We build on these six features and elaborate them through case studies to redirect the cultural turn(s) in political economy and put them in their place by making and illustrating the case for a distinctive approach to ‘cul-tural political economy’. We suggest that analogous approaches are possi-ble for non- capitalist regimes and also that the CPE approach to semiosis and structuration is useful in other fields of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences.
26 Towards a cultural political economy
Chapter 1 distinguishes four types of institutional turn, introduces different kinds of institutionalism, and assesses their limitations from a critical-realist, strategic- relational perspective. It reviews a wide range of institutionalist analyses in political economy and the social sciences more generally. In particular we critique the three conventionally identi-fied institutionalisms (rational choice, historical and sociological) and address one recently suggested and actively promoted ‘fourth institution-alism’, that is, constructivist, discursive or ideational institutionalism. This variant marks a belated acknowledgement, by some in the field of new institutionalism, of the importance of ideas, discourse and argumentation in institutionalization, institutional dynamics and institutional change.
We ask what needs to be recovered from classical political economy and classical social theory in order to ‘put institutions in their place’ and connect them with questions of agency and meaning- making. We examine recent social theory and heterodox political economy for critical concepts and insights that reveal the potential static bias of institutional analysis and its privileging of social order over potential sources of instability. And we indicate how institutions can be related to broader questions of sense- and meaning- making, social practice, power and knowledge.
Chapter 2 considers one possible supplement to institutionalism when we review the initiatives by some regulation schools and scholars to make a cultural, hermeneutic or, as we would say, semiotic, turn (Jessop and Sum 2006). This is often intended to break with rationalist accounts of economic agency (especially where the rationality is that of homo economi-cus) and/or to illuminate the socio- cultural embedding of economic calcu-lation, conduct and institutions. We consider the value of cultural turns in ways analogous to our critique of institutional turns. This is where we introduce the concept of the ‘imaginary’. Whereas ‘institution’ belongs to a family of terms that identify mechanisms implicated in regularizing expec-tations and conduct within and across different social spheres, despite ten-sions and crisis tendencies, the ‘imaginary’ is one of a family of terms that denote semiotic systems that shape lived experience in a complex world.
In short, institutions and imaginaries can be studied as sets of mechanisms that contribute crucially to the always problematic, provisional, partial and unstable reproduction–régulation of the capital relation (and much else besides). Bringing them together productively requires that both institu-tions and imaginaries are ‘put in their place’, that is, located in wider sets of semiotic and structural relations and their articulation – with all due regard for the possibilities of contradiction, conflict and crisis.
Third, given the relative failure of the main regulation schools to realize the potential of the cultural turn (especially compared with their advances in institutional analysis and periodization), Chapter 3 introduces some
Introduction 27 basic concepts, assumptions and analytical tools for a more profound and
critical analysis of semiosis. It does not aim to provide a complete review of critical discourse analysis (let alone of linguistics, semiology, semiotics or symbology more generally), but to highlight some useful theoretical resources that would facilitate an ontological and reflexive cultural turn in the critique of political economy without this becoming one- sided.
Thus, whereas Chapters 1 and 2 address the limits of the institutional and cultural turns that have occurred in political economy, Chapter 3 reviews semiosis in general and semantic change in particular from institutional and/or evolutionary perspectives.
Recognizing the importance of semiosis and identifying the limited capacities of some contributions to political economy (including the regu-lation approach) to address this topic does not entail that semiosis is always the best entry- point into the critique of political economy, let alone that it is the only valid approach. It does imply that semiosis must be brought in sooner or later to provide explanations adequate at the level of meaning as well as other forms of causality. This requires attention to semiosis and structuration, their interpenetration and their disjointed co- evolution.
Thus the chapters in Part II present the core conceptual and methodologi-cal features of the CPE research programme in its own terms, drawing on the results of the preceding analyses. Chapter 4 introduces our current syn-thesis of these two bodies of theoretical work and highlights the specificity of CPE and its foundational concepts. Chapter 5 presents several ways to operationalize the CPE research agenda in terms of the articulation of structural, discursive, technological and agential selectivities. These chap-ters aim to synthesize, within a critical- realist, strategic- relational frame-work, insights from the regulation approach, materialist state theory, semiology and relevant Foucauldian studies. Attentive readers will have noted the substitution of semiology for discourse analysis in this list, and the addition of Foucauldian studies compared with our 2006 book. This reflects subsequent work, especially in the field of semiosis and semantics, to discover the most appropriate and commensurable approaches for the grand theory that we aim to develop.
Parts III and IV reflect our individual and collective development of the CPE research programme with one or other of us as the princi-pal author of specific chapters (as indicated in the list of sources in the Acknowledgements). Individual chapters develop specific aspects of the overall research agenda. For example, Chapters 6 and 11 focus mostly on the cultural political economy of social imaginaries and their role in shaping accumulation regimes and modes of regulation, paying particular attention to the role of semantics, and institutional and spatio- temporal fixes in facilitating ‘zones of relative stability’ within the contradictory flux
28 Towards a cultural political economy
of the world market. Chapters 7, 8 and 12 are more focused on economic imaginaries, the social practices (which always have discursive as well as structural, ‘material’, or ‘extra- discursive’ moments) that promote them, and the ways they are selected, recontextualized and retained to remake social relations. Chapters 9 and 10 explore in turn the changing, always uneven, interaction of four different modes of strategic selectivity (struc-tural, discursive, technological, agential) to examine, interpret and explain recent developments in particular enterprise forms (Wal- Martization), economic strategies (leading to a ‘new ethicalism’), and the hegemonic project of competitiveness–integration (dis)order. Part V summarizes the main points in the CPE research programme and explores their implications for future research.