Beyond Regulation: Towards a Cultural Political Economy of Complexity and Emergence

Abstract

Drawing on and contributing to materialist state theory, the regulation approach and institutional economics for more than three decades, Bob Jessop can certainly be considered one of the foremost Marxist political economists of our time. Recently, he has taken on board the cultural turn in social analysis by developing a highly original cultural political economy of the knowledge-based economy. As a contribution to the further development of a cultural political economy that is sensitive to the cultural dimensions of social life while retaining an emphasis on capital accumulation and state regulation, this article directs attention to the limits of Jessop's approach and suggests possible amendments to the theory. In particular, the article highlights the need to move beyond a concern with regulation towards a cultural political economy of complexity and emergence.

Keywords:

• Regulation approach
• critical realism
• capital accumulation
• state regulation
• cultural political economy
• knowledge-based economy

Notes

The author wishes to thank André Bank, Sally Wyatt and two anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

For single-authored or collaborative publications from Jessop on cultural political economy, see Jessop (2004a, 2004b, 2008a, 2008b), Jessop and Sum (2001, 2006a, 2006b), Sum and Jessop (forthcoming) and Jessop and Oosterlynck (2008). Other publications that explicitly draw on cultural political economy include: Sayer (2001), Prichard (2006), Lagendijk (2007), Hudson (2008), Jones (2008), Dannestam (2008) and Ribera-Fumaz (2009). Also see the chapter contributions to Jessop et al. (2008).

As has been abundantly illustrated by social studies of science, this has always been more of an ideal than actual practice (see Latour and Woolgar 1979; Knorr-Cetina 1981).

The use of the term ‘problematique’ is conscious and taken from Hay (2001), since it highlights that the debate on the relative significance of structure and agency cannot simply be solved (i.e. a solution to a problem). Instead, the structure–agency problematique refers to a point of crystallisation around which competing – and ontologically incompatible – narratives gather.

For a discussion of how the strategic-relational approach differs from Bhaskar's critical realism, see Jessop (2005) (also relevant in this context is Jessop 2001 and 2006).

This at least applies to the Marxist strand within regulation theory. Others, such as Boyer (Hollingsworth and Boyer 1999), have increasingly moved away from this Marxist tradition and now use a much more eclectic framework.

Actually, it is by no means certain if these subordinated forms of accumulation need to be short-term. It might very well be possible that alternative forms of accumulation exist for an extended period of time – even surviving a particular accumulation regime – by operating in a societal niche defined, for example, by ethnicity. It is important to recognise that an accumulation regime is never complete, but always tendential and, as such, is always confronted with the limits of its reach due to institutional, functional and spatial differentiation.

One of the referees rightly mentioned that the regulation approach is not fixated on Fordism and post-Fordism, but has also been applied to other types of accumulation regime and mode of regulation. Particularly relevant work in this context has been undertaken by Jessop's main collaborator on the cultural political economy approach (see Sum n.d.). Nevertheless, it remains clear that the regulationist perspective was originally developed in order to theorise Fordism and this heritage still informs most debates.

There is no space to discuss these reasons (and their complex interrelations) here in any depth, but see the following literature for a first overview: Offe (1972), O'Connor (1973), Hirsch and Roth (1986), Marglin and Schor (1990), Huber and Stephens (2001) and Koch (2006).

As has been shown most clearly by the literature on the transformation of sovereignty (see Sassen 1996; Jackson 1999; Lake 2003; Agnew 2005).

Quote taken from Jessop's personal page at the University of Lancaster's Department of Sociology website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/profiles/Bob-Jessop [Accessed 12 February 2009].

See Sum (n.d.). Thanks are due to one of the anonymous referees for emphasising this point.

On this abstract level, Jessop prefers the notion of semiosis over other terms such as language or discourse and uses it to refer to all moments of intersubjective production of meaning in social processes, understanding semiosis as part of but irreducible to the social. Drawing on the critical discourse analysis of Fairclough, Jessop tends to use the concept of discourse in a more particular sense, namely as those semiotic moments that represent other social practices and the material world from a particular social position (see Fairclough et al. 2004; Jessop 2004a).

In distinguishing between system and lifeworld, Jessop draws on but extends Habermas. Thus, whereas Habermas limits the notion of systems to refer to the economic and the juridical-political sphere, Jessop (2002a: 277 n. 1) uses the term to refer to ‘any self-organizing (or autopoietic) system with its own instrumental rationality, institutional matrix and social agents who consciously orient their actions to that system's code’. The lifeworld, in Jessop's approach, is then understood as providing the ‘substratum and background to social interaction in everyday life’ (277 n. 1) and remains rather amorphous.

This, to some extent, can also be interpreted as Jessop's renewed engagement with the discipline of cultural studies, in particular the work of Hall with whom he has had an ongoing ‘debate’ since the mid-1980s (see Hall 1985, 2003; Jessop et al. 1984, 1985; Jessop 2004c).

According to Norrie (2005), the use of a grounding ontology in explanation is unavoidable and even used by those rejecting it. In other words, the question is not if one is foundationalist, but if one acknowledges this.

Although I cannot discuss this here in any depth, it seems that this will also necessitate a rethinking of Jessop's method of articulation. The strength of Jessop's method is that it traces the ontological depth of particular social relations to capital and the state, while simultaneously acknowledging and introducing new causal chains on lower levels of abstraction (see Jessop 1982: 212–19). Although important, this method still prioritises one plane of analysis at the expense of other theoretical traditions, thus pre-fixing the theoretical outcome of empirical analysis. Jessop's method of articulation, in other words, does not seriously accommodate the co-constitution of theoretical and empirical objects of analysis.