Abstract
This chapter seeks to overcome the one-sided emphasis on materiality at the expense of discursivity that plagues much work in critical international political economy (IPE). It does so by introducing the concept of cultural political economy (hereafter CPE) in an effort to avoid both the tendency towards soft economic and/or political sociology, in which the material specificity of economic and political categories is dissolved into a generic concern with the social or cultural, and the tendency towards hard political economy, in which economic and political categories are reified and their social construction and contingency are ignored (cf. Sayer 1998). Insofar as it emerged in part through critical engagement with structuralism, our approach can certainly be described as poststructuralist. However, because it is inspired by classical political economy and Gramsci’s work on hegemony, it could also be described as prestructuralist. Thus, while we affirm the importance of neo-Gramscian contributions to IPE, we also criticize them for failing to exploit fully Gramsci’s account of the coconstitution and coevolution of the material and the discursive. We also argue that this is best achieved through a combination of critical semiotic analysis and the critique of political economy in an approach that insists that both time and institutions matter to the overall dynamic of hegemonic struggles.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Amoore, L. (2002) Globalization Contested: an International Political Economy of Work. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bakker, I. (2003) ‘Neo-Liberal Governance and the Reprivatization of Social Reproduction,’ in Bakker, I. and Gill, S. (eds), Power, Production and Social Reproduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Bonnell, V. and Hunt, L. (1999) Beyond the Cultural Turn. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brenans, D. (1999) ‘Historical Materialism and Ordinary Language: Grammatical Peculiarities of the Class Struggle “Language Game,”’ Rethinking Marxism 11 (2): 19–37.
Campbell, D. T. (1969) ‘Variation and Selective Retention in Socio-Cultural Evolution,’ General Systems 14: 69–86.
Chouliaraki, L. and Fairclough, N. (1999) Discourse in Late Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cox, R. (1981) ‘Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond international relations theory,’ Millennium, 10 (2), 126–55.
Cox, R. (1987) Production, Power and World Order, New York: Columbia University Press.
Cox, R. (with Schechter, M.) (2002) The Political Economy of a Plural World. London: Routledge.
Davies, M. (1999) International Political Economy and Mass Communication in Chile. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
de Certeau, M. (1984) Practices of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
de Goede, M. (2003) ‘Beyond Economism in IPE,’ Review of International Studies 29 (1): 79–97.
Dean, M. (1999) Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage.
Egan, D. (2001) ‘The Limits of Internationalization: A Neo-Gramscian Analysis of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment,’ Critical Sociology 27 (3): 1–42.
Fairclough, N. (1995) Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Gill, S. (1991) American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gill, S. (1995) ‘Globalization, Market Civilization, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism,’ Review of International Studies 16 (4): 369–81.
Gill, S. (2000) ‘Toward a Postmodern Prince? The Battle of Seattle as a Moment in the New Politics of Globalisation,’ Millennium 29 (1): 131–40.
Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Hall, S. (1981) ‘Notes on Deconstructing “The Popular,”’ in Samuel, R. (ed.) People’s History and Socialist Theory. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hall, S. (1982) ‘The Rediscovery of “Ideology”: The Return of the Repressed,’ in Gurevitch, M., Bennett, T., Curran, J. and Woolacott, J. (eds) Culture, Society and the Media. London: Methuen.
Harris, D. (1992) From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: the Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Hay, C. (1996) ‘Narrating Crisis: the Discursive Construction of the “Winter of Discontent,”‘ Sociology 30 (2): 253–77.
Hodgeson, G. M. (1988) Economics and Institutions. Cambridge: Polity.
Hodgeson, G. M. (1993) Economics and Evolution. Cambridge: Polity.
Holub, R. (1992) Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
Jessop, B. (1982) The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods, Oxford: Martin Robertson.
Jessop, B. (1990) State Theory. Cambridge: Polity.
Jessop, B. (2002) The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity.
Jessop, B. (2004) ‘Critical Semiotic Analysis and Critical Political Economy,’ Critical Discourse Studies 1 (1): 1–16.
Jessop, B. and Sum, N.-L. (2001) ‘Pre-Disciplinary and Post-Disciplinary Perspectives,’ New Political Economy 6 (1): 89–102.
Jessop, B. and Sum, N.-L. (2006) Beyond the Regulation Approach: Putting Capitalist Economies in their Place. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso.
Langer, B. (1988) ‘Review of Practices of Everyday Life,’ Contemporary Sociology 17 (1): 122–3.
Lawson, T. (1997) Economics and Reality. London: Routledge.
Marsden, R. (1999) The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault. London: Routledge.
Martin-Barbero, J. (1993) Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Newbury Park CA: Sage.
McAnulla, S. (1998) ‘The Structure-Agency Debate and its Historiographical Utility,’ http://www.psa.ac.uk/cps/1998%5Cmcanulla.pdf, accessed on 10 August 2004.
Peet, R. (2000) ‘Geographies of Policy Formation: Hegemony, Discourse and the Conquest for Practicality,’ Paper for the Geographies of Global Economic Change Conference, October 12–14, Clark University, http://www.clarku.edu/leir/Peet.htm, accessed on 6 July 2004.
Robinson, W. (1996) Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rupert, M. (1995) Producing Hegemony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rupert, M. (1997) ‘Globalization and American Common Sense,’ New Political Economy 2 (1): 105–16.
Rupert, M. (2003) ‘Globalizing Common Sense: A Marxian-Grasmcian (Re) Vision of the Politics of Governance/Resistance,’ Review of International Studies 29 (S1): 181–98.
Sayer, A. (1998) ‘Critical and Uncritical Turns,’ http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/sociology/papers/sayer-critical-and-uncritical-truns.pdf, accessed on 28 April 2005.
Steger, M. (2002) Globalism. Latham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Sum, N.-L. (2004) ‘From “Integral State” to “Integral World Economic Order”: Towards a Neo-Gramscian Cultural International Political Economy,’ Working Paper No. 7, Institute for Advanced Studies Working Paper Series, Lancaster University, (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ias/polecon/index.htm), accessed on 28 April 2005.
Sum, N.-L. (2005) ‘From “New Constitutionalism” to “New Ethicalism”: Global Business Governance and the Discourses and Practices of Corporate Social Responsibility,’ Paper prepared for the European Consortium of Political Research. Workshop 24, Transnational Private Governance in the Global Political Economy, Granada, Spain, April 14–19.
Sum, N.-L. and Jessop, B. (forthcoming) The Economic Institutions of Culture: Towards a Cultural Political Economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Sum, N.-L. and Pun, N. (2005) ‘Globalization and Paradoxes of Transnational Ethical Production,’ Competition and Change, 9 (2): 225–44.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2006 Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jessop, B., Sum, NL. (2006). Towards a Cultural International Political Economy: Poststructuralism and the Italian School. In: de Goede, M. (eds) International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800892_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800892_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52558-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-80089-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)