The search for the ‘new economy’

There has been an extensive and often heated discussion - now somewhat diminished - about the adequacy of the concept of post-Fordism as an entry­point for studying recent changes in the growth dynamics of advanced capitalist economies, the changing forms of competitive advantage of cities, regions, and nations as well as of firms, clusters, and economic networks, and changing forms of economic and social policy.

their concerns and Marxist analyses. We can initiate the dialogue by considering the role of economic imaginaries in the restructuring of economic and political institutions, organizations, and activities and in the reorienting of the economic and social policies pursued by the state as a mechanism of translation and authoriza­tion. Let me begin by making two brief points about post-Fordism.

First, it may be better for some purposes to characterize the emerging accumu­lation regime through a substantive concept that is analogous to Fordism, such as Toyotism, Sonyism, Gatesism, or Wintelism. These refer to new techno-economic paradigms in established or emerging manufacturing sectors and/or to new forms of enterprise and competition deemed superior to the archetypal Fordist forms. These paradigms lack the pervasive resonance in many different discourses, domains, and countries that the Fordist paradigm enjoyed during the consolidation of the Fordist labour process and its associated mode of growth based on mass production and mass consumption. But they are certainly more susceptible to analysis in actor-network terms as well as more fruitful than the more formal concept of post-Fordism. This relies primarily on a chronological prefix to distinguish it from Fordism and serves at best to remind us that its successor regime, if any, is far from pre-ordained.

Second, whether the notion of post-Fordism is currently theoretically justified as an analytical concept or not, discourses more or less explicitly referring to post­Fordism or flexible specialization were important in the initial mediation of economic, political and social change during the crisis in/of Atlantic Fordism. Even so the initial meaning of ‘post-Fordism’ appeared to be more negative than positive, i.e. it was seen in terms of a series of moves away from certain crisis­generating or crisis-prone features of Fordism rather than as a move towards a new, positively defined mode of economic growth with its own putative structured coherence.

Cultural political economy, the knowledge-based economy and the state 151 and forms of competition in response to the rigidities of mass production. There was also interest in historical alternatives (such as a reinvigorated craft production) or contemporary foreign models (such as the Third Italy, Silicon Valley, Toyotism, or ‘lean production’) - although these would often prove hard to revive or transplant. In addition this search process was often focused one-sidedly on technical- organizational questions (cf Gough 1992; Schoenberger 1997; Smith 2000). Efforts were made, for example, to discover how, given the basic technology, firms could organize design, production and marketing most ‘efficiently’, i.e. to achieve the best mix of cost minimization, quality/variety maximization, and responsiveness to markets. This focus was linked to the assumption that problems within capitalism can be solved through technical-organizational change within the economy and/ or through adoption of new technical-institutional fixes and forms of governance in the wider societal context in which capitalism is embedded.

The search for a positive content for post-Fordism can be compared with the rise of Fordism. Gramsci’s comments on ‘Americanism and Fordism’ are helpful here (Gramsci 1971). For he indicates that the emergence and consolidation of a new accumulation regime depends critically on the exercise of political, intellectual, and moral leadership and its translation into the reorganization of an entire social formation. It cannot be secured purely through technological innovation coupled with specific changes in the labour process, enterprise forms, forms of competition, and other narrowly economic matters.

A key part of this process, as noted above, is the development of a new ‘economic imaginary’ with its own performative, constitutive force.

In these terms an effective solution to the search for a meaningful ‘post-Fordist’ order in an increasingly integrated world market would involve an ‘economic imaginary’ that satisfies two interrelated requirements. First, it should be able to

inform and shape economic strategies on all scales from the firm to the wider economy, on all territorial scales from the local through regional to the national or supra-national scale, and with regard to the operation and articulation of market forces and their non-market supports.

It is for these reasons that I referred above to the knowledge-based economy as a meta-object of (meta-)governance and it should now be clear that it is an extremely heterogeneous notion.

Table 7.1 Some representative terms linked to the KBE in different functional systems and the wider society

resonance in a particular conjuncture and a relatively enduring institutional materiality. Nonetheless, with all due caution about the frailty of prediction during a period still strongly marked by the specific crisis-tendencies associated with a transition from one long wave of capitalist expansion and decline to another (see Perez 2002), it does seem that the knowledge-based economy has not only been ‘selected’ from among the many competing discourses about the post-Fordist future but is now subject to ‘retention’ through a complex and heterogeneous network of practices across a wide range of systems and over many scales of action. Whether or not the KBE also offers a scientifically adequate description of the nature of the contemporary economy in all its chaotic complexity is another matter entirely.

The emergence of the KBE as the master narrative guiding the transition to post-Fordism is by no means an innocent development. It has material and ideological roots in earlier discussions on post-industrialism but gained momentum in the 1980s as US capital and the US state sought an effective response to the challenge to American hegemony from the increasing competitiveness of their European and East Asian rivals. A growing body of academic studies, think-tank reports, and official inquiries indicated that the US was competitive in the leading sectors of the ‘knowledge-based economy’ (an important discursive innovation in its own right, leading to the ‘reclassification’ of goods, services, industries, commodity chains, and forms of competitiveness) and this prompted a very deliberate and highly concerted campaign to make this the material and ideological basis for a new accumulation strategy tied to the massive extension of intellectual property rights to protect and extend the dominance of US capital. There is no need here to repeat the subsequent history of the attempt to reorient and strengthen the bases of economic competitiveness in this way through a wide range of bilateral and multilateral economic, political, legal, and ideological measures as well as through the dissemination of US technical standards, social norms of production and consumption, and juridical precedents.

The rationale for this continuing effort has been quite clearly stated by leading figures in the US administration, namely, that the economic growth and competi­tiveness of the USA in the twenty-first century will depend on creating, owning, preserving, and protecting its intellectual property This can be seen as a neo­liberal policy for productive capital that safeguards its superprofits behind the cloak of free trade and thereby complements its neo-liberal policy for financial capital. But this strategy has been translated into a successful hegemonic campaign (armoured by law, bilateral trade leverage, diplomatic arm-twisting, and bloody- minded unilateralism) to persuade many other states to sign up to the KBE agenda. The knowledge-based economy has also been warmly embraced as a master narrative and strategy by other leading political forces - ranging from the international level (notably the OECD and WTO but also the IMF, World Bank, and UNCTAD) through regional economic blocs and intergovernmental arrangements (EU, APEC, ASEAN, Mercosur, NAFTA) and many individual national states with widely different positions in the global division of labour down to provinces, metropolitan regions, and small cities. Like the earlier promotion of Fordism as a master narrative and strategy, the ‘KBE’ can be inflected in different ways to suit different national and regional traditions as well as different economic interests. It can also be used to guide economic and political strategies at all levels from the labour process through the accumulation regime and its mode of regulation to an all-embracing mode of societalization. Moreover, once accepted as the master narrative with all its attendant nuances and scope for interpretation, it becomes easier for its neo-liberal variant to shape the overall development of the emerging global knowledge-based economy through the sheer weight of the US economy as well as through the exercise of economic, political, and intellectual domination.

This said, we should not neglect the scope for counter-hegemonic versions of the knowledge-based economy and for disputes about the most appropriate ways to promote it. This is why I distinguish between neo-liberal, neo-corporatist, neo­statist, and neo-communitarian approaches to the promotion of the KBE (Jessop 2002). Let me illustrate this point with two examples. First, from 1998 to 2002 an interesting conundrum was played out in the international competitiveness benchmarking exercise conducted by the World Economic Forum, with the neo­liberal USA and neo-corporatist Finland alternating in the top two positions (see Porter et al., 2000; Cornelius and Schwab 2003). Similarly, at its Lisbon summit in March 2000, the European Council committed itself to making the European Union the leading knowledge-based economy whilst protecting the European Social Model and developing new modes of meta-governance that relied on social partnership rather than market forces alone (see Telo 2002).

States and knowledge-based economies

Cultural political economy should treat politics and the state in the same way as the economy. For states can also be analysed as imagined political communities with their own specific boundaries, conditions of existence, political subjects, developmental tendencies, sources of legitimacy, and state projects (Jessop 1990; Mitchell 1991). As such they orient political actions that influence the institutional architecture of the state and the exercise of its various state powers. At the same time, states can be imagined as co-existing in complex state systems (e.g the medieval, Westphalian, and post-Westphalian orders). Moreover, building on these arguments, we can also study how struggles over the boundaries between the economic and the extra-economic (including the political) are central both to economic restructuring and to the transformation of the state and state intervention (Jessop 1999, 2002). Here too we can identify some interesting parallels with actor­network theory in terms of the notion of ‘punctualization’, i.e. the semblance of solidity and unity to an institutional ensemble or organization as a ‘single point actor’ that, in other circumstances and/or from another perspective, would appear as heterogeneous and disunified (Law 1992). Thus equipped, I now turn to the third part of my argument: the transformation of the state in and through its attempts to transform the economy and its economic agents. This has two interrelated aspects. On the one hand, the state is actively involved through its own distinctive juridico-political powers in the discursive-material constitution of the globalizing KBE as an object of economic governance and in seeking to create and discipline the subjects deemed necessary to sustain it (e.g. flexible workers, entrepreneurial subjects, respecters of copyright, lifelong learners). And, on the other hand, through its key roles in organizing multiple public-private partnerships and other networks and in shaping attitudes, expectations, and horizons of action, the state also undertakes key meta-governance activities in organizing the conditions for other economic and extra-economic agents to contribute to this process (on the complexities of meta-governance and meta-governance failure, see Jessop 2002).

States have been actively involved in shaping the meanings and practices of the new, knowledge-based economy and, in attempting to do so, they have also been transforming themselves, sometimes in a deliberate, reflexive manner, sometimes as the unintended result of these interventions. However, since politics is not just ‘concentrated economics’, state involvement cannot be read off from a given set of economic imperatives. For the particular functions of the state are always overdetermined by its generic role of securing social cohesion in a conflictual society Thus state involvement in promoting the KBE is mediated through the state projects and strategic selectivities of the state and its exercise of power. In this sense, then, state capacities in promoting the KBE are constrained not only by the specific problems of governing particular technologies in a ‘technological society’ (cf Barry

2001) but also by the more general problems of governing the political sphere as a whole in the light of new problems of social cohesion associated with this transition (cf Poulantzas 1978).

This said, as the economy comes to be defined and naturalized as knowledge­based and/or knowledge-driven (an ongoing achievement that involves active and extensive discursive as well as material work), states are increasingly involved in promoting the production and diffusion of knowledge. This is one part of the more general structural transformation and strategic reorientation of the Keynesian Welfare National State system associated with Fordism towards what I have elsewhere categorized in ideal-typical terms as the Schumpeterian Workfare Post­National Regime (Jessop 2002). I will ignore this broader set of changes here to focus on how states advance the central role of ‘knowledge’ in the KBE. This role is doubly problematic. On the one hand, knowledge is an extremely heterogeneous and deeply contested category both ontologically and epistemologically and, as social scientists of various stripes have shown, knowledges (or truth regimes) are intimately linked to the material and discursive (or, better, material-discursive) conditions of knowledge production and management. And, on the other hand, knowledge is a collectively generated resource and, even where specific forms and types of intellectual property are produced in capitalist conditions for profit, this depends on a far wider intellectual commons. In this sense, one can regard knowledge as a fictitious commodity analogous to land, labour-power, and money (cf. Polanyi 1957).

The state has three key roles here. First, as a privileged instance of the distinction between mental and manual labour (cf Poulantzas 1978), it is a major player both directly and indirectly in the social production of truth regimes. Second, in the context of the transition to the KBE, it is promoting the commodification of knowledge through its formal transformation from a collective resource (intellectual

Cultural political economy, the knowledge-based economy and the state 157 commons) into intellectual property (for example, in the form of patent, copyright and licences) as a basis for generating profits of enterprise and rents for individual economic entities as well as for its own fisco-financial benefit. And, third, it must also seek to protect the intellectual commons as a basis for competitive advantage for the economy as a whole as well as to develop the bases of the learning society and an informed public sphere. While these tensions may be especially acute for state actors, they also occur on many other scales from individual firms through local ‘innovation milieux’ or ‘learning regions’ to the global ‘knowledge complexes’ involved in genomics and the like.

In short, states at all levels are currently involved in helping to manage the contradictions rooted in the nature of knowledge as a fictitious commodity. For, on the one hand, ‘[t]he intellectual commons is fundamental to the production of knowledge’ (Dawson 1998: 281); and, on the other hand, intellectual property is a major source of profit in informational capitalism. States are situated differently in this regard. They tend to polarize, first, around interests in protecting or enclosing the commons (for example, North-South) and, second, around the most appropriate forms of intellectual property rights and regimes on different scales from global to local. Thus, some states are more active than others in enabling the primitive accumulation of intellectual property, in privatizing public knowledge and in commoditizing all forms of knowledge; others are more concerned to protect the intellectual commons, promote the information society, and develop social capital. Given its competitive advantage in ICT products and the knowledge revolution, the American state is the strongest advocate of the neo-liberal form of the knowledge revolution on a global scale. This is especially clear in its advocacy of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement as a key element in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in using bi- and multilateral trade agreements, conditionalities and other pressures to seek to enforce its interests in intellectual property rights.

Whatever their position on such issues, all states must try to resolve various contradictions and dilemmas in knowledge production whilst eschewing any direct, hierarchical control over it. For example, they ‘must balance the need to protect and maintain the intellectual commons against the need to stimulate inventive activity’ (Dawson 1998: 278). Likewise, in the latter context, they need to balance the protection of individual intellectual property and its associated revenue flows against the collective benefits that derive from the general diffusion of its applications ‘by creating open systems, by moving key intellectual properties into the public domain, by releasing source code democratically’ (Kelly 1998: 28). The latter task is often pursued through state promotion of innovation and diffusion systems (including social capital), broad forms of ‘technological foresight’, co­involvement and/or negotiated ‘guidance’ of the production of knowledge, and the development of suitable meta-governance structures (Messner 1998; Willke 1997). Thus states sponsor information infrastructures and social innovation systems on different scales; develop intellectual property rights regimes and new forms of governance and/or regulation for activities in cyberspace; promote movement away from national utility structures with universal supply obligations suited to an

era of mass production and mass consumption to more flexible, differential, multiscalar structures suited to a post-Fordist era; and intervene to restructure research in universities to bring it more closely into alignment with the perceived needs of business and to encourage the management and exploitation of intellectual property through spin-offs, licensing, partnerships, science parks, technology parks, industry parks, and so on.

More particularly, some states are getting heavily involved in assisting the primitive accumulation of capital (in the form of intellectual property) through private expropriation of the collectively produced knowledge of past generations. This enclosure of knowledge takes several forms, including: (1) the appropriation of indigenous, tribal, or peasant ‘culture’ in the form of undocumented, informal, and collective knowledge, expertise and other intellectual resources and its trans­formation without recompense into commodified knowledge (documented, formal, private) by commercial enterprises - biopiracy is the most notorious example; (2) divorcing intellectual labour from the means of production - embodying it in smart machines and expert systems - and thereby appropriating the knowledge of the collective labourer; and (3) gradual extension of the limited nature of copyright into broader forms of property right with a consequent erosion of any residual public interest. States have a key role here in changing intellectual property rights (IPR) laws and enabling firms to appropriate the intellectual commons at home and abroad (on all these issues, see Drahos with Braithwaite 2002).

States also advance the commoditization of knowledge and the integration of knowledge and intellectual labour into production, whether in the private, public, or third sectors. This is reflected in the increased emphasis on the training of knowledge workers and lifelong learning, including distance learning, the introduction of ICTs and other new technologies into its own spheres of activity and the more general proselytization of the knowledge-based economy and information society.

The state also heavily furthers the dynamics of technological rents generated by new knowledge as part of a more general promotion of innovation. This serves to intensify the self-defeating character of the informational revolution from the viewpoint of capital, insofar as each new round of innovation is prone to ever more rapid devalorization. But it nonetheless wins temporary advantages and technological rents for the economic spaces it controls and, insofar as there are sustainable first-mover advantages, it can consolidate longer-term advantages for a region, nation, or triad. This strategy is an important and quite explicit element in the reassertion of US hegemony since the pessimism of the early 1980s. More­over, if firms in the information economy are to maintain above-average profit rates despite the tendency for technological rents to be competed away, less technologically advanced sectors must secure below-average profits. This is another driving force behind globalization insofar as less profitable firms are forced to relocate or outsource to lower-cost production sites and reinforce the tendencies towards unequal exchange and development associated with globalization. States also get involved in often-contradictory ways in promoting and/or retarding the mobility of productive capital.

Such activities tend to subordinate the totality of socio-economic fields to the accumulation process so that economic functions come to occupy the dominant place within the state. Other functions thereby gain direct economic significance for economic growth and competitiveness and this tends to politicize those formerly (or still formally) extra-economic domains that are now direct objects of state intervention. In this context, states also attempt to manage the conflicts between time horizons associated with time-space distantiation and compression - especially in regard to protecting the social capital embedded in communities, promoting longer-term economic orientations and designing institutions that sustain innovation. But this expanding field of intervention means that the state finds it harder to reconcile its responses to ever more insistent economic imperatives with the more general demands of securing general political legitimacy and social cohesion (Poulantzas 1978).

I argue elsewhere that this set of functions (and the many other new tasks tied to the shift from state concern with full employment in relatively closed national economies to a concern to promote permanent innovation and economic competitiveness in relatively open economies) is associated with a fundamental restructuring and strategic reorganization of the typical postwar form of state. In telegrammatic form, this shift involves three main trends: (1) a complex rescaling of the national state, with old and new state capacities being located above, below, and across national states; (2) an equally complex shift from top-down government to heterarchic forms of governance based on networks and partnerships, sometimes including, sometimes excluding states; and (3) a growing internationalization of policy regimes. All three changes appear to challenge the continued vitality of the national state but this impression is misleading on several grounds. Above all, it ignores the extent to which it is a particular form of the national state that has been challenged by the crisis of Atlantic Fordism and the transition to a globalizing knowledge-based economy. What we find is the slow reinvention of the national state as state managers redefine the nature and purposes of the state in the light of this transition - to which they themselves are making a key contribution both in terms of discursive practices and in terms of new forms of government and governance. Thus the three above-mentioned trends are actively linked to three other trends that reaffirm the importance of state institutions and capacities. These are: (1) the increasing importance of states, especially the national state, in interscalar articulation, i.e. the modulation of which capacities are recalibrated and rescaled; (2) an increasing role for states, especially the national state, in meta­governance, i.e. the organization of the conditions for self-organization and the continual reweighting of the relative balance of market, network, and state modes of coordination in achieving state objectives; and (3) an increasing role for states, especially the national states in seeking to influence the design of international regimes and to control their implementation (for further discussion, seeJessop

2002). Within this general set of transformations, there is ample scope for variation in and across national states, reflecting national political specificities as well as the relative position of their different economic places and spaces within the emerging globalizing knowledge-based economy.