Putting Culture in its Place? A Critical Engagement with Cultural Political Economy

ABSTRACT

Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop present Cultural Political Economy (CPE) as a project that seeks to deepen Critical Political Economy (C*PE) through an engagement with the cultural turn. This article critically assesses their success in such an enterprise. It begins by framing CPE within Jessop and Sum’s previous work on the Regulation Approach, in order to show why the former can only be understood as the result of a critical dialogue with the latter. Next, my reconstruction of the main elements of Sum and Jessop’s CPE is presented. After having carefully examined its main assumptions and concepts, I criticise CPE’s main novel element, an ontological cultural turn, due to the culturalist risks it engenders. In order to substantiate and exemplify that theoretical criticism, I review CPE’s application to the analysis of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis. This article concludes by showing the main difficulties that CPE faces as an alternative for deepening C*PE and proposes the Amsterdam School of Transnational Historical Materialism as a more suitable direction in which that initiative could be advanced.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural political economy
• critical political economy
• regulation approach
• transnational historical materialism
• North Atlantic financial crisis

Acknowledgements

Hubert Buch-Hansen offered insightful comments and support throughout the writing of this paper. Additionally, Kees van der Pijl, Stefano Ponte and Ida Lunde Jørgensen provided feedback and very useful suggestions at different stages of the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Juan Ignacio Staricco has recently obtained his PhD at the Copenhagen Business School. His dissertation offered a critical examination of the Fair Trade system from a regulationist perspective. His research interests include: governance in agriculture, international food regimes and critical political economy.

Notes

1 Since this section is mostly based on Jessop and Sum's work, I will keep their classification of the different (philo)regulationist perspectives as ‘regulation schools': that is, the Parisian School, the Amsterdam School, the West German School and so on (see: Jessop and Sum 2006).

2 Jessop (2008: 15) explains that it comprises a variety of different ‘turns’, for example, the narrative turn, the rhetorical turn, the discursive turn, the argumentative turn, the performative turn, the reflexive turn, the visual turn and so on.

3 A fact that had been acknowledged by Jessop and Sum themselves: ‘The Amsterdam school developed a distinctive approach based on a Marxist critique of political economy and a (neo-)Gramscian analysis of hegemonic strategies’ (Jessop and Sum 2006: 25); ‘Only the Asmterdam and West German schools took agency seriously in first-generation work and both adopt solutions influenced by Gramsci's analyses of hegemony’ (Jessop and Sum 2006: 101).