This chapter explores the constitution of the knowledge-based economy as an increasingly hegemonic meta-object of governance (and, indeed, meta-governance) in response to the crisis of Atlantic Fordism.1
It interprets the knowledge-based economy (KBE) as a complex, heterogeneous, and variable assemblage of social relations which are articulated to a distinctive set of subjectivities and mediated through material objects and social institutions.
It also traces the rise of the KBE as a provisional, partial, and unstable product of distinctive discourses and material practices. It should be emphasized at once that this approach does not imply that capitalism is always characterized by such hegemonic meta-objects of (meta-)governance nor that the latter have some predetermined lifespan (let alone a predetermined life-course) that coincides with a preordained logic of capitalist development. Instead the following analysis is concerned with what I have elsewhere termed the ‘contingent necessity’ of durable institutional orders and with what actor-network theorists have elsewhere described as the problem of how Leviathan (and, by extension, other institutional ensembles) get ‘screwed down’ and actors are enrolled behind them (Jessop 1982; Gallon and Latour 1981; Gallon and Law 1982).My interpretation of the knowledge-based economy is developed in three main steps. First, theoretically, I introduce the distinctive features of cultural political economy as a powerful general approach that helps to overcome some of the limitations of conventional approaches to economic analysis (Jessop and Sum 2001; for applications,Jessop 2003; Sum 2003). Second, substantively, I describe the search to identify and develop a ‘new economy’ following major crises in/of the Atlantic Fordist economies and argue that this search has been provisionally concluded with the (still incomplete) discursive construction and material constitution of the new economy as a KBE. In particular, I highlight the extent to which this new meta-object of (meta-)governance rests on an expanded notion of the technological and economic factors making for competitiveness, on increased valorization of creative and flexible attitudes in an enterprise culture, and on the potential contribution of lifelong learning to the dynamism of the knowledgebased economy as a mode of growth. I also argue that these discourses are performative rather than purely descriptive. And, third, in this context, I describe
Cultural political economy, the knowledge-based economy and the state 143 the distinctive roles played by states in shaping these new objects and subjects of economic governance and note how these roles are linked with a profound structural transformation and strategic reorientation of the political regimes associated with Atlantic Fordism. The chapter ends with some brief remarks on a more general research agenda for cultural political economy.