Cultural political economy of competitiveness, competition, and competition policy in Asia

Abstract

This article employs cultural political economy to explore, interpret, and explain the articulation of competition, competitiveness, and competition policies in Asia in the current neo-liberal era. It describes how this approach explores social order and change in terms of the interaction between semiosis and structuration in the context of four types of selectivity: structural, agential, discursive, and technological. It then outlines an analytical framework and methodology to apply this approach to the chosen case study. This concerns how these modes of selectivity have operated since the 1997 ‘Asian Crisis’ to produce changes in the policy discourses and practices of the World Bank and its Asian regional agencies with the declared aim of reducing poverty, enhancing competitiveness, and promoting corresponding forms of competition policy. Next it examines how these discourses and practices are assembling a new dispositive around an emerging disciplinary and governmentalized socioeconomic-cum-legal order in the wake of the Doha conjuncture in Asia. The concluding remarks address some tensions and challenges in the making of this competitiveness order in Asia.

Keywords:

• Asian Development Bank
• competition policy
• competitiveness
• cultural political economy
• discourse
• dispositive
• poverty reduction
• World Bank

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Michael Dowdle from the National University of Singapore for his encouragement to apply the CPE approach to competition policy/law; and Eva Hartman from Copenhagen Business School and two anonymous referees for their comments on this article. I also thank Paula Chung, Gigi Chen and Helen Fu for their support and friendship while finishing this paper in Hong Kong.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

Part of the work reported here was funded by the British Academy under a British Academy Research Development Award (2008-10) on ‘Changing Cultures of Competitiveness: A Cultural Political Economy Approach’ (BARDA-48854).

Notes on contributor

Ngai-Ling Sum is Reader in Cultural Political Economy and Co-Director of the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Lancaster University, UK. She studied Economics at Birmingham University, received her PhD in Sociology from Lancaster, and has since worked in Sheffield, Manchester, and Lancaster Universities. Her recent work includes: Beyond the Regulation Approach: Putting the Economy in Its Place in Political Economy (2006, co-authored with Bob Jessop), Towards a Cultural Political Economy: Putting Culture in Its Place in Political Economy (2013, co-authored with Bob Jessop), many book chapters, and articles in journals such as Capital and Class, Competition and Change, Critical Asian Studies, Critical Policy Studies, Development Studies, Economy and Society, Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Journal of Language and Politics, New Political Economy, and Urban Studies. Her homepage is: www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/ppr/profiles/Ngai-Ling-Sum/.

ORCID

Ngai-Ling Sum http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4285-1351

Notes

1. This does not mean that the real (social) world exists outside discourse: it means only that there it has objective features that exist and constrain action, whether or not specific subjects and discourses refer to them. To believe otherwise is to assert that the real world exists only to the extent that it is the subject of discourse.

2. According to Fairclough (2003), genre chains are genres which are regularly and predictably chained together such that meanings are moved and transformed along the chain, and recontextualized and transformed in regular ways in accordance with recontextualizing principles (e.g. exclusion).