The heroic character, the neo-liberal productive citizen, and the feminist filmmaker

ABSTRACT

I recut an observational documentary about a woman called Bekti into a more conventional hero’s journey for a broadcaster. The hero’s journey narrative requires large obstacles to be overcome by the hero in their search for their ego. In this documentary the obstacle is connecting experimental science with communities with the aim to reduce dengue fever, and the hero’s ‘ego’ is to be an effective communicator. Using the hero’s journey style of narrative reduced the importance of the domestic aspects of Bekti’s life because these scenes did not contribute to overcoming obstacles or finding ego. To explore these changes use feminist critique of the influence of the hero’s journey on narrative structure and character creation. Alongside this, I use a decolonising lens to challenge the universality of the monomyth. I then bring into this debate work on value in the economy to explore how the hero’s journey used in the recut documentary corresponds to neoliberal values. This critique adds to the current debates around heroic characters and story structures in non-fiction films via rethinking story in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Character
• story
• feminism
• documentary
• value
• action

Introduction

This paper explores my experience of recutting a documentary¹ for broadcast on ABC TV (Australian Broadcasting Commission). I will use feminist and decolonising theory to evaluate the effects that recutting the film had on the narrative structure and the resulting change in the narrative value of scenes. As part of this process, I will refer to the documentary I created as an example of what is being discussed. I will use the basket rather than the spear (Le Guin 2019, 32) as a method of organising the material in this paper: meaning is created through the collection of ideas together, rather than by using the linear argument form.

The original documentary and the changes

The ABC TV broadcast documentary is called The Communicator (2022) and the central character is an Indonesian woman, Bekti Andari. Bekti lives on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, an important cultural and educational city in Indonesia. She lives with her partner and her two young children. She works in community outreach and communications for an international science project aiming to help reduce dengue. She is smart and provocatively funny. Like many of her educated middle-class female colleagues working in the sciences, she does not wear a hijab.

Bekti (Left) talks with the mother about the dengue infection the baby experienced.

The original film that the broadcaster saw used a diurnal organisation of the material, meaning a narrative that follows a ‘day’ in Bekti’s life, and an observational style, meaning that the narrative unfolds without intrusive explanation. For instance, there is no voiceover providing insights into what the characters think or what is taking place. The broadcaster’s notes required a restructure of the documentary and that locations and events be explained to the audience, rather than the audience being left to discover what is happening. Structurally, the broadcaster wanted to remove the ‘day in the life of’ diurnal narrative in favour of a hero’s journey.

In the new cut, Bekti’s ‘obstacle’ in her heroic journey is communicating complex science to busy women in the local communities, and explaining the complex communities to the busy (predominantly female) scientists. Her job working on the research project, whose aim is to reduce dengue infections, becomes the driving force of the film. While these narrative elements were in the previous cut, they were not elevated to be the key narrative points. I expected to have to restructure the narrative for the broadcaster to become a hero’s journey, what I did not expect was the effect these changes would have on the domestic scenes. In the new cut, the domestic sphere is used to provide insight into Bekti’s character, but it is not considered to be a site of action. The placement of action in a particular type of location (the workplace) focuses the narrative drive on Bekti’s workplace self and what she does in that space.

The new edit for the broadcaster raises two issues which I find are linked: firstly, the confinement of action to the workplace, and secondly how this is influenced by the use of the hero’s journey structure in which the hero must overcome an obstacle to create change. I will begin by examining the hero’s journey, or monomyth, as a narrative form, in particular, claims that it is the only form of storytelling.

The hero narrative: an imperial form?

As a documentary filmmaker, my experience of the hero’s journey narrative has primarily been via the work of Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey (2007) where he applied Campbell’s analysis of heroic myths to feature film storytelling. For Vogler, Campbell’s analysis is ‘a welcome toolkit, stocked with sturdy instruments ideal for the craft of storytelling’ which can be used to ‘diagnose the problems of almost any ailing plot line’ (2007, 3). Vogler suggests that this mode of storytelling is ‘older than the Pyramids, older than Stonehenge, older than the earliest cave paintings’ and that myths ‘are all basically the same story’ (2007, 4). In doing this Vogler is claiming that the hero narrative is the narrative of all stories and of all times. There is no space here for other approaches to storytelling.

A plot with cause and effect that inevitably leads to the merging of the hero’s will with their world is not unique to the hero’s journey, and Western cultures have been using this structure for centuries. Scriptwriting guru, Robert McKee, who is influenced by Aristotle (plot structure) and Jung (archetypes), talks about a story as ‘a strategic sequence’ (1999, 33). Another scriptwriting guru, Linda Aronson, specifies that conventional narrative structure is ‘a three-act, linear chronological one-story piece about a single protagonist on a suspenseful journey towards a goal’ (2010, 45). While I dispute the universality of the structure, Vogler is correct to note that it is prevalent in Western storytelling, especially in plays and films. The linear-overcoming-of-obstacles story predates Campbell’s work, but, via Vogler, Campbell’s work is influential in the scripting of contemporary popular films, including documentaries.

Vogler states that the ‘Hero archetype represents the ego’s search for identity and wholeness’ (2007, 29). This is a reworking of Campbell, who describes the conclusion of a myth as involving ‘a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will’ (1949/2008, 206). The hero’s sense of self is often found through them reshaping their identity, and, as part of the process, also reshaping their world around that identity. At the end of their journey, the hero becomes an embodied metaphor for a new social wholeness that frequently reinforces the existing dominant social values of the viewer’s world. The hero’s journey is ‘a universal source in the shared unconscious’ that reflects ‘universal concerns’ (2007, 5). Implied here is that the search for individual self is fundamental to all storytelling. This assumption is not problematised in the text but is discussed in the preface of the second edition. Vogler asks the question ‘Is the Hero’s Journey an instrument of cultural imperialism?’, and he answers by stating that it is ‘a useful tool for the storyteller in any culture’, he qualifies this with ‘if adapted thoughtfully to reflect the unique, inimitable qualities of the local geography, climate and people’ (2007, xix). This suggests that the narrative form remains universal, but can be tweaked to suit the locals, rather than there being other valid storytelling modes.

Vogler singles out Australians as being resistant to the hero’s journey, and I should make it known at this point that I am an Australian filmmaker. He identifies Australians as ‘acutely conscious of cultural imperialism’ and that they ‘pointed out to me hidden cultural assumptions in my understanding of the Hero’s Journey’ (2007, xix). And yet, Vogler writes in the next sentence that the Hero’s Journey ‘is universal and timeless’ (2007, xix). He only concedes that Australians might have a point that a story containing a virtuous hero who experiences a happy and resolved ending is not universal.

The cultural imperialism of the monomyth is strongly present in Campbell’s original text, where, in the prologue, Campbell describes an ‘aloof amusement’ at the ‘dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo’ whereas Lao-tse is read in translation with ‘cultivated rapture’ (1949/ 2008, 1). According to Campbell, cultures are dismissed as primitive and unintelligible or venerated as cultivated and complex. What is interesting to note is that both types of cultures are then considered to use the same type of mythic structure. A unification of all cultures is an imperial approach to culture. Campbell suggests that myths may not complete the hero’s journey cycle and that ‘characters or episodes can become fused, or a single element can repudiate itself and reappear under many changes’ (1949/ 2008, 212). Despite this, the world’s myths are moulded by Campbell onto the hero journey structure even when they use entirely different storytelling methods, leading Campbell to ask: ‘Why is mythology everywhere the same, beneath its varieties of costume?’ (1949/ 2008, 1). Difference is dismissed as a form of dressing rather than the core of the story.

Challenging the hero narrative: the relationship between language and narrative

When challenging the universal claims of the hero narrative it is useful to explore other narrative modes. Writer and decolonising theorist Ngugi wa Thiong'o notices how language and culture connect. For wa Thiong'o ‘The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, in relation to the entire universe’ (2011, 4). He recounts storytelling he experienced as a child where ‘we learnt that the apparently weak can outwit the strong’ and ‘we followed the animals in their struggle against hostile nature – drought, rain, sun, wind – a confrontation often forcing them to search for forms of co-operation’ (2011, 10). While wa Thiong'o talks about conflict as being central to the story, he also talks about co-operation being important in the resolution of that story. Co-operation is not the same as the ‘help’ which heroes receive on their journey, co-operation implies working together as the resolution to the story. The narrative structure here is not about an ego’s search for self, it is more an understanding of the importance of co-operation for survival. This mode of storytelling is deeply connected to language and the very words used to tell the story. wa Thiong'o states that ‘Language as culture is thus mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves; between me and nature’ (2011, 15). This approach implies that narrative modes are not universal, because language is distinct and regional. Experiences of place are mediated by language and the resulting stories that are told.

As a young woman, I briefly lived with Walrpiri people in Yeudumu and I noticed that their language better describes the surrounding landscape than my language, English. I was young and naïve and surprised, because I had thought of English as the language of the land, and not realised another language might better portray where I live. It was an awakening where I discovered that my own language had not emerged in concert with this landscape, but was slowly evolving to be able to describe it, and yet it is hampered by a structure and mode of thinking that had been created elsewhere. Warlpiri is a language that emerged to ‘mediate’ between the people and the place, and the stories told in it can differ in structure. For instance, the protagonist can change throughout the story, depending upon the action taking place (Swartz 1988). This shift in protagonist challenges the centrality of a singular hero’s ego searching for self as being core to all stories. While shifting protagonists can occur in Western plays and films, it is unusual, and often an indicator of a more experimental work.

When Glenda Hambly critiques the hero’s journey, especially Campbell’s understanding of the Arrernte’s cultural practices, she provides many examples of alternative storytelling in which the primary concern is not the individual’s need to solve a problem in the process of seeking out their ego. Instead, the story can use a structure where ‘the causal connections are concealed and mysterious’ (2021, 147) and discovering meaning requires an understanding of the social order of the culture and its interplay with the action in the story. An action may be repeated at least three times before the consequence of that action takes place. The consequence being informed by kinship rules, and subservience of ego, rather than a search for ego. The Campbellian story, where a hero brings back to community ‘“new” knowledge [that] will challenge the “old” ways of the hero’s community’ (2021, 141) differs from one in which characters learn about the existing ways of the community. There are clearly other story structures, and ways of understanding our place in, and relationship to, the world.

wa Thiong'o positions language at the centre of these different narrative approaches, because language defines our sense of self and our social relations. wa Thiong'o concludes that the destruction of the languages of colonised people ‘was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised’ (2011, 16). Without their words that mediated their identity, entire social structures that were represented in storytelling modes were crushed. The Warlpiri have an active language, and set of stories, but this has not been the case for all first nations people in Australia.

The broadcaster notes for changes to the documentary I was creating for them was designed to create a narrative style for their primarily English-speaking audience. The notes did not encouraging me to explore the story form that might emerge from the languages used in the film (primarily Indonesian and Javanese). In fact, part of the recutting process was to create a voice over in English that establishes the dominance of that language within the cut. Even the accent spoken mattered, and Bekti’s reading was replaced by a woman with a broad Australian accent. The original language was overlaid with Australian English as part of the adoption of the hero’s journey as a narrative structure. The addition of spoken English (the original had English subtitles) and a western structure provide a subtle example of wa Thiong’o’s analysis of the connection between structure and language.

Challenging the hero narrative: the unifying qualities

Vogler transforms Campbell’s analytical tool into ‘the’ narrative structure. The stories should use all aspects of the journey to reach a conclusion in which the hero’s ego and the community are happily unified. Visual ethnographer, Trinh T Minh-ha, notes that the ‘function of any ideology in power is to represent the world positively unified’ (1991, 2). Trinh is pointing to the power of ideology to create a myth of a unified world, this can be seen both within the narrative structure being used, and in the claims that the hero’s journey is universal, when instead it is a reflection of a particular cultural approach.

An example of this unification of ego with the community can be found in the recut version of The Communicator. The film ends with a community meeting, at which Bekti speaks, and where the residents agree to the dengue experiments taking place in their area. In terms of the hero’s journey, Bekti has brought her elixir/ego to the community and claims that it will help them change for the better, and they have accepted it. In reality, this is one of many meetings and points in the process of gradual testing and implementation of a possible method of reducing dengue fever. Its significance is raised in the broadcaster version of the documentary to provide a heroic unified ending. In the earlier version, the film ended with Bekti at her mother’s house picking up her children, after that evening meeting, and heading home, the day finally over. What is interesting is that both versions of the story end with a form of unification: Bekti’s will aligns with the community in the hero’s journey; Bekti is physically with her family in the diurnal structure.

Trinh T Minh-ha provides a lens to view the two versions of unification when she discusses the lack of conflict in her films. She suggests that ‘Conflicts in Western contexts often serve to define identities’ (1997, 416). This coincides with the hero’s search for ego via conflict. She proposes that ‘difference replace conflict’ where ‘difference is not what makes conflicts. It is beyond and alongside conflict’ (1997, 416). Trinh is suggesting that characters can express difference without needing to create a conflict designed to overcome the will of the other. She goes further and asserts that ‘Hegemony works at leveling our differences and at standardizing contexts and expectations in the smallest details of our daily lives’ (1997, 416). For Trinh, hegemony encourages the conflict of the self with our environment and other characters, and as a narrative structure does not allow space for peaceful recognition of difference that is entangled rather than in opposition. The wholeness of endings required by the hero’s journey refutes that differences can coexist within a story resolution and requires the overcoming of obstacles (end of conflict). Using Trinh’s lens, it is possible to say that the unification at the end of the diurnal version of the documentary is one in which difference is allowed to co-exist and that it avoids the dominance of one character’s ego over the identity of the other. Bekti does not bring the ‘elixir’ to the community and requires them to accept it, instead, she is ‘with’ her family.

Challenging the hero narrative: the relationship between location and narrative

As well as decolonising critiques of the cultural assumptions of the hero’s journey there are feminist critiques such as Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (1990) that attempt to chart a feminised version of the journey. The most interesting critiques, in my opinion, challenge the very nature of the journey structure rather than feminise it. In her 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, Le Guin reveals that the hero narrative is ‘the story that hid my humanity from me’ (2019, 33). She calls it the ‘killer story’ that involves ‘bashing, thrusting, raping, killing’ (2019, 33). Le Guin feels that the type of story we tell is important because it affects how we behave and see ourselves. She suggests that ‘we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it’ (2019, 33). She sees the narrative structure as being linked to, and re-enforcing, wider problems in our society. Le Guin sought to create stories where ‘and then next day you probably do much the same again – if to do that is human’ (2019, 32). These are not stories about a unique challenge that is overcome, instead the daily obstacles are what the character/s face on a regular basis. Le Guin challenges the primacy of the heroic narrative form, instead wanting to write about ‘what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else’ (2019, 37).

Feminist and post-humanist theorist Donna Haraway believes ‘It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’ (2016, 12). Haraway reminds us that a ‘carrier bag’ is just as important to our existence as the spear. She suggests that the ‘last thing the hero wants to know is that his beautiful words and weapons will be worthless without a bag, a container, a net’ (2016, 39–40). Both Haraway and Le Guin are interested in stories that explore how we reap rather than ‘sow’ wild oats which include bringing those reaped wild oats home to share with others. What this implies is that the domestic space can be a site of action and that narratives can explore the complexities of existing in this domestic space. Action need not be ‘out there’ and involve conquering, it can be at home and involve sharing.

Of course, a heroic story can unfold in a domestic space, for instance, stories about royal families often do this, in these stories the home world is the public/external/work world. The inclusion of the non-workspace home can open up a different understanding of what action is, and where the narrative is heading. Including that, the domestic place as a site of action (not just character rounding) can challenge the linearity of storytelling and encourage the creation of narratives that possess iterative or cyclical qualities. Instead of the character gaining a deeper understanding through overcoming obstacles, and changing their world, maybe all the character must do is live their daily life in what Le Guin calls ‘the life story’ (2019, 33).

While most of the domestic scenes in the diurnal cut of the documentary appear in the broadcaster cut, one notable scene hit the cutting room floor. In this scene, Bekti’s children argue over who owns a backpack as Bekti is preparing to leave for work. This scene involves a partial resolution of conflict, rather than an ‘overcoming’ through conflict. Bekti is instrumental in diffusing the situation but it could not be fully resolved because underlying the argument was a desire by the younger child to be part of the family that heads out to other locations, like school and work, rather than stay at home with the nanny. The scene shows Bekti’s role within the family, and various pulls that familial responsibilities have on a mother. It is undoubtedly a scene of action, but the action contained within the scene did not correspond to the narrative drive of the broadcaster cut, which was centred on Bekti’s work. It is the type of scene that would happen often as the childrens’ desires burble into conflict over objects. As there is no consequence for the action in this scene (Bekti still goes to work, and the child has forgotten the conflict by the time she returns at night) it is in alignment with both Trinh’s challenge to the dominance of conflict in the narrative and Le Guin’s ‘life story’.

Challenging the heroic character in documentary filmmaking

So far the critiques of the hero’s journey I have discussed emerged from its use in fictional narratives. In this section, I would like to focus on how the hero’s journey is critiqued within the documentary.

It is widely accepted that documentary uses some of the same narrative techniques as fiction filmmaking (Bruzzi 2006; Juhasz and Lebow 2021; Renov 1993). As Michael Renov points out, ‘nonfiction contains any number of “fictive” elements’ (1993, 2). Fictional narrative structures are used in documentary films to ‘tell stories’ about ‘how we humans see ourselves in the world’ using the ‘values’ that are prevalent (2021, 287).

As far back as John Grierson, in the 1940s, documentary filmmakers have been challenging the use of the heroic character. Grierson proclaimed ‘you may feel that in individualism is a yahoo tradition largely responsible for our present anarchy, and deny at once both the hero of decent heroics (Flaherty) and the hero of indecent ones (studio)’ (1946, 82). Grierson is referring to Nanook, the eponymous hero of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) and the ‘indecent’ heroes of western and gangster genre films. Grierson’s documentary model creates a narrative that reflects a modernist and socialist ideal of a ‘co-operative or mass nature of society’ (1946, 82). Grierson was interested in a narrative style that reveals the society he saw around him, and admired. Interestingly, Grierson’s film unit did head into domestic spaces to hear from people about the nature of their lives. As Brian Winston notes, ‘In Housing Problems, Cockney slum dwellers address the camera directly to explicate the living conditions the film depicts. This was the first time that the working class had been interviewed on film in situ’ (1988, 39). In situ is in their domestic spaces where the streets and rooms in which they live form the sites of action.

Grierson’s attack on the neo-liberal nature of the heroic story shares similarities with a recent rallying call by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. They claim that ‘Story itself has become part of the problem’ because it is an ‘unchallenged neoliberal palliative, a way to make us feel better, a means of preventing us from attending to necessary paradigm shifts’ (2021, 9). Filmmaker and geographer Brett Story says ‘I find myself concerned in particular about the ways in which much work that leans hard on the character-driven form can end up reinforcing this idea that there is no such thing as a society’ (Smith et al. 2021, 114). Brett Story is interested in creating film work ‘that feels true to what it means to go about a life’ (Smith et al. 2021, 114). This reflects Le Guin’s desire to create works that encapsulate ‘the life story’ (2019, 33). For Juhasz and Lebow, stories must be told with ‘extreme vigilance, taking care not to repeat the violences (or silences) of past tellings’ (2021, 10). Grierson and Story, and to some extent Juhasz and Lebow, are focused on the heroic character as a force that can be seen as an obscuring society: I would like to extend this idea of the violence/silence to choice of the location where the action takes place. Bekti’s home is no longer a site of action precisely because in this story it is not a space in which she is overcoming significant obstacles in the search for her ego. It is a place where her connection to others, alongside her ego, is constantly adapting to the small challenges and changes that life brings each day. The hero narrative ‘silences’ these adaptive and iterative qualities of life in favour of the monumental.

What we value shaping narrative events (which in turn shapes what we value)

Given that the narrative created for the broadcaster is focused on Bekti being a worker, it is interesting to explore the parallels between the broadcaster’s notes and the work of economist Mariana Mazzucato, who analyses the value boundaries that we establish in society with regard to productivity.² I contend that what is valued as productive in economics and action in a narrative are aligned. For Mazzucato, value is subjective and ‘has not been fixed’ and the boundary’s ‘shape and size have shifted with social and economic forces’ (2019, 9). Mazzucato explains that the ‘care given by parents to children or by the healthy to the unwell’ (2019, 11) has only recently been considered as of productive value, e.g. being placed within the production boundary. Those actions that occur in the domestic space are traditionally considered not to be of productive (or narrative action) value.

I suggest that the broadcaster’s preferencing of the workplace as a site of action over the domestic sphere adheres to these wider societal notions of what is of productive value, as outlined by Mazzucato. The broadcaster was asking me to create a stronger story, and what that means is a story that aligns with, rather than works against, dominant values. The notes refer to the fact that it takes too long for Bekti to arrive at work. In the initial cut, this happens at four minutes in a 28 min film. It occurs after Bekti went to the market to buy food, cooked breakfast, ensured her daughter had her schoolbooks, resolved a fight between the children, helped her daughter put on her hijab during the drive to school. In Bekti’s life, all those things, or similar things, happen each day before she goes to work. In the new cut, we start with Bekti at work, most of these domestic events are still in the edit, but by placing them later, they are not part of the establishment scenes which set out the actions that help to define Bekti’s character and the story’s structure. By placing them later in the work, they lose their position of importance, the mere act of getting to work is no longer something that requires overcoming a series of obstacles that must be resolved before the workplace obstacles can even be considered. While these domestic obstacles are not large obstacles that require conquering, they are the obstacles of daily life that require various types of resolutions. More properly, they could be called the tasks of being a human. They establish action as being the resolution of daily tasks, rather than overcoming a large obstacle.

Alongside the implication in the hero’s journey that a character needs to face and overcome conflict is the assumption that there are heroes who will change our world. The hero’s journey can be seen as a narrative that suggests we should not take action to improve or shape our lives (or resist hegemonic pressure) because a better heroic person will do that for us. A feminist narrative requires we have a communal responsibility for our environment, alongside recognising that there are systemic pressures being placed upon us. A feminist narrative does not ask us to wait for a saviour, or for Bekti to become our saviour.

I suggest that the previous cut I created of the film, in which action was considered to be of equal value in all sites, and where there was not a large obstacle to overcome, adheres to a feminist critique of dominant narrative structures, like the hero’s journey, as outlined by Ursula K. Le Guin (2019) and Donna Haraway (2016). The diurnal structure is one that does not easily re-enforce dominant ideology. It is resistant to establishment of the large obstacle that must be overcome, and the creation of identity through change, because in a diurnal structure, the world at home at the conclusion is often the same as it was at the beginning of the film. The structure is not about creating change in the world and in the ego, it is about sharing the character’s experiences and self with the viewer.

Conclusion

Over the course of this paper, I have examined the narrative structure, especially the hero’s journey from various perspectives: challenging universality; the connection between language, place, and story; allowing difference to be part of the resolution; use of the domestic space to challenge reaching goals through conflict; and that the hero’s journey aligns with hegemonic neo-liberal social values in the West. It is not a singular argument that I propose that happily resolves, instead, I am sharing what I noticed as I recut the documentary, and how this connects with theoretical ideas that critique the monomyth. I am resisting using the ‘spear’ of a monumental singular resolving argument. I am not the hero who overcomes the obstacles, instead, I am the author who gathers ideas into a basket. The ending involves allowing space for difference and a co-existence of ideas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Gough-Brady

Catherine Gough-Brady is an award-winning documentary producer and director who publishes on the relational nature of documentary production processes in journals including Media Practice and Education, Screenworks, [in]Transition, The International Journal of Creative Media Research, and Cultural Geographies. She is co-editor of an edited collection exploring the intersection of theory and practice, Constructing the Real (2023). Catherine produced and directed six ABC TV documentary series, including Legal Briefs (2016) and Ethics Matters (2017). Catherine created 11 radio features for ABC Radio National. Her most recent TV half-hour for ABC TV is called The Communicator (2022). Catherine is a senior lecturer at Edith Cowan University in Australia and is an associate editor of Screenworks.

Notes

1 The documentary sold to ABC TV, and so I did not release the earlier observational cut.

2 For instance, in her 2019 book The Value of Everything: Making and taking in the global economy.