Jessop, B. (2010) - Cultural Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies.

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Critical Policy Studies

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Cultural political economy and critical

policy studies
a
Bob Jessop
a
Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Institute of
Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Published online: 26 Apr 2010.
To cite this article: Bob Jessop (2010) Cultural political economy and critical policy studies,
Critical Policy Studies, 3:3-4, 336-356, DOI: 10.1080/19460171003619741
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Vol. 3, Nos. 3–4, October–December 2009, 336–356
Cultural political economy and critical policy studies

1946-018X
1946-0171
RCPS
Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3-4, Jan 2010: pp. 0–0
Bob Jessop*
Critical
B. JessopPolicy Studies
Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Institute of Advanced Studies, Lancaster University,
Lancaster, UK
This article introduces cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in the social
sciences, including policy studies. The version presented here combines critical semi-
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 21:16 19 August 2013
otic analysis and critical political economy. It grounds its approach to both in the prac-
tical necessities of complexity reduction and the role of meaning-making and
structuration in turning unstructured into structured complexity as a basis for ‘going
on’ in the world. It explores both semiosis and structuration in terms of the evolutionary
mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention and, in this context, also highlights
the role of specific forms of agency and specific technologies. These general proposi-
tions are illustrated from ‘economic imaginaries’ (other types of imaginary could have
been examined) and their relevance to economic policy. Brief comments on crisis-
interpretation and crisis-management give this example some substance. The conclu-
sion notes some implications for research in critical policy studies.
Keywords: complexity; crisis; crisis-management; cultural political economy; cultural
turn; crisis-management; finance-led accumulation; Green New Deal; neo-liberalism
Cultural political economy is an emerging post-disciplinary approach that highlights the

contribution of the cultural turn (a concern with semiosis or meaning-making) to the ana-
lysis of the articulation between the economic and the political and their embedding in
broader sets of social relations. Explicit arguments in favor of ‘cultural political economy’
as such emerged in several contexts in the 1990s as part of and/or in reaction to the then
prevailing cultural turn. It was also prefigured in classical political economy, the German
Historical School, and some versions of critical political economy and/or ‘old institution-
alisms’; and there are similar currents in other fields of social scientific inquiry. Given the
range of cultural turns and the starting points from which they have been made as well as
the widely different definitions of political economy (and its critique), there is no consen-
sus among scholars on the nature of cultural political economy. The version presented
here is by no means intended to be prescriptive: indeed, such an ambition would conflict
with the meta-theoretical foundations set out below. Nonetheless this version does involve
a novel synthesis of critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy that has major
implications for cultural and social analysis. Its novelty can be seen in five features that
together distinguish this version of cultural political economy (hereafter CPE) from others
on similar terrain: (1) the manner in which it grounds the cultural turn in political eco-
nomy in the existential necessity of complexity reduction; (2) its emphasis on the role of
evolutionary mechanisms in shaping the movement from social construal to social
*Email: r.jessop@lancaster.ac.uk
ISSN 1946-0171 print/ISSN 1946-018X online

© 2009 Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham
DOI: 10.1080/19460171003619741
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Critical Policy Studies 337
construction and their implications for the production of hegemony; (3) its concern with
the interdependence and co-evolution of the semiotic and extra-semiotic; (4) the signifi-
cance of technologies, in a broadly Foucauldian sense, to the consolidation of hegemony
and its contestation in the remaking of social relations; and (5) its de-naturalization of eco-
nomic and political imaginaries and, hence, its contribution to Ideologiekritik and the cri-
tique of specific forms of domination. Even within this version of CPE, different authors
give more weight at different times to different features. For example, the present author is
especially interested in issues of complexity reduction, evolutionary mechanisms, and the
critique of political economy both as a discipline and a field of social relations (Fairclough
et al. 2004, Jessop 2004, 2007, 2008, Jessop et al. 2008); Fairclough retains a strong inter-
est in critical discourse analysis and is developing argumentation theory (e.g. Fairclough
and Ietcu-Fairclough 2010); Sayer explores the moral and evaluative aspects of social
imaginaries and practices, taking human flourishing as his criterion (e.g. Sayer 2005); and
Sum emphasizes the production of hegemony, governmental technologies, and the cri-
tique of discourses of competitiveness and their articulation to knowledge brands (Sum
1995, 2004, 2005, 2009a, 2009b, 2010). These concerns are complementary and reflect
specific objects of inquiry. After sketching these features, I argue for intellectual value-
added in the critique of political economy and illustrate this from a brief account of the
CPE approach to crisis.
An approach to CPE
While CPE is applied mainly, as its name implies, in the field of political economy, the
general propositions and heuristic that inform it can be applied elsewhere by combining
the same semiotic analysis with concepts appropriate to other social forms and institu-
tional dynamics. I will suggest below that this also holds for policy studies.
Complexity reduction, semiosis, and structuration

Cultural turns can be thematic, methodological, or ontological: in other words, one could
examine hitherto neglected research topics, propose a new entry point into social analysis,
or argue against other positions that ‘culture’ is foundational to the social world. The
present version of CPE makes all three turns but emphasizes the last. The cultural turn
includes approaches oriented to argumentation, narrativity, rhetoric, hermeneutics, iden-
tity, mentalities, conceptual history, reflexivity, historicity, and discourse (for a good sur-
vey of different turns, see Bachmann-Medick 2006; for useful introductions to critical
discourse analysis, see Fairclough 2003, Lakoff and Johnson 1980, van Dijk 1987, Wodak
and Meyer 2009). Most versions of the cultural turn regard semiosis as causally effica-
cious as well as meaningful and, in this sense, suggest that it serves not only to interpret
actual events and processes and their emergent effects but also to contribute to their expla-
nation. Thus, in emphasizing the foundational nature of meaning and meaning-making
in social relations, CPE does not seek to add ‘culture’ to economics and politics as if
each comprised a distinct area of social life; nor, analogously, does it aim to apply ‘cul-
tural theory’ as a useful tool in policy analysis.1 Instead it stresses the semiotic nature of
all social relations.
The approach to CPE advocated here begins from the role of complexity reduction as a
condition of ‘going on’ in the world and argues that semiosis (the intersubjective produc-
tion of meaning)2 is one mechanism whereby complexity is reduced. The aim here is not
to theorize or model complexity as such but to explore how actors and observers reduce
338 B. Jessop
complexity. Because the world cannot be grasped in all its complexity in real time, actors
(and observers) must focus selectively on some of its aspects in order to be active partici-
pants in that world and/or to describe and interpret it as disinterested observers. This
enforced selection occurs as actors/observers attribute meaning to some ‘aspects’ of the
world rather than others. While the real world pre-exists complexity reduction (and is also
transformed in some respects in and through complexity reduction), actors/observers have
no direct access to that world apart from the sheer facticity of the concrete historical situa-
tions into which they are ‘thrown’. They do not encounter the world as pre-interpreted
once-and-for-all but must engage with and reflect on it in order to make some sense of it.
The ‘aspects’ that particular actors/observers regard as significant depend on specific
meaning systems.3 Meaning-making not only reduces complexity for actors (and observ-
ers) but also gives meaning to the world (Luhmann 1990, pp. 81–82; for some implica-
tions of this line of argument for public policy and administration, see Morçöl 2005).
These construals may also contribute to the constitution of the natural and social world
insofar as they guide a critical mass of self-confirming actions premised on their validity
(see below).
A second aspect of complexity reduction concerns the emergent pattern of social inter-
actions, including direct or indirect human interactions with the natural world. If these are
not to be random, unpredictable, and chaotic, it is essential that possible connections and
sequences of action are limited; and, if adaptation in response to changing circumstances
is to be possible, there should also be scope for flexibility and innovation in such structur-
ation. These two forms of complexity reduction work to transform meaningless and
unstructured complexity into meaningful and structured complexity and succeed insofar
as the world becomes meaningful to actors and social interactions undergo structuration.
Many other meanings are thereby excluded and so are many alternative social constella-
tions. Because complexity reduction has both semiotic and structural aspects, we should
treat the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’ as dialectically related moments of the social world. Its
cultural moment refers to meaning-making and the resulting properties of discursive for-
mations (such as distinct discourses, genres, genre chains, styles, or inter-textuality)
regardless of their condensation, or otherwise, in social structures. And its social moment
concerns the extra-semiotic features of social practices and the resulting properties of
social interaction (such as social cohesion and institutional integration, dilemmas and
contradictions, and institutional logics) that operate ‘behind the backs’ of agents and may
not correspond to their meaning-making efforts. The scope for disjunction and non-
correspondence between the cultural and social moments makes it necessary to study both
in their articulation.
The particularity of the cultural and the social indicates the need for a clear distinction
between social construal and social construction (cf. Sayer 2000, pp. 90–93). All actors
are forced to construe the world selectively as a condition of going on within it. But, while
all construals are equal before complexity, some are more equal than others. Given the
potential for infinite variation in construals, we must explore how their selection and
retention are shaped by emergent, non-semiotic features of social structure as well as by
inherently semiotic factors. Although every social practice is semiotic (insofar as social
practices entail meaning), no social practice is reducible to its semiotic moments. Semio-
sis involves more than the play of differences among networks of signs and is therefore
never a purely intra-semiotic matter without external reference. It cannot be understood or
explained without identifying and exploring the extra-semiotic conditions that make semi-
osis possible and secure its effectivity – including its embedding in material practices and
their relation to the constraints and affordances of the natural and social world. Although
individual words or phrases have no one-to-one relation to the objects to which they refer,
the world still constrains language and ways of thinking. This occurs over time, if not at
every point in time. Not all possible discursive construals can be durably constructed
materially and attempts to do so may have unintended effects (Sayer 2000).
For the present CPE approach, construal and construction have four interrelated
aspects: semiosis, agency, technologies, and structuration. While three of these will
already be familiar to most readers, technologies merit a brief comment. They include
diverse social practices that are mediated through specific instruments of classification,
registration, calculation, and so on, that may discipline social action. Technologies have a
key role in the selection and retention of specific imaginaries insofar as they provide refer-
ence points not only in meaning-making but also in the coordination of actions within and
across specific personal interactions, organizations and networks, and institutional orders.
In this sense they are important meaning-making instruments deployed by agents to trans-
late specific social construals into social construction and hence to structure social life.
Policies, policy decisions techniques, policy instruments and policy evaluation are import-
ant technologies in this regard because each, in its own way, contributes to the selection
and retention of its associated policy discourses, often transforming them at the same time
(cf. Sum 2009c on policy technologies relating to competitiveness).4 This is why one must
look beyond agenda setting, policy discourses and policy formulation to examine how pol-
icies actually get implemented and with what effects, whether intended or not.
CPE draws on different theoretical and empirical approaches for each of these aspects
but aims to produce a coherent rather than eclectic account. Its analysis of semiosis is
inspired by diverse cultural turns; its approach to agency is inspired by various analyses of
assujetissement (subjectivation), identity formation, learning, and reflexivity (including,
in the present context, of course, policy learning); its analytical toolkit for technologies
includes, inter alia, Foucault on disciplinary normalization and governmentality, govern-
mentality studies more generally, actor-network theory, and research on material culture;
and its view of structuration builds on Jessop’s strategic-relational approach (1982, 2007),
which, in the present context, would study the strategic selectivity of advocacy coalitions,
partnerships, policy networks, policy transfer mechanisms, and other aspects of policy
regimes. Attention to all four aspects and their interaction is required to explain why and
how some construals are selected, get embodied/embrained in individual agents or routi-
nized in organizational operations, are facilitated or hindered by specific social technolo-
gies and affordances, and become embedded in specific social structures ranging from
routine interactions via institutional orders to large-scale social formations. Success or
failure in this regard also depends on how specific construals correspond to the properties
of the ‘raw materials’ (including social phenomena such as actors and institutions) that
provide the target and/or tools of attempts to construct social reality. As indicated, this
provides the basis for thinking about semiosis in terms of variation, selection, and reten-
tion and hence about the actors and factors that affect the movement from construal to
construction.
In stressing the interdependence and co-evolution of these interrelated semiotic (cul-
tural) and extra-semiotic (structural) moments in complexity reduction and their conse-
quences for meaning-making and social structuration, CPE aims to avoid two
complementary but unequally threatening theoretical temptations. The first occurs in
forms of structuralism and social determinism that reduce agents and actions to passive
bearers of self-reproducing, self-transforming social structures. There is little support
nowadays for such positions. The second temptation is the sociological imperialism of
radical social constructivism, according to which social reality is reducible to participants’
340 B. Jessop
meanings and understandings of their social world. This sort of reductionism generates an
arbitrary account of the social world that ignores the unacknowledged conditions of action
as well as the many and varied emergent properties of action that go un- or mis-recognized
by the relevant actors. It also ignores the many and varied struggles to transform the con-
ditions of action, to alter actors’ meanings and understandings, and to modify emergent
properties (and their feedback effects on the social world). It also leads to the voluntarist
vacuity of certain lines of discourse analysis, which seem to imply that agents can will
almost anything into existence in and through an appropriately articulated discourse. CPE
offers a ‘third way’ between a structuralist Scylla and a constructivist Charybdis. It aims
to explore the dialectic of the emergent extra-semiotic features of social relations and the
constitutive role of semiosis. It is in this context that the notion of the ‘imaginary’ is intro-
duced and elaborated below.
Variation, selection, and retention in semiosis

Another feature of the CPE approach recommended here is its integration of the three evo-
lutionary mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention into semiotic analysis. This
does not entail the sort of evolutionism that posits pre-determined sequences. Rather, an
evolutionary turn highlights the dialectic of path-dependency and path-shaping that
emerges from the contingent co-evolution of semiotic and extra-semiotic processes that
make some meaningful efforts at complexity reduction more resonant than others. This
calls for a shift from a mainly semiotic analysis of individual texts or discursive genres to
a concern with the semiotic and extra-semiotic mechanisms that together shape the varia-
tion, selection, and retention of particular imaginaries in a continuing dialectic of path-
dependent path-shaping. Discourse analysis tends to focus on specific texts in particular
contexts, to undertake static comparative analyses of certain types of text at different
times, or to study changes in linguistic corpora. A thorough CPE analysis would include
the role of extra-semiotic (material) as well as semiotic factors in the contingent emer-
gence (variation), subsequent privileging (selection), and ongoing realization (retention)
of specific discursive and material practices (for two approaches to these processes, com-
pare Sum 2004, 2005 with Fairclough et al. 2004 and Jessop 2004).
A useful concept here is ‘sedimentation’. This covers all forms of routinization that
lead, inter alia, to forgetting the contested origins of discourses, practices, processes, and
structures. This gives them the form of objective facts of life, especially in the social
world. In turn, ‘politicization’ covers challenges to such objectivation that aim to denatu-
ralize the semiotic and material (extra-semiotic) features of what has become sedimented.
Sedimentation and (re-)politicization are not confined to a specific ‘political’ domain
(separate from others); they are contingent aspects of all forms of social life (Glynos and
Howarth 2007). Indeed, the role of extra-semiotic mechanisms seems to grow in the
movement from the disruption of sedimented discourses and relatively structured com-
plexity through the (re-)politicization of discourse and the rise of relatively unstructured
complexity and thence to new forms of sedimentation and structuration
Co-evolution of semiosis and structuration

Third, turning to wider evolutionary and institutional issues in political economy, there is
constant variation, witting or unwitting, in apparently routine social practices. Simplifying
the analysis in Fairclough et al. (2004) and extending it to include material as well as sem-
iotic factors, the following factors shape the co-evolution of semiosis and structuration.
(a) Continuing variation in discourses and practices, due to their incomplete mastery,
their skilful adaptation in specific circumstances, new challenges or crises, or
other semiotic or material causes.
(b) Selection of particular discourses (the privileging of just some available, includ-
ing emergent, discourses) for interpreting events, legitimizing actions, and (per-
haps self-reflexively) representing social phenomena. Semiotic factors act here
by influencing the resonance of discourses in personal, organizational and institu-
tional, and broader meta-narrative terms and by limiting possible combinations of
semiosis and semiotic practices in a given semiotic order. Material factors also
operate here through conjunctural or entrenched power relations, path-depend-
ency, and structural selectivities.
(c) Retention of some resonant discourses (e.g. inclusion in an actor’s habitus, hexis,
and personal identity, enactment in organizational routines, integration into insti-
tutional rules, objectification in the built environment,5 material and intellectual

technologies, and articulation into widely accepted accumulation strategies, state
projects, or hegemonic visions). The greater the range of sites (horizontally and
vertically)6 in which resonant discourses are retained, the greater is the potential
for effective institutionalization and integration into patterns of structured coher-
ence and durable compromise. The constraining influences of complex, recipro-
cal interdependences will also recursively affect the scope for retaining resonant
discourses.
(d) Reinforcement insofar as certain procedural devices favor these discourses and
their associated practices and also filter out contrary discourses and practices.
This can involve both discursive selectivity (e.g. genre chains, styles, identities)
and material selectivity (e.g. the privileging of certain dominant sites of discourse
through structural biases in specific organizational and institutional orders). Such
discursive and material mechanisms recursively strengthen appropriate genres,
styles, and strategies and selectively eliminate inappropriate alternatives and are
most powerful where they operate across many sites to promote complementary
discourses across society.
(e) Selective recruitment, inculcation, and retention by relevant social groups, orga-
nizations, institutions, etc., of social agents whose predispositions fit maximally
with requirements the preceding requirements.
This list emphasizes the role of semiosis and its material supports in securing social repro-
duction through the selection and retention of mutually supportive discourses. Conversely,
the absence or relative weakness of one or more of these semiotic and/or extra-semiotic
conditions may undermine previously dominant discourses and/or block the selection and
retention of appropriate innovative discourses. This poses questions about the regulariza-
tion of practices in normal conditions and about possible sources of radical transforma-
tion, especially in periods of crisis. These are often moments of profound disorientation
due to rapid social change and/or crises that trigger major semiotic and material innova-
tions in the social world. It should be noted here that the semiotic and extra-semiotic space
for variation, selection, and retention is contingent, not pre-given. This also holds for the
various and varying semiotic and material elements whose selection and retention occurs
in this ‘ecological’ space. In a complex world there are many sites and scales on which
such evolutionary processes operate and, for present purposes, what matters is how local
sites and scales come to be articulated to form more global (general) sites and scales and
how the latter in turn frame, constrain, and enable local possibilities (Wickham 1987).
342 B. Jessop
These interrelations are themselves shaped by the ongoing interaction between semiotic
and extra-semiotic processes.
Applying these general principles to political economy (especially in capitalist social
formations), two complementary lines of reflection and research are proposed. On the one
hand, given the infinity of possible meaningful communications and (mis)understandings
enabled by semiosis, how do extra-semiotic as well as semiotic factors affect the variation,
selection, and retention of semiosis and its associated practices in ordering, reproducing
and transforming capitalist social formations and their various spatio-temporal features?
More concretely, given the meaning-making and path-shaping potential of competing eco-
nomic and political imaginaries, why do only some of these get selected and institutional-
ized and thereby come to co-constitute and embed economic subjectivities, interests,
activities, organizations, institutions, structural ensembles, and the dynamics of economic
performance? In short, how do such imaginaries come to provide not only a semiotic
frame for construing the world but also contributing to its construction? And, on the other
hand, given the structural contradictions, strategic dilemmas, and overall improbability of
capitalist reproduction, especially during its recurrent crises, what role does semiosis play
in construing, constructing, and temporarily stabilizing capitalist social formations at least
within specific spatio-temporal fixes and their associated zones of relative stability?7
Again, more concretely, and by way of illustration, in the face of economic and political
crises, what contribution do established or new economic and political imaginaries make,
if at all, to crisis-management and resolution?
Two provisional hypotheses grounded in these general considerations suggest them-
selves at this point, though neither has been fully tested in CPE work. First, the relative
importance of semiosis declines from the stage of variation in imaginaries through the
stage when they are selectively translated into specific material practices and institutional
dynamics to the stage when they are embodied in a structurally coherent set of social rela-
tions with a corresponding spatio-temporal fix. Second, the relative weight of semiotic and
extra-semiotic mechanisms varies across social fields. No great leap of imagination is
needed to suggest that extra-semiotic mechanisms are less important in theology and philos-
ophy than in natural science and technology and that, conversely, that semiosis matters more
in the former than the latter. However, because every field is always already semiotic and
also socially structured, each has its own mix of semiotic and extra-semiotic mechanisms.
Governmental technologies, hegemony, and domination

This fourth feature merits special comment because it is often overlooked in discourse
analysis and heterodox political economy. In this version of CPE technologies refer not to
the productive forces involved in the appropriation and transformation of nature but to the
mechanisms involved in the governance of conduct and, a fortiori, in the production of
hegemony. While the fashionable Anglo-Foucauldian governmentality studies approach
explores the many efforts to decompose power into political rationalities, governmental
programs, technologies and techniques of government (Miller and Rose 2008), it tends to
focus on micro-social relations at the expense of broader macro-social issues such as
hegemony, domination, state power, or capital accumulation. Unlike Foucault (2008, p.
186), these students of governmentality are less interested in how the micro-analytics of
power gets ‘scaled up’ to macro-level questions about political economy and the state.
Foucault himself explored how capitalism had penetrated deeply into everyday life, espe-
cially as it required diverse techniques of power to enable capital to exploit people’s bodies
and their time, transforming them into labor power and labor time respectively to create
surplus profit (for discussion, see Jessop 2010). CPE combines this line of critical inquiry
with Gramscian interests in the forms and mechanisms of hegemony, passive revolution,
and domination. At stake here is how micro-technologies come to be assembled and artic-
ulated to form more encompassing and enduring sets of social relations that are embedded
in the habitus, hexis, and the common sense of everyday life but also provide the substra-
tum of institutional orders and even broader patterns of social domination. Such questions
are addressed in Sum’s synthesis of Foucault and Gramsci, through which she examines
how techniques of government are strategically (hence selectively) deployed across differ-
ent discourses and sites of action to produce hegemony and consolidate states of domina-
tion (Sum 2004, 2005). To Foucauldian notions such as disciplinary normalization,
governmentality, expertise, and truth regimes, Sum’s work on economic competitiveness
and clusters adds concepts such as knowledge apparatuses (e.g. numbers, standards, pro-
grams, guidelines, scorecards) and knowledge brands as well as common discursive strat-
agems (e.g. naturalization, inevitabilization, otherization, nominalization) (Sum 2009b,

2010). She also relates such governmental technologies to issues of sub-hegemony, resist-
ance, counter-hegemony, and the possibilities of fraud, corruption, and force as alternative
means of securing domination.
Ideologiekritik and the critique of domination

Complementing its distinctive approach to critical semiotic analysis, CPE aims to contrib-
ute to the critique of orthodox political economy regarded both as a discipline and as a
field of social relations. As a discipline, political economy tends to naturalize or reify its
basic categories (such as land, machines, the division of labor, money, commodities, the
information economy), to offer impoverished accounts of how subjects and subjectivities
are formed, and to neglect the question of how different modes of calculation emerge,
come to be institutionalized, and get modified. CPE critiques the categories and methods
of orthodox political economy and emphasizes the inevitable contextuality and historicity
of its claims to knowledge. It follows critical political economists in regarding capital not
as a thing but as ‘a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of
things’ (cf. Marx 1967, p. 717). Thus it views technical and economic objects as socially
constructed, historically specific, more or less socially (dis)embedded in broader networks
of social relations and institutional ensembles, more or less embodied (‘incorporated’ and
embrained), and in need of continuing social ‘repair’ work for their reproduction. The
same points hold for the categories of mainstream political science and/or (neo-)realist
international relations theory. The former tends to take the institutional separation of the
economic and political for granted and to focus on how the governmental institutions are
deployed to pursue objective interests. Realist and neorealist international relations theory
also tends to naturalize national states and national interests in explaining the necessary
logic of state action. In contrast, the present CPE approach examines state power as the
discursively- and institutionally-mediated condensation of a changing balance of forces. It
examines struggles to shape the identities, subjectivities, and interests of the forces
engaged in political struggle as well as to transform the state system and its various selec-
tivities. Moreover, regarding political economy as a complex field of socially constructed
social relations with distinctive emergent properties and effects, CPE involves a form of
political intervention that goes beyond Ideologiekritik. The latter serves at best to reveal
the immanent contradictions and inconsistencies in relatively coherent meaning systems,8 to
uncover the ideal and material interests behind meaning systems and ideologies more gener-
ally, and to contribute to the re-politicization of sedimented, taken-for-granted discourses
344 B. Jessop
and practices. CPE also aims to explore the semiotic and extra-semiotic mechanisms
involved in selecting and consolidating the dominance and/or hegemony of some meaning
systems and ideologies over others. This in turn offers more solid foundations to under-
stand the nature of different forms of social domination, to develop Herrschaftskritik (cri-
tique of domination), and to contribute thereby to critical policy studies.
On economic imaginaries
I now consider how these general remarks can be re-specified in investigations of the eco-
nomic field broadly interpreted. In other contexts, it would be more appropriate to elabo-
rate them in relation to other fields of social practice, such as technology, law, politics,
education, science, or religion. Let me note immediately that the ‘economy’ is a histori-
cally constituted category with changing denotation and connotations and that its meaning
is heavily contested (on the conceptual history of the ‘economy’ as an economic category,
see, for example, Burkhardt 1992, Fey 1936, Finley 1973, Foucault 2008, Marx 1963,
Polanyi 1968, Tribe 1978). Nonetheless its use simplifies a complex social world and has
semiotic and material consequences in making sense of that world and organizing eco-
nomic activities. Let me note, second, that, through variation, selection, and retention,
economic ideas may have a performative, constitutive force in shaping economic forms
and relations (see, for example, Callon 1998, MacKenzie et al. 2007, Mirowski 1994).
CPE contributes to these social scientific commonplaces by highlighting the role of
discursively-selective ‘imaginaries’ and structurally-selective institutions in the making of
economic practices and, a fortiori, economic policies. Imaginaries are semiotic systems
that frame individual subjects’ lived experience of an inordinately complex world and/or
inform collective calculation about that world. They comprise a specific configuration of
genres, discourses and styles and thereby constitute the semiotic moment of a network of
social practices in a given social field, institutional order, or wider social formation (Fair-
clough 2003). Genres are distinctive ways of acting and interacting viewed in their specif-
ically semiotic aspect and, as such, they serve to regularize (inter)action. Examples
include initial public offering documents, political party manifestos, and university mis-
sion statements. Discourses represent other social practices (and themselves too) together
with relevant aspects of the material world from the vantage point of particular positions
in the social world. Illustrations include particular economic discourses, such as mercan-
tilism, liberalism, the ‘social market economy’, or revolutionary syndicalism. Styles are
ways of being, identities in their specifically semiotic (as opposed to bodily/material)
aspect. Two instances are the ‘new’ managerial style depicted by Boltanski and Chiapello
(2007) and the flexible, entrepreneurial, risk-taking, self-responsible individual of
advanced liberalism (Miller and Rose 2008). Genres, discourses and styles are dialecti-
cally related. Thus discourses may be enacted as genres and inculcated as styles and, in
addition, get externalized in a range of objective social and/or material facts (e.g. nature as
modified by human action, physical infrastructure, new technologies, and new institu-
tional orders). Viewed in these terms, an economic imaginary is a semiotic system that
gives meaning and shape to the ‘economic’ field. The ‘knowledge-based economy’, for
example, can be read as a distinctive semiotic order that (re-) articulates various genres,
discourses, and styles around a novel economic strategy, state project, and hegemonic
vision and that affects diverse institutional orders and the lifeworld (see Jessop 2004,
2008). Whereas the ‘imaginary’ is a general term for semiotic systems that shape lived
experience in a complex world, ‘institution’ belongs to a family of terms that identify
mechanisms that embed lived experience across different social spheres.
In terms of what orthodox economics misleadingly describes as the macro-level, CPE

distinguishes the ‘actually existing economy’ as the chaotic sum of all economic activities
(broadly defined as concerned with the social appropriation and transformation of nature
for the purposes of substantive provisioning)9 from the ‘economy’ (or, better, ‘economies’
in the plural) as an imaginatively narrated, more or less coherent subset of these activities
occurring within specific spatio-temporal frameworks. The totality of economic activities
is so unstructured and complex that it cannot be an object of effective calculation, man-
agement, governance, or guidance. Instead such practices are always oriented to subsets of
economic relations (economic systems, subsystems, or ensembles) that have been semiot-
ically and, perhaps organizationally and institutionally, fixed as appropriate objects of
intervention. Economic imaginaries have a crucial constitutive role in this regard. They
identify, privilege, and seek to stabilize some economic activities from the totality of eco-
nomic relations and transform them into objects of observation, calculation, and govern-
ance. Technologies of economic governance, operating sometimes more semiotically,

sometimes more materially,10 constitute their own objects of governance rather than
emerging in order to, or operating with the effect that, they govern already pre-constituted
objects (Jessop 1990, 1997).
Economic imaginaries are always selectively defined – due to limited cognitive capac-
ities and to the discursive and material biases of specific epistemes and economic para-
digms. They typically exclude elements – usually unintentionally – that are vital to the
overall performance of the subset of economic (and extra-economic) relations that have
been identified. Such exclusions limit in turn the efficacy of economic forecasting, man-
agement, planning, guidance, governance, etc., because such practices do not (indeed,
cannot) take account of excluded elements and their impact. Moreover, if they are to prove
more than ‘arbitrary, rationalistic, and willed’ (Gramsci 1971, pp. 376–377), they must
have some significant, albeit necessarily partial, correspondence to real material interde-
pendencies in the actually existing economy and/or in the relations between economic and
extra-economic activities. Similar arguments would apply, with appropriate changes, to
so-called meso- or micro-level economic phenomena, such as industrial districts or indi-
vidual enterprises.
Imagined economies are discursively constituted and materially reproduced on many
sites and scales, in different spatio-temporal contexts, and over various spatio-temporal
horizons. They extend from one-off transactions through stable economic organizations,
networks, and clusters to ‘macro-economic’ regimes. While there is usually massive scope
for variation in individual transactions, the medium- to long-term semiotic and material
reproduction demands of meso-complexes and macroeconomic regimes narrow this scope
considerably. Recursive selection of semiotic practices and extra-semiotic processes at
these scales tends to reduce inappropriate variation and thereby secure the ‘requisite vari-
ety’ (constrained heterogeneity rather than simple uniformity) that supports the structural
coherence of economic activities. Stable semiotic orders, discursive selectivities, social
learning, path-dependencies, power relations, patterned complementarities, and material
selectivities all become more significant, the more that material interdependencies and/or
issues of spatial and intertemporal articulation increase within and across diverse func-
tional systems and the lifeworld. Yet this growing set of constraints also reveals the fragil-
ity and, indeed, improbability of the smooth reproduction of complex social orders.
Economic imaginaries at the meso- and macro-levels develop as economic, political,
and intellectual forces seek to (re)define specific subsets of economic activities as sub-
jects, sites, and stakes of competition and/or as objects of regulation and to articulate strat-
egies, projects and visions oriented to these imagined economies. Among the main forces
346 B. Jessop
involved in such efforts are political parties, think tanks, bodies such as the OECD and
World Bank, organized interests such as business associations and trade unions, and social
movements; the mass media are also crucial intermediaries in mobilizing elite and/or pop-
ular support behind competing imaginaries.11 These forces tend to manipulate power and
knowledge to secure recognition of the boundaries, geometries, temporalities, typical eco-
nomic agents, tendencies and counter-tendencies, distinctive overall dynamic, and repro-
duction requirements of different imagined economies (Daly 1991, Miller and Rose
2008). They also seek to develop new structural and organizational forms that will help to
institutionalize these boundaries, geometries, and temporalities in an appropriate spatio-
temporal fix that can displace and/or defer capital’s inherent contradictions and crisis-ten-
dencies. However, by virtue of competing economic imaginaries, competing efforts to
institute them materially, and an inevitable incompleteness in the specification of their
respective economic and extra-economic preconditions, each ‘imagined economy’ is only
ever partially constituted. There are always interstitial, residual, marginal, irrelevant,
recalcitrant and plain contradictory elements that escape any attempt to identify, govern,
and stabilize a given ‘economic arrangement’ or broader ‘economic order’ (Malpas and
Wickham 1995, Jessop 2002). These provide important sources of resistance and help pre-
serve a reservoir of semiotic and material resources that enable dominant systems
(through the agency of their associated social forces) to adapt to new challenges through
their re-articulation and recombination in the service of power.
Relatively successful economic imaginaries presuppose a substratum of substantive
economic relations and instrumentalities as their elements. Conversely, where an imagi-
nary has been successfully operationalized and institutionalized, it transforms and natural-
izes these elements and instrumentalities into the moments of a specific economy with
specific emergent properties. This process is mediated, as indicated above, through the
interaction among specific economic imaginaries, appropriately supportive economic
agents – individual or collective – with appropriate modes of calculation and behavioral or
operational dispositions, specific technologies that sustain and confirm these imaginaries
(e.g. statistics, indexes, benchmarks, records), and structural constellations that limit the
pursuit of contrary or antagonistic imaginaries, activities, or technologies.
A cultural political economy of crisis

A significant moment in the development of economic imaginaries is the emergence of
crises affecting economic identities and performance. Crises often create profound cogni-
tive and strategic disorientation and trigger proliferation in interpretations and proposed
solutions. As the critical policy studies literature emphasizes, a crisis is never a purely
objective, extra-semiotic moment or process that automatically produces a particular
response or outcome. A CPE approach combines semiotic and material analyses to exam-
ine: (a) how crises emerge when established patterns of dealing with structural contradic-
tions, their crisis-tendencies, and strategic dilemmas no longer work as expected and,
indeed, when continued reliance thereon may aggravate matters; (b) how contestation over
the meaning of the crisis shapes responses through processes of variation, selection, and
retention that are mediated through a changing mix of semiotic and extra-semiotic mecha-
nisms. A crisis is most acute when crisis-tendencies and tensions accumulate across inter-
related moments of a given structure or system, limiting manoeuvre in regard to any
particular problem. Shifts in the balance of forces may also intensify crisis-tendencies by
weakening or resisting established modes of crisis-management (Offe 1984, pp. 35–64). This
creates a situation of more or less acute crisis, a potential moment of decisive transformation,
and an opportunity for decisive intervention. Thus crisis situations are unbalanced: they
are objectively overdetermined but subjectively indeterminate (Debray 1973, p. 113). This
opens space for strategic interventions to significantly redirect the course of events rather
than ‘muddle through’ in the (perhaps forlorn) hope that the situation will eventually
resolve itself. Moreover, as Milton Friedman (1962, p. 32) put it hyperbolically but tell-
ingly: ‘[o]nly a crisis produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are
taken depend on the ideas that are lying around’. This indicates that a ‘war of position’,
i.e. preparing the cultural and social ground for crisis-induced strategic interventions, will
also prove important to the nature and outcome of crisis-management and crisis response.
In short, crises are potentially path-shaping moments that provoke responses that are
mediated through semiotic-cum-material processes of variation, selection, and retention.
First, even in normal times, there is continuing variation as actors deliberately or unin-
tentionally redefine the sites, subjects, and stakes of action and articulate and experiment
with innovative strategies, tactics, projects and visions. This is even more likely during
crises as various forms of disorientation stimulate alternative discourses and practices
rooted in old and new semiotic systems and practical routines. Diverse economic, polit-
ical, and socio-cultural narratives may intersect as they seek to give meaning to current
problems by construing them in terms of past failures and future possibilities. While many
visions will invoke, repeat, or remix established genres, discourses, and styles; others may
develop, if only partially, a ‘poetry for the future’ that resonates with new potentialities
(Marx 1996, pp. 32–34).
Second, while most of this variation is arbitrary and short-lived, lacking long-term
consequences for overall social dynamics, some innovations do get selected. In the case of
interpretations of the crisis and its implications, for example, the plausibility of narratives
and their associated strategies and projects depends on their resonance (and hence capa-
city to reinterpret and mobilize) with the personal (including shared) narratives of signific-
ant classes, strata, social categories, or groups affected by the crisis. Moreover, although
many plausible narratives are advanced, their narrators will not be equally effective in
conveying their messages and securing support for the lessons they hope to draw. This
depends on the prevailing ‘web of interlocution’12 and its discursive selectivities, the
organization and operation of the mass media, the role of intellectuals in public life, and
the structural biases and strategically selective operations of various public and private
apparatuses of economic, political, and ideological domination.13 Such matters take us
beyond questions of narrativity and specific organizational or institutional genres towards
issues of the extra-discursive conditions of narrative appeal and stable semiotic orders and
their reinforcement by various structural mechanisms. That these institutional and meta-
narratives resonate powerfully does not mean that they should be taken at face value. All
narratives are selective, appropriate some arguments, and combine them in specific ways.
So we must also consider what goes unstated or silent, repressed or suppressed, in specific
discourses. Nonetheless, if the crisis can be plausibly interpreted as a crisis in the existing
economic order, minor reforms may first be tried to restore that order. If this fails or the
crisis is initially interpreted primarily as a crisis of that order, more radical changes may be
explored. In both cases conflicts are likely over the best policies to resolve the crisis and
allocate its costs as different social forces propose new visions, projects, programs, and
policies and a struggle for hegemony develops.
Third, we must explore the discursive and extra-discursive mechanisms that select
some discourses for further elaboration and articulation with other discourses and that
contribute to their subsequent institutionalization. There is many a slip between the discur-
sive resonance of new imaginaries in a given conjuncture and an enduring institutional
348 B. Jessop
materiality. It is one thing to (re-)politicize discourses in the context of the apparently

unstructured complexity associated with crisis, it is another to move to sedimented (taken-
for-granted) discourse and seemingly structured complexity. This raises the question of
the correspondence, always limited and provisional, between new imaginaries and real, or
potentially realizable, sets of material interdependences in the economy and its embed-
ding in wider sets of social relations (for studies on the ‘knowledge-based economy’, see
Jessop 2004, 2008; on competitiveness, Sum 2009b; on the Green New Deal, see below).
This poses crucial problems around delimiting the origins of a crisis in space-time,
establishing whether it is purely economic or has broader roots and effects, and reducing
its complexities to identifiable causes that could be targeted in the search for solutions (cf.
Gramsci’s comments on the complexity of the origins of the Great Depression and, hence,
the difficulties of identifying them, 1995, p. 219; and, for a study of the 1997 ‘Asian’ cri-
sis in South Korea on these lines, see Ji 2003). Economic imaginaries have a crucial role
to play in both respects. In addition, of course, complexity reduction is never wholly inno-
cent. It is intimately connected to diverse forms of social contestation, alliance building,
and forms of domination. Likewise, given a crisis in/of a given social order, the emer-
gence and consolidation of a new economic regime does not occur purely through techno-
logical innovation and changes in the labor process, enterprise forms, and forms of
competition. Wider ideational and institutional innovation going beyond the economy nar-
rowly conceived is needed, promoted and supported by political, intellectual, and moral
leadership. This includes a new ‘economic imaginary’ that is articulated to new state
projects and hegemonic visions that can be translated into material, social, and spatio-
temporal fixes that would jointly underpin a relative ‘structured coherence’ to support
continued accumulation. If this proves impossible, the new project will, to quote Gramsci
(1971, pp. 376–377) again, prove ‘arbitrary, rationalistic, and willed’ rather than ‘organic’.
Such arguments are exemplified in his analyses of Americanism and Fordism in the USA
and the problems of translating this crisis solution to Europe (Gramsci 1971, pp. 277–318).
Let us now consider the multifaceted global financial crisis that began to emerge well
before it attracted general attention in 2007–2008. This complex set of events has already
led to countless interpretations, explanations, strategic plans, and specific policy recom-
mendations. These range from claims about the terminal crisis of capitalism through to the
equally fanciful belief that it was a temporary blip in an otherwise well-functioning, self-
correcting free market system. Such variation in interpretations is unsurprising given the
complexity of the crisis and the wide spectrum of entry points and standpoints that could
be taken towards it. Even ‘mainstream’ interpretations, explanations, blame, and proposed
solutions reflect different regional, national, and macro-regional economies experiences of
the global financial crisis and its broader repercussions. What matters from a CPE view-
point is which of these many and diverse interpretations get selected as the basis for pri-
vate and public attempts to resolve the crisis. This is not reducible to narrative resonance,
argumentative force, or scientific merit alone (although each has its role in certain con-
texts) but also depends on structural, agential, and technological14 selectivities. Critical in
this regard is that most accounts lack the support of economic and political actors with
enough economic, administrative, fiscal, or legislative resources to offer ‘necessary’ insti-
tutional and policy solutions on the most relevant scales of action.
In the advanced capitalist economies, especially in the leading neo-liberal regimes, the
ways in which the crisis has been interpreted and measures identified and pursued are typ-
ical of liberal-democratic political regimes in the face of crisis. In short, generous (and
often ill-defined) discretionary powers have been given to the executive, or its nominees,
to solve the crisis (Scheuerman 2002). In the present case, exceptional measures with limited
consultation were declared essential to ensure timely, targeted, and temporary action to
return the economy to health. While this has facilitated a rapid return to ‘business as
usual’, the concentration and centralization of political power in the hands of economic
and political elites and the extent of agreement among the leading political parties has
largely closed the space for democratic debate and accountability at the same time as it
opened one for populist appeals and diversions. One effect of this has been that the effect-
ive scope of debate over policy was quickly narrowed down to a limited set of alternatives.
This was useful for financial elites and the political class in the leading capitalist econo-
mies because, by confining serious debate to policy choices, however wide-ranging, it
suggested that correct policy choices can solve the crisis, curing its symptoms and remov-
ing its deeper causes. This diverted attention from more basic questions of institutional
design and, more radically, of the basic social relations that reproduce crisis-tendencies
and shape the forms that they take (cf. Wolff 2008). Challenging this implication is an
important part of Ideologiekritik in this period and also relates to the structural selectivities
of economic and political orders.
My current research15 suggests that the dominant interpretation in liberal market econ-
omies that has been ‘selected’ after an intense private and public debate is that, with some
differentiation reflecting specific economic, political, and institutional locations and inter-
ests, this is a crisis in finance-led accumulation or, at most, in neo-liberalism. As such it
could be resolved through a massive, but strictly temporary, financial stimulus, recapitali-
zation of the biggest (but not all) vulnerable banks, tighter regulation, and a reformed (but
still neoliberal) international economic regime. This will permit a return to neoliberal
‘business as usual’ at some unfortunate but necessary cost to the public purse and some
re-balancing of the financial and ‘real’ economies.16 In other capitalist regimes, the crisis
is more often read by leading forces as a crisis of finance-led accumulation, prompting
efforts to roll this policy approach back, especially in the financial sector, through more
radical re-regulation, and through greater investment in the ‘real economy’. In other capi-
talist regimes, however, the crisis is more often interpreted as a crisis of neoliberalism and
this has led to a divergence in domestic and international economic policies: rolling back
neoliberalism at home and seeking stricter regulations on neoliberalism in various supra-
national and international contexts. Even in more neo-statist or neo-corporatist advanced
capitalist economies, however, where the legitimacy of earlier neoliberal policy adjust-
ments has been questioned and calls are being made for stricter regulation of financial
markets in various supranational and international contexts, this has yet not prompted
leading forces to question the broader commitment to world market integration. The feasi-
bility of these alternative responses will depend on the integration of different economic
spaces into the world market, the respective strengths of the political regimes promoting
them domestically and in international arenas, and the substantive rationality of the
proposals in the light of the more general global economic crisis, the worsening crises
affecting food, fuel, water, climate change, and the environment more generally. Such
crisis-tendencies indicate that, although a neoliberal restoration of ‘business as usual’ may
displace and/or defer the costs of financial crisis-management, it cannot resolve more
fundamental impending crises. Much will also depend on how problems that have been
merely postponed or displaced will be addressed when the crisis re-emerges and how
those committed to alternatives can prepare the ground for the next set of encounters in
key economic spaces and states.
More generally, the crisis was quickly thematized at elite levels in the advanced capi-
talist economies in terms of variable combinations of: (1) a return to Keynesian demand
management nationally, regionally, and globally; (2) restructuring and recapitalization of
350 B. Jessop
banks and isolating toxic assets in state-owned or supported ‘bad banks’; (3) building a
new international financial architecture; (4) remoralization of capitalism in tune with cor-
porate responsibility and responsible competitiveness; (5) a Green New Deal; and (6) the
turn to rapidly growing market economies like Brazil, Russia, India and China (the discur-
sively construed ‘BRIC’ quartet) as offering good prospects for investment. The first
theme is evident in the turn from a period of ‘private Keynesianism’ when consumer debt
sustained demand despite declining real wages to pursuit of state-sponsored Keynesianism
with massive expansion of demand through quantitative easing (releasing money also for
investment bubbles in raw materials, emerging economies, and so on) and short-term
stimulus to some of the hardest hit industrial sectors. The second response is a central
plank of crisis-management in neoliberal and other economies and has been pursued
through emergency legislation, executive discretion, and behind a veil of secrecy. It
resulted in the nationalization and/or recapitalization of ‘impaired’ banks (notably in Ice-
land, Ireland, the USA, and the UK, plus those Baltic States and Eastern and Central Euro-
pean economies that took a radical neoliberal turn and, inter alia, experienced real-estate
booms on the back of cheap loans). The third response is proving much harder to realize in
a concerted and coherent way, even with the expansion of the G8 to the G20 economies
and key international bodies, and the key players seem to have agreed that more free trade,
de-regulation, and so on, are required. The opportunity for tighter regulation seems
already to have been lost as the semblance of ‘business as usual’ has been restored –
although few experts claim the crisis is fully resolved. At least the much-feared return to
protectionism is absent. The fourth response is largely rhetorical and reflected in demands
for responsible and green competitiveness (Sum 2009b). The Green New Deal remains a
floating signifier, which is being narrated as capitalism’s best hope to create jobs, restore
growth, and limit climate change but which is also being re-contextualized primarily on
neoliberal lines. There is also little agreement on how to proceed, let alone how to trans-
late promised action into binding multilateral commitments, as can be seen from the out-
come of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit on climate change. Finally, on the BRIC
economies as the next economic frontier and efforts to translate them into an inter-
regional bloc, see Jessop and Sum (2010).
To illustrate some of these points, let me first refer to the disorienting impact of the
financial crisis. The expert witness is Alan Greenspan, Chair of the Federal Reserve
(1987–2006). This is an extract from a Congressional Hearing on 23 October 2008:
Greenspan: Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions

to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.
Questioner: Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you
wish you had not made?
Greenspan: Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it
is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact. (Greenspan 2008)
One quotation proves nothing but it is emblematic of a more general shock to the neolib-
eral mindset, especially during the panic of late 2008. Nor does it follow that the advo-
cates of neoliberalism will abandon the field of ideological contestation or resign from
further involvement in decision-making. The emblematic case here is, of course, Ben
Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor as Chair of the Federal Reserve, who despite his major
role as an architect of crisis, has been confirmed by Senate for a second term as an archi-
tect of crisis-management. On the contrary, whatever the scope for discursive variation
among those affected by the crisis and its resonance in populist measures against bankers’
bonuses, other forms of selectivity – structural, agential, and technological – in the current
conjuncture have tended to concentrate power in the hands of the same economic and
political interests that contributed to the global financial crisis.
In short, following the panic of late 2008, the dominant forces in the leading capitalist
economies have managed to normalize the situation, individuals have accepted the crisis
as a fact of life and turned to coping strategies, populist anger against ‘banksters’ and pol-
iticians has been defused, and there is a return to capitalist normality. Given a return to
‘business as usual’ in the short- to medium-term in the advanced capitalist economies, the
more interesting question is what sort of economic imaginary is likely to shape a meaning-
ful ‘post-finance-led’ or ‘post-neoliberal’ macroeconomic order in an increasingly inte-
grated world market.
Such an imaginary would need to satisfy two requirements. First, it should be able to
inform and shape economic strategies for all scales from the firm to the wider economy,
for all territorial scales from the local through regional to the national or supra-national
scale, and for most market forces and their non-market supports. And, second, it should
inform and shape state projects and hegemonic visions on different scales, providing guid-
ance in the face of political and social uncertainty and providing a means to integrate pri-
vate, institutional, and wider public narratives about past experiences, present difficulties,
and future prospects. The more of these fields a new economic imaginary can address, the
more resonant and influential it will be. This explains the appeal of Fordism and the know-
ledge-based economy in the last and current long waves of growth respectively and indi-
cates the potential of the ‘Green New Deal’ (or GND) as a post-neoliberal economic
imaginary.
Drawing on the mythology of Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ in the last great global depres-
sion and social contract rhetoric, the GND has been proposed from many different per-
spectives. It also has the power to frame broader struggles over political, intellectual and
moral leadership on various scales as well as over more concrete fields of technical and
economic reform. The basic idea is being articulated on many scales from the local (even
under the anti-environmental Bush administration, climate change and ecological modern-
ization was already on some local and state-level political agendas) to the national (notably
in Norway, Germany, and China) and supranational (with strong engagement from the
European Union) and up to the global (its sponsors include the United Nations Environmental
Programme). It also has attractions to diverse organizational and institutional sites from
firms to states, in many systems besides the economy in its narrow sense, such as science
and technology, law and politics, education and religion, and in the public sphere and the
lifeworld. Thus it is being articulated across fields as different as technology (eco-technol-
ogies, energy efficiency), the productive economy (green collar jobs, sustainable develop-
ment, ecological modernization, low carbon economy), the financial system (cap and
trade, carbon trading, green bonds, sustainable investing), law (environmental rights, new
legal regimes), politics (the green movement, climate change), religion (environmental
stewardship), and self-identities (homo virens, green lifestyle). The Green New Deal has
also been translated into many different visions and strategies and can be inflected in neo-
liberal, neo-corporatist, neo-statist, and neo-communitarian ways by prioritizing,
respectively, market incentives, social partnership, societal steering, and solidarity
respectively. Indeed, the very fuzziness of the ‘Green New Deal’ has helped to build
alliances and compromises and it is currently being heralded in many quarters as a
‘magic bullet’ (Brand 2009) that can somehow resolve the economic crisis, the problem
of peak oil, and climate change.
352 B. Jessop
The Green New Deal can be seen in some ways as an imaginative extension of the par-
adigm of the knowledge-based economy that was consolidated in the mid-1980s to mid-
1990s – a paradigm that was sidelined but not negated by the rise of a finance-led accumu-
lation that reflected the interests of financial rather than industrial capital. The Green New
Deal (initially without this particular label) has been proposed on many occasions as a glo-
bal (in the triple sense of comprehensive, planetary, and world-wide) solution to diverse
problems from the mid-1990s (see Brüggen 2001). It has acquired serious traction only in
the current crisis (indicating again the key analytical distinction among variation, selec-
tion, and retention) as a floating signifier that can be articulated in different ways to
resolve a crisis (or complex of crises) also read in different ways. Its appeal from early
2008 onwards lies in its mobilization of the opposition between the interests of those
engaged with the ‘natural’ or ‘real economy’ and the interests of ‘footloose finance’ (for
an exemplary presentation, see New Economics Foundation 2008). In this sense, the GND
has moved from one economic (and political) imaginary among many in the mid-1990s to
one that has been strongly selected as the basis for concerted action in the late 2000s. At
stake now are the form, manner, and likelihood of its retention as a powerful imaginary
that can be translated into accumulation strategies, state projects, and hegemonic visions.
The role of structural, agential, and technological selectivities will be even more important
in this stage than in the period of ‘selection’ and, whilst motivated by the principle of ‘pes-
simism of the intellect, optimism of the will’, the present author expects that the GND will
acquire a strong neo-liberal inflection in the leading national economies whatever its form
beyond them and/or at local level. Time – and struggle – will tell.
Conclusions
Unlike many currents in evolutionary and institutional political economy but like other
variants of cultural materialism, the above approach to CPE takes the cultural turn seri-
ously, highlighting the relations between meanings and practices. For, insofar as semiosis
is studied apart from its extra-semiotic context, resulting accounts of social causation will
be incomplete, leading to semiotic reductionism and/or imperialism. Conversely, insofar
as material transformation is studied apart from its semiotic dimensions and mediations,
explanations of stability and change risk oscillating between objective necessity and sheer
contingency. On this basis, I outlined five interrelated features of CPE, introduced the
notion of ‘economic imaginary’ as a useful general concept for analyzing the co-evolution
of semiosis and structuration, provided a simplified (of course!) account of some of the
implications of CPE for the analysis of crisis and crisis-management, and offered a very
preliminary account of how this approach might be applied to the financial crisis and
Green New Deal.
The evolutionary and institutional approach to semiosis advocated here enables us to
recognize the semiotic dimensions of political economy at the same time as indicating
how and why only some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate actually
come to be selected and institutionalized. And the semiotic and evolutionary approach to
political economy enables us to identify the contradictions and conflicts that make capital
accumulation inherently improbable and crisis-prone, creating the space for economic
imaginaries to play a role in stabilizing accumulation in specific spatio-temporal fixes
and/or pointing the way forward from recurrent crises. Finally, although I have presented
one variant of CPE, cultural political economy is actually a broad movement. It should not
be reduced to an intellectual current exclusively linked to just one theorist, school, or tra-
dition. Such a move would contradict my own arguments about complexity reduction
(there are different ways to reduce complexity) and with more general reflections on the
contribution of pluralism and debate to advances in theoretical and policy paradigms,
including in the fields of critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy.
Acknowledgments
This article draws on discussions over several years with Norman Fairclough, Andrew Sayer, Ngai-Ling
Sum, and Ruth Wodak. Its specific form and content benefited from sound advice from Ngai-Ling
Sum, timely recommendations from Frank Fischer, pertinent comments from Andrew Sayer, and
remarks by two anonymous reviewers.
Note on contributor
Bob Jessop is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University and Co-Director of the
Cultural Political Economy Research Centre. He is best known for his contributions to state theory,
the regulation approach in political economy, studies of state restructuring, and contributions to
critical realism. His most recent books include: The Future of the Capitalist State (2002), Beyond the
Regulation Approach: Putting Capitalist Economies in their Place (2006, co-authored with
Ngai-Ling Sum), and State Power (2007). He is currently completing Towards a Cultural Political
Economy: Taking Semiosis and Materiality Seriously (co-authored with Ngai-Ling Sum, forthcom-
ing 2010).
Notes
1. An example of this ‘culturalist approach’ is the use of group-grid cultural theory as a tool for
taking account of cultural differences in policy analysis (cf. Hoppe 2007).
2. While semiosis initially refers to the intersubjective production of meaning, it is also an important
element/moment of ‘the social’ more generally. Semiosis involves more than (verbal) language,
including, for example, different forms of ‘visual language’.
3. These meaning systems are shaped by neural, cognitive, and semiotic frames (Lakoff and Johnson
1980) as well as, of course, social interaction, meaning-making technologies, and strategically-
selective opportunities for reflection and learning.
4. On other policy decision techniques, see the contributions on cost-benefit analysis, environmen-
tal impact assessments, technology assessments, and policy mediation in Part IX of Fischer
et al. (2007, pp. 465–534). Many other examples exist. On public policy instruments, see also
Hood (1983), Peters and van Nispen (1998) and Salaman (2002).
5. For a narrative account of the meaning of buildings, see Yanow (1995).
6. Horizontal denotes sites on a similar scale (e.g. personal, organizational, institutional, func-
tional systems); vertical denotes different scales (e.g. micro–macro, local–regional–national–
supranational–global).
7. On spatio-temporal fixes, see Jessop (2002).
8. Adorno (1973, p. 190) notes that ‘the critique of ideology, as the confrontation of ideology with
its own truth, is only possible insofar as the ideology contains a rational element with which the
critique can deal’.
9. Polanyi (1982) distinguished substantive economic activities involved in material ‘provisioning’
from formal (profit-oriented, market-mediated) economic activities. The leading economic
imaginaries in capitalist societies ignore the full range of substantive economic activities in favor
of a focus on formal economic activities.
10. Although all practices are semiotic and material, the relative causal efficacy of these elements
will vary.
11. I am not suggesting that mass media can be disentangled from wider networks of social rela-
tions but seeking to highlight the decline of an autonomous public sphere.
12. A web of interlocution comprises meta-narratives that reveal linkages between a wide range of
interactions, organizations, and institutions and/or help to make sense of whole epochs (Somers
1994, p. 614).
13. On discursive selectivity, see Hay (1996) and Somers (1994); on structural selectivity, see
Jessop (2001, 2007).
354 B. Jessop
14. Besides policy decision techniques, technologies refer here to diverse presentational devices
that render some discourses more persuasive in some contexts than others: economic models,
powerpoint presentations, video clips, vox pop interviews, etc. Other technologies, including
policy instruments (e.g. quantitative easing), may also be involved in retention, i.e. the transla-
tion of selected accounts into the policy field.
15. A three-year professorial fellowship begins in 2010, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social
Research Council on the ‘Cultural Political Economy of Crisis-Management’ (Grant number:
RES-051-27-0303).
16. Iceland is an extreme case due to excessive financialization.
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Critical Policy Studies

Cultural political economy and critical

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Cultural political economy and critical policy studies

Cultural political economy is an emerging post-disciplinary approach that highlights the

ISSN 1946-0171 print/ISSN 1946-018X online

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Variation, selection, and retention in semiosis

Co-evolution of semiosis and structuration

tutional rules, objectification in the built environment,5 material and intellectual

Governmental technologies, hegemony, and domination

agems (e.g. naturalization, inevitabilization, otherization, nominalization) (Sum 2009b,

Ideologiekritik and the critique of domination

In terms of what orthodox economics misleadingly describes as the macro-level, CPE

ance. Technologies of economic governance, operating sometimes more semiotically,

A cultural political economy of crisis

materiality. It is one thing to (re-)politicize discourses in the context of the apparently

Greenspan: Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions

Reinbeck, Hamburg: Rohwolt.

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