment of a robust UN Peacekeeping mission in 2014; and finally, the democratic election of a civilian president in 2016. However, three deep-rooted patterns of governance have in each case transformed these ruptures. A history of outsourced politics, a plurality of violence and peripheral neglect push actors to perpetuate the violent past rather than breaking with it. We conclude that after an initial attempt to break with the CAR's long-term political economic trends, rebel groups, the UN mission and the democratic government have backtracked and now risk reinforcing the violence that mark politics and everyday life in the country.

“Challenging it softly”: a feminist inquiry into gender in the news media context

ABSTRACT As they are a privileged site for the (re)construction of the dominant gender order, media often contribute to naturalizing inequalities. This paper aims to critically discuss the way in which hegemonic meanings of gender have been accepted, resisted, and/or challenged in the Portuguese media context, both by professionals working in news magazines and by publics. This discussion revolves around three different topics: access, distribution, and participation in the media industries; reporting practices and media contents; and gender equality policies. The research is based on 11 focus-group discussions with 101 undergraduate students, as well as on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 15 media professionals. The collected data were subsequently submitted to a thematic analysis. The findings show that hegemonic meanings of gender were mostly (re)produced: gender asymmetries in the media industry were either taken as a non-issue, or attributed to individual-level factors. Additionally, gendered media representations, and the relationships between the male-biased news-making process and the neoliberal trends in political economy of communication were largely disregarded, as far as their impact is concerned; gender equality policies were dismissed as actions required to achieve equality, diversity, and social justice. Critical gender perspectives have rarely been endorsed by media professionals and publics.

Learning to share: Pedagogy, open learning, and the sharing economy

The sharing economy is fertile sociological ground for studying important themes like labor, exchange, consumption, and inequality, as well as larger political-economic trends that are reflective of this post-recession era. The multifaceted research agenda of the sharing economy can provide lessons around many themes relevant to sociologists, but what does the sharing economy teach to those who participate in it? What is learned from the sharing economy and how do participants learn it? In this article, the author explores the pedagogic elements of one case study within the sharing economy: open learning. Drawing from 51 interviews with 34 participants and roughly 300 hours of participant observation, the study uses Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse to ask how open learners learn to share. The author argues that an ethos of communalism and cooperativism dominated moral discourse for learners and regulated social order. Entrepreneurialism was learned through a flexible sociality, where participants contributed to each other’s learning as a means of validating and legitimizing that learning. The need to contribute or give back was taken for granted by participants, who felt compelled to give their own expertise or labor to the commons after taking something from it. This study depicts a tension between a neoliberal entrepreneurial frame and a communalist, cooperativist frame that is also present within the larger sharing economy. The author suggests that a similar pedagogic approach that asks how participants learn to share could be developed in the larger sharing economy in order to better understand learning and economic relations as two sides of the same coin in contemporary capitalism.

“The land of the sick and the land of the healthy”: Disability, bureaucracy, and stigma among people living with poverty and chronic illness in the United States

Disability benefits have become an increasingly prominent source of cash assistance for impoverished American citizens over the past two decades. This development coincided with cuts and market-oriented reforms to state and federal welfare programs, characteristic of the wider political-economic trends collectively referred to as neoliberalism. Recent research has argued that contemporary discourses on ‘disability fraudsters’ and ‘malingerers’ associated with this shift represent the latest manifestation of age-old stigmatization of the ‘undeserving poor’. Few studies, however, have investigated how the system of disability benefits, as well as these stigmatizing discourses, shapes the lived experience of disabling physical illness in today's United States. Here we present qualitative data from 64 semi-structured interviews with low-income individuals living with HIV and/or type 2 diabetes mellitus to explore the experience of long-term, work-limiting disability in the San Francisco Bay Area. Interviews were conducted between April and December 2014. Participants explained how they had encountered what they perceived to be excessive, obstructive, and penalizing bureaucracy from social institutions, leading to destitution and poor mental health. They also described being stigmatized as disabled for living with chronic ill health, and simultaneously stigmatized as shirking and malingering for claiming disability benefits as a result. Notably, this latter form of stigma appeared to be exacerbated by the bureaucracy of the administrating institutions. Participants also described intersections of health-related stigma with stigmas of poverty, gender, sexual orientation, and race. The data reveal a complex picture of poverty and intersectional stigma in this population, potentiated by a convoluted and inflexible bureaucracy governing the system of disability benefits. We discuss how these findings reflect the historical context of neoliberal cuts and reforms to social institutions, and add to ongoing debate around the future of public social provision for impoverished and chronically ill citizens under neoliberalism.

The rise of food banks and the challenge of matching food assistance with potential need: towards a spatially specific, rapid assessment approach

In the United States, food banks served an estimated 46 million people in 2015. A combination of government policy reforms and political economic trends contributed to the rising numbers of individuals relying on private food assistance in the US, the United Kingdom and other high-income countries. Although researchers frequently map urban food environments, this project is one of the first to map private food assistance and potential need at the census-tract scale. We utilize Geographic Information Systems, demographic data, and food assistance locations to develop a rapid assessment tool that could support food banks, pantries, soup kitchens, and government agencies that seek to answer the question of whether people with the greatest need have food distribution sites in close proximity. We define access based on distance and then calculate potential food insecurity using either poverty rates or a food insecurity index. We apply these methods in a case study analysis of Santa Clara County, California. Our findings suggest that food assistance distribution locations match the areas of potential need in more than 80% of urban census tracts. However, there are several potentially underserved locations and populations that could benefit from new food assistance operations. The poverty and index-based approaches show significant spatial overlap in mapped areas of high food insecurity and low access. The poverty only approach produces a higher estimate of food insecurity rates, is easier to calculate, and draws attention to the need to address poverty as a root cause of hunger.

Financiar las bellas artes: tendencias internacionales político- económicas de 1985, 2001 y 2016

Financiar las bellas artes: tendencias internacionales político- económicas de 1985, 2001 y 2016

Putting higher education in its place in (East Asian) political economy

ABSTRACTThis article relates changes in higher education (HE) and research in East Asian societies to recent trends in political economy and, in particular, the reorientation of developmental states (DSs) in the region. The DS is oriented to catch-up competitiveness and, as the horizon of development shifts, so do its appropriate institutional forms and strategies. Catch-up competitiveness is guided by economic imaginaries, often linked to geoeconomic, geopolitical, and broader societal imaginaries, whose hegemony depends on particular discursive and disciplinary practices. The shift in the roles of HE and research is related to the reorientation of DSs from export-oriented, investment-led growth to knowledge-intensive, investment-led growth, supplemented in some cases by efforts to create international financial hubs to exploit a global trend towards financialisation. These themes are explored through comparison of selected East Asian economies/societies. The article ends with some general conclusions about the state's continuing role in HE and its internationalisation in the region.

The Friction of Cartography: On the Politics of Space and Mobility among Migrant Communities in the Thai–Burma Borderlands

The dominant approach to understanding migration in the Thai–Burma borderlands frames migration largely as an economic effect of industrialization in Thailand and economic stagnation in Burma. Drawing on a range of secondary sources and long-term field-based research on the Thai–Burma border, this article pursues a different approach, seeking to situate current migration trends in a historical and political context. James Scott's recent work on Zomia and upland Southeast Asia is instrumental here. Key factors Scott cites as drivers of flight from state space over the longue durée—taxation, forced or corvée labor, and war and rebellion—remain strikingly relevant today. This article examines the applicability of Scott's migration analysis to contemporary mobility patterns in the Thai–Burma borderlands, proposing two concepts that highlight the politics of mobility in this border area: the friction of cartography and migrant counter-topographies. The former evokes the protective quality of the border line itself, whereby ostensibly economic migrants who cross it achieve a measure of distance and refuge vis-à-vis Burma's predatory state structures, especially the military; the latter seeks to name the spaces created by migrants to evade forms and structures of state power, in both Thailand and Burma. I argue that today's migrant communities, far from being overdetermined reflections of recent trends in political economy, much resemble Scott's state-evading peasants from centuries past, displaying political agency and intentionality in their strategic use of space to seek and secure refuge in the Thai–Burma borderlands.

The Role of the Public Institution in Iconic Architectural Development

Research on iconic architecture has typically explained its popularity with reference to global political-economic trends like neo-liberalism and urban entrepreneurialism, but the role of the immediate clients has often been overlooked. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that the majority of these clients are public cultural institutions. In order to explain the affinity between this organisational form and iconic architecture, this paper develops a model of the public institution based on its need to establish public legitimacy and attract outside support. To develop this model further, the paper presents a comparative case study of two museum expansion projects in Toronto: Daniel Libeskind’s Royal Ontario Museum and Frank Gehry’s Art Gallery of Ontario. The study addresses the underlying motivations behind the projects, the role of global political-economic trends and how the unique logic of the public institution structured the development process itself.

How farmers matter in shaping agricultural technologies: social and structural characteristics of wheat growers and wheat varieties

Science and technology studies (STS) research challenges the concept of technological determinism by investigating how the end users of a technology influence that technology’s trajectory. STS critiques of determinism are needed in studies of agricultural technology. However, we contend that focusing on the agency of end users may mask the role of political-economic factors which influence technology developments and applications. This paper seeks to mesh STS insights with political-economic perspectives by accounting for relationships between availability of diverse technologies, variations in political-economic structures, and farmer interests and characteristics. We present the results of an analysis on the recent development of three wheat varieties: (a) a wheat variety that was modified genetically to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate, (b) wheat varieties with characteristics selected to serve specific markets, (c) and emerging research and development of perennial wheat varieties. Using data obtained through a survey of wheat growers in Washington State, we analyzed whether farmer interest in these three clusters of wheat varieties was associated with distinct individual characteristics and attitudes and whether those characteristics and attitudes are consistent with political economic structures. Although our analysis did not allow us to assess the degree of direct influence that farmers have on the technological development trajectory for these types of wheat, we were able to document variation in technological alternatives and farmer characteristics related to different political-economic trends.

Pirates, privateers and the political economy of private violence

Historical accounts of private violence in international relations are often rather under-theorised and under-contextualised. Overall, private violence historically needs to be seen in the context of the relationship between state-building, political economy and violence, rather than through the narrative of states gradually monopolising violence. Pirates and privateers in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century Europe were embedded in a broader political economy of violence which needed and actively promoted ‘private’ violence in a broader pursuit of power. As such, the de-legitimatisation of piracy and privateering were the consequence of a number of interlinked political economic trends, such as the development of public protection of merchant shipping (through the growth of centralised navies), the move away from trade monopolies to inter-imperial trade, and the development of capitalism and industrialism. Present forms of private violence also need to be seen as part of a broader historical dynamic of war, violence and political economy.

Influencing Tourism at the Grassroots Level: the role of ngo Tourism Concern

The campaigning ngo Tourism Concern has grown from a minor irritant in the flesh of the service sector's largest industry to an acknowledged presence able to hit its mark. One of the younger members of an international network of organisations founded to raise awareness of the impacts of tourism on the marginalised, it looked to the development rather than the business paradigm in its emphasis on giving a voice to the people of the South. This article charts the evolution of Tourism Concern and describes the kind of work it does, highlighting specific campaigns on displacement in East Africa and Burma and on labour conditions among mountain porters. Some notable successes have been achieved and there is evidence that the public is taking the issues Tourism Concern raises into account in its holiday-taking behaviour. Nevertheless, progress is not assured (as demonstrated in East Africa) and current political–economic trends suggest that there is still a long way to go to end exploitation in tourism.

Transformations in Casino Gaming and the Unionization of Atlantic City's Dealers

This account of a successful unionization campaign among dealers is based on an ethnographic study-in-progress of workers in Atlantic City's eleven casinos. Deteriorating working conditions that reflect broader political economic trends have contributed to a shift in employees' attitudes toward their jobs, their employers, and consequently unions. Unions became “insiders,” as casino management is increasingly viewed as “outsiders.” This case study is indicative of organized labor's ability to unionize in the twenty-first-century service economy.

Tailoring globalisation to national needs and well-being: one size never fits all

This paper argues that political-economic trends referred to under the single heading of globalisation have distinct causes and manifestations in different countries. Institutional variables chosen by governments and their constituents play a dominant role in determining the character of those manifestations, few of which are inevitable. The political Left and Right often base their arguments on the common premise that nations have no choice but to adopt the US model of highly mobile investment capital, market-centred provision of most goods, minimal governmental regulation and minimisation of accounting costs. That countries possess considerable degrees of freedom in establishing rules for international flows of labour, capital and goods is insufficiently appreciated by critics and supporters of trade and labour market liberalisation. Variety in political-economic forms achieves institutional diversification on a global scale, providing a multi-dimensional spectrum of benchmarks that help individual countries measure policy performance and update institutional variables accordingly.

The Transformations of Labour: Knowledge Work and the Legacies of the New Economy

The discourse accompanying political-economic restructuring toward an “information society” since the 1970s has been thick with utopian conjecture, hyperbole, and exaggeration. This talk of democratic workplaces free of hierarchy, collective investment on the part of workers in the destiny of their companies, and the disengagement of economic value from labouring bodies culminated during the delirium of the New Economy period. Five years later, as the debris of that economic model is carted away, critical studies of the flexible economy, the 1990s workplace, and the varieties of knowledge work, or immaterial labour, fuelling these, have begun to add to our understanding of those delirious times and their legacy. What was the structure of the “new” economy? What kinds of labour became dominant within it? How were linguistic, communicative, and affective qualities put to work, and to what processes is that labour currently subject? The books addressed here range from a macroanalysis of the New Economy and its close ties to deepening political and economic inequality (Henwood), to an examination of the restructuring of workplaces and the attempts to de-skill all levels of the knowledge worker hierarchy during the 1990s (Head), to a veritable anthropology of two new-media workplaces spanning the pinnacle and fall of the New Economy (Ross). After the New Economy is Doug Henwood’s third book. The editor and publisher of Left Business Observer and host of a widely followed critical radio show, Henwood has been following political-economic trends and theoretical debates

The double burden on safety net providers: Placing health disparities in the context of the privatization of health care in the US

The US Institute of Medicine's (IOM) influential 2003 report has focused attention on disparities in treatment outcomes and health status for American minorities, zeroing in on the role of unconscious bias in the unequal clinical disposition of minority patients. In keeping with the IOM's focus, current examinations of health disparities in the US tend to explore bias in clinical decision-making to the neglect of the political economic trends that buffet health care safety net sites and create the need for financial shortcuts. This paper recontextualizes the study of health disparities in the US by placing it against the backdrop of private sector trends emphasizing fiscal austerity and increased workforce productivity in health care. The social science literature on workers in human service bureaucracies, only recently applied to health care workers, suggests that higher demands for system “accountability” and worker “efficiency” may encourage providers to take shortcuts by treating individuals as mass categories. This ethnography of a Latino mental health clinic in the Northwestern USA shows that new private-sector measures of “productivity” take a toll on both the Latina clinicians whose invisible work subsidizes the system as well as on particular categories of patients—the uninsured and immigrants with serious psychosocial issues. While clinicians attempt to buffer the impacts of such reforms on patients, they also resort to means to increase their productivity such as firing repeated no-show patients and denial of care to the uninsured. This study is relevant for the health care of the poor in all health care systems considering restructuring along managerial principles to increase system ‘efficiencies.’

Bushmen, Boers and Baasskap : Patriarchy and Paternalism on Afrikaner Farms in the Omaheke Region, Namibia

In this article I examine the paternalistic and patriarchal components inherent in the institution of 'baasskap' on Afrikaner farms in the Omaheke Region of Namibia, where farm labourers and domestic servants are largely Ju/'hoansi. First, I examine the development of baasskap from the top down, focusing on macro-level political economic trends, and the farmers' reactions to those trends that helped to create an ambiguous class status for the Ju/'hoansi. I then examine the dialectics of coercion, collusion and consent between farmers and the Ju/'hoansi in the maintenance of baasskap by outlining two important features of Afrikaner-Ju/'hoan interactions: first, the pseudo-familial relations between farmers and farm workers, as those are perceived by the farmers; and second, the contrast between 'helping' ( hui ) others and 'working' ( //xnòà ) for others, as that is perceived by the Ju/'hoansi. I argue that the conflation of the farmers' role as 'baas' and 'father figure' establishes the patriarchal family as the model for race and class relations on the farms. While the paternalistic attitudes of the farmer are openly expressed, and therefore easily challenged and manipulated by the Ju/'hoansi, the principles of gender subordination inherent in the patriarchal model of farm and family government go unnoticed and unchallenged. This makes patriarchy the most deeply hegemonic principle of inequality that gives race and class relationships their distinctive form under baasskap .