Conclusions
This chapter has examined the state’s role in the (re-)constitution of the economy as an object of regulation and the shaping of the subjects of economic activity. There are no objective criteria that enable us to identify the necessary boundaries of economic space (on whatever territorial or functional scale).
Instead we should pose this issue in terms of an imaginary constitution (and naturalization) of the economy and the resulting construction of a boundary between the economy and its environment. At the same time, the mode of regulation helps constitute and naturalize its objects in and through the very processes of regulation. Of course, naturalizing discursive formations and specific regularizing practices are contestable. Struggles to define specific economies as subjects, sites, and stakes of competition and/or as objects of regulation typically involve the asymmetrical manipulation of power and knowledge and also depend on the resonance of these new narratives with wider cultural and institutional formations and with metanarratives that connect a wide range of interactions, organizations, and institutions or help to make sense of whole epochs (see Somers 1994: 619). But this resonance is also related to material contradictions and tensions in existing and emerging forms of economic regulation and/or governance as these influence personal and organizational experience and challenge the plausibility of technoeconomic paradigms, accumulation strategies, and societal paradigms.Thus, the emergence of a new accumulation regime and its mode of regulation involve a veritable ‘cultural revolution’ as well as radical institutional innovation. Technoeconomic paradigms are transformed - witness the contrast between the discourses of economic and political planning and of productivity based on economies of scale in Atlantic Fordism and the discourses of enterprise, market forces, and flexibility in the early stages of the transition to post-Fordism.
Changes are also occurring in organizational paradigms - witness the new-found emphasis in the economic and political spheres on the role of networks, partnerships, stakeholding, and good governance. New norms and expectations must be defined to complement new structural forms and social practices - thus the transition to new accumulation regimes is typically associated with public campaigns to adopt new bodily, production, and consumption practices and to share new visions of economic, political, and social life. All of this involves acts of imagination that establish an ‘imagined economic community’ grounded both in an ‘imagined economic space’ and an ‘imagined community of economic interest’ among social forces. It also involves social mobilization as well as institutional innovation to establish the hegemony of the associated accumulation strategies and to articulate them into different state projects and hegemonic projects. Economic strategies and spatiotemporal horizons must be re-aligned with changes in the structurally inscribed strategic selectivity of modes of growth and their associated political regimes. This is reflected in the rhetoric of the enterprise culture, the knowledgebased economy, and the learning society. This said, it remains the case that ‘there is many a slip ’twixt cup and lip’. For such visions, projects, and strategies must be translated into reality - and this is far from automatic. This is why cultural politicalCultural political economy, the knowledge-based economy and the state 161 economy must not only study changing discourses but also the mechanisms and material practices through which visions, projects, and strategies are realized, imperfectly, if at all. This is where the insights of the Anglo-Foucauldians and actor-network theorists as well as institutional political economy can be brought to bear in analysing the improbable expanded reproduction of capital accumulation.
Drawing on these ideas, a research agenda based on cultural political economy would need to address the following questions: (a) how are objects of economic regulation and governance constituted in specific conjunctures and under what conditions, if any, do they become more or less hegemonic despite the inevitable tendencies towards instability and fluidity in social relations; (b) how are actors/ institutions and their modes of calculation constituted and how do they interact to produce these objects both discursively and extra-discursively; (c) how do new spatio-temporal fixes serve as socially-constructed institutional frameworks for displacing and deferring the contradictions and dilemmas of capital accumulation beyond their prevailing spatial boundaries and temporal fixes; (d) what specific discursive practices and structuring principles are involved in consolidating the various discourses that (re-)position subjects and identities, articulate power and knowledge, consolidate truth regimes, and materialize power relations in specific institutional contexts; (e) how do counter-hegemonic forces challenge routinized categories and naturalized institutions, generate new subject positions and social forces, and struggle for new projects and strategies; and (f) how are different forces continually balanced and counter-balanced in an unstable equilibrium of compromise within specific spatio-temporal fixes to maintain what is often little more than a ‘thin coherence’ in different conjunctures?
Notes
1 This chapter has benefited from discussions with Andrew Barry, Ryan Conlon and Ngai-Ling Sum.
It also draws on previous work, notably Jessop (1997, 2000, 2002,2003) and Jessop and Sum (2000). The usual disclaimers apply.
2 The distinction between social and cultural phenomena is analytical and based on their respective emergent properties. Whereas the ‘social’ concerns configurations of social interaction, the ‘cultural’ refers to properties of both narrative and non-narrative discursive formations. However, insofar as social relations are discursively constituted and meaningful, they have a cultural dimension; and, insofar as cultural phenomena are realized in and through social relations, they have a social dimension.
3 Here I follow Wickham (1987) in insisting that the distinction between micro and macro (or between particular and global) is always relative to an object of analysis rather than a fixed property of a given set of social relations.
4 On the doubly tendential nature of these laws (as tendentially reproduced tendential laws), see Jessop (2001a).
5 On spatio-temporal fixes, see Jessop (2001a, 2002). Callon’s notions of ‘framing’ and ‘overflow’ perform similar work but, in developing a more general sociological approach and/or focusing on particular market transactions or specific economic externalities, he does not relate framing to the basic contradictions and dilemmas of capitalist economies (Callon 1988b). Although these different approaches were developed independently, they share several key themes and insights.
6 I follow Polanyi (1982) here in distinguishing between substantive economic activities concerned with material ‘provisioning’ and formal (in the sense of profit-oriented,
market-mediated, formally-rationally calculated) economic activities.
7 Daly rejects the concept of ‘extra-discursive’ but he radically simplifies the distinction between discursive and extra-discursive, reducing it to an issue of epistemology and neglecting the issue of ontology. Contrast Debray (1991).
8 This argument is inspired by, but by no means identical with, Richard Marsden’s comment on the Marx-Foucault relation (Marsden 1999: 149).
9 A ‘leading indicator’ in econometric analysis is an empirical indicator that enables one to anticipate a later event; conversely, a lagging indicator is one that becomes apparent after that event.
10 Cf. actor-network theory on the depth, breadth, and heterogeneity of networks and entanglements in the sedimentation of structures and their associated constraints. The strategic-relational approach is quite consistent with this claim but also emphasizes that constraints are relative to specific actors, identities, interests, strategies, spatial and temporal horizons, etc.
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