Publications

Renowned social and political theorist Bob Jessop explores the idea of civil society as a mode of governance in this bold challenge to current thinking. Developing theories of governance failure and metagovernance, the book analyses the limits and failures of economic and social policy in various styles of governance. Reviewing the principles of self-emancipation and…

Neoliberalization is a variegated series of processes with a core policy set that comprises: liberalization, deregulation, privatization, recommodification, internationalization, reductions in direct taxation, and decriminalization of predatory economic activities. Compared to the era of Atlantic Fordism and Spatial Keynesianism, neoliberalization promotes uneven development in the name of competitiveness and pursues policies that largely neglect its…

This forum contribution discusses the increasing trend toward academic capitalism and profit-oriented entrepreneurial practices in the fields of education and research. This occurs as universities, in different ways and subject to greater or lesser financial, administrative, and ideological pressures, act less like centers of disinterested education and research and more like economic enterprises that aim…

This comment explores the relation between geoeconomics and geopolitics from a critical realist, strategic-relational, and cultural political economy perspective. We disambiguate the ‘geo-’ family of concepts; introduce a more complex view of sociospatiality that enables a taxonomy of approaches to geopolitical analytical objects and inquiries; and illustrate this from China’s Belt and Road Initiative seen…

This contribution introduces a distinctive approach to the critique of capitalism and, in this context, of recent economic and financial crises and crisis-management. Cultural political economy takes sense-making and meaning-making seriously in describing and explaining political economy without neglecting the historically specific properties, dynamic and crisis-tendencies of capitalist social formations. In this light, the chapter…

This chapter explores the work on language, ideology, and politics of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser. While only the first two explicitly considered language, all three adopted a totalising approach, forcefully critiqued ideologies and domination, and stressed the unity of social theory and political practice. The chapter addresses Marx’s ideas on language and…

This chapter revisits claims in the light of the growing financialisation of social relations and the rise of neo-liberalisation as an economic and political project. It introduces two working definitions and then modifies them to reflect further theoretical arguments and recent empirical trends. The chapter then explores the implications of economic and political changes in…

This article responds to Staricco’s critique of cultural political economy (CPE) for being inherently constructivist because of its emphasis on the ontologically foundational role of semiosis (sense- and meaning-making) in social life. Staricco recommends the Amsterdam School of transnational historical materialism as a more immediately productive and insightful approach to developing a regulationist critique of…

This article begins with a brief review of research on the development of ideas about the knowledge-based economy (analysed here as ‘economic imaginaries’) and their influence on how social forces within and beyond the academy have attempted to reorganize higher education and research in response to real and perceived challenges and crises in the capitalist…