My recent research falls into five areas:
1) changes in contemporary capitalism and the dynamics of ‘variegated capitalism’ – a notion that I prefer to ‘varieties of capitalism’, including the illogics of globalization and the contradictions of knowledge-based economies;
2) changes in the state’s form, scale, and functions in the broad fields of economic and social policy — initially in relation to the welfare states of advanced capitalist economies and then in some East Asian cases and, most recently, in the crises of advanced capitalist economies;
3) governance, governance failure, and meta-governance – and its failure — and the implications of different forms of governance and meta-governance failure and their reflection in crises of crisis-management for ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’;
4) cultural political economy, i.e., advancing the cultural turn in political economy by analysing the variation, selection, and retention of economic and political imaginaries and their implications for economic, political, and social transformation — this involves work on the knowledge-based economy and finance-dominated accumulation as well as more general theoretical issues;
5) the strategic-relational approach to issues of structure and agency — framed within a more general concern with issues of complexity, complexity reduction, and critical r ealism. An emerging interest is the integration of the critique of political economy with a critical approach to political ecology. This is linked to my current research and the role of the Green New Deal as a potentially hegemonic — but deeply contradictory — economic imaginary.
Bob Jessop Bio
