Towards A Cultural Political Economy

Towards A Cultural Political Economy: Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy

This fascinating volume offers a critique of recent institutional and cultural turns in heterodox economics and political economy. Using seven case studies as examples, the authors explore how research on sense- and meaning-making can deepen critical studies in political economy, illuminating its role in critiquing the specific categories, contradictions and crisis-tendencies of capitalism.

Parts I and II provide a foundation in institutionalism, international political economy and historical semantics, before introducing an original account of sense- and meaning-making and its role in remaking social relations. This account connects the evolution of both economic and extra-economic concepts to dispositives (problem-oriented social fixes), institutions, and capitalist restructuring. In Parts III and IV, specific case studies demonstrate how this new research program can be applied to issues such as competitiveness, the knowledge-based economy, governmental technologies, institutional and spatio-temporal fixes and crisis management.

Scholars and students of heterodox, cultural, political and institutional economics will find this book a comprehensive and illuminating addition to their libraries.

Table of Contents

PART I The logos, logics and limits of institutional and cultural turns: challenges and responses
Chapter 1. Institutional turns and beyond in political economy
Chapter 2. Cultural turns and beyond in political economy
Chapter 3. Semiotics for cultural political economy

PART II Towards a post- disciplinary cultural political economy
Chapter 4. Between Scylla and Charybdis: locating cultural political economy
Chapter 5. Elaborating the cultural political economy research agenda: selectivities, dispositives and the production of (counter-)hegemonies

PART III Reimagining and institutionalizing competitive governance: narratives, strategies and struggles
Chapter 6. A cultural political economy of variegated capitalism
Chapter 7. A cultural political economy of competitiveness and the knowledge-based economy
Chapter 8. The production of a hegemonic knowledge brand: competitiveness discourses and neoliberal developmentalism
Chapter 9. Competitiveness clusters, Wal-Martization and the (re)making of corporate social responsibilities
Chapter 10. Competitiveness knowledge brands and service governance: the making of Hong Kong’s competitiveness–integration (dis)order

PART IV Financialization, financial crisis and reimaginations
Chapter 11. Crisis construals and crisis recovery in the North Atlantic financial crisis
Chapter 12. The North Atlantic financial crisis and crisis recovery: (trans-)national imaginaries of ‘BRIC’ and subaltern groups in China

PART V Consolidating cultural political economy: from pre- theoretical intuition to post- disciplinary practice
Chapter 13. Implications for future research in and on cultural political economy