Cultural political economy: On making the cultural turn without falling into soft economic sociology

By B. Jessop, S. Oosterlynck. 2008

315 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article explores the implications of making the cultural turn in the engagement of economic and political geography with issues of political economy. It seeks to steer a path between a fetishistic, reified economics that naturalizes economic categories and a soft economic sociology that focuses on the similarities between economic and other socio-cultural activities at the expense of the specificity of the economic. We show how combining critical semiotic analysis with an evolutionary and institutional approach to political economy offers one interesting way to achieve this goal. An evolutionary and institutional approach to semiosis enables us to recognize the semiotic dimensions of political economy at the same time as establishing how and why only some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate actually come to be selected and institutionalized; and Marxian political economy enables us to identify the contradictions and conflicts that make capital accumulation inherently improbable and crisis-prone, creating the space for economic imaginaries to play a role in stabilizing accumulation in specific spatio-temporal fixes and/or pointing the way forward from recurrent crises. The paper illustrates these arguments with a case study on the Flemish �anchoring strategy� as a specific regional economic development strategy. It concludes with a set of guidelines for the further development of cultural political economy.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf11ce9d25cc688f0cd41a707d5890333306fda1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Neil M. Coe
2. P. Dicken
3. C. Berndt
4. M. Boeckler
5. Claes Belfrage
6. Felix Hauf
7. Justin O'Connor
8. Martin Hess

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Martin Hess
2. Neil M. Coe
3. Kean Birch
4. P. Dicken
5. Justin O'Connor
6. C. Berndt
7. Antoni Verger
8. Simon Springer

Citations in the corpus

• The Gentle Art of Retroduction: Critical Realism, Cultural Political Economy and Critical Grounded Theory (2017, background): “Taking the cultural turn within the political economy of organization without falling into ‘soft economic sociology’ (Jessop & Oosterlynck, 2008) requires navigating between the ‘structuralist Scylla’ and the ‘constructivist Charybdis’ (Sum & Jessop, 2013, p. 148).”
• Global production networks: realizing the potential (2008, methodology): “This perspective is based on the recent conceptualizations of a (critical) cultural political economy or CPE (Sayer, 2001; Jessop and Sum, 2006; Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2007; Sum and Jessop, 2008).”
• Framing and selling global education policy: the promotion of public–private partnerships for education in low-income contexts (2012, background): “In this sense, periods of crisis typically lead to cognitive and strategic disorientation and, consequently, encourage policy innovation and variation in policy practices (Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008).”
• Geographies of circulation and exchange: constructions of markets (2009, background): “…economic imaginaries in constructing economic subjectivities in addition to the processes at the heart of institutional political economy (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008; Jessop and Sum, 2006; Sayer, 2001; see also Hudson, 2008). the past have largely ceased to exist, transnational mobility of…”
• The Handbook of Neoliberalism (2016, background): “, are dedicated to the making of political, intellectual and moral leadership in and through these knowledge technologies (Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008).”
• Creative industry clusters in Shanghai: a success story? (2014, background): “Second, if the creative economy was a new kind of ‘economic imaginary’ (Jessop 2005, Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008) demanding the mobilization of new forms of human capital – self-directed, entrepreneurial and unpredictable – then this had implications for the kinds of cultural values or traditions…”
• Port Governance Reforms in Diversified Institutional Frameworks: Generic Solutions, Implementation Asymmetries (2010, background): “The examination conducted into the implementation phases of previously decided reforms provides a first engagement of port studies with the cultural political economy (CPE) account.”