Strangers asking strange questions? A methodological narrative of researching belonging and identity in English rural communities

This paper emerges from a current research project that examines the relationship between contemporary English rurality and notions of identity and belonging. While this is primarily a methodological narrative we argue that this narrative speaks to an analysis of current rural relations. The paper concerns itself with two key methodological issues that have arisen during the ‘doing’ of the research. First, it examines our own relationship, as ‘outsider’, urban-based researchers, to the rural and the use and/or relevance of our biographies as resources for making ourselves seem less ‘strange’ and for accessing, and being in, rural environments. At the same time as providing us with a map into our micro rural worlds the paper draws on this biographic-research relation in order to problematize notions of homogenous rural identities and polarized rural/urban identities. The second part of the paper argues that who we were/how we were perceived had a relation to what ‘truths’ and accounts we were told by our respondents. More particularly, we show how our use of focus group interviews had a direct role in the rehearsal and presentation of these ‘truths’. Given the current contestations and tensions over what and who ‘the rural’ is, it was clear that those involved in the focus group discussions wanted to give us particular stories that often fell into a consensus pattern of either ‘rural idyll’ or ‘rural crisis’ narratives. Drawing on Simmel's notion of the stranger and focus group data we argue that for these narratives to be told we, as researchers, were ascribed by the group members to shifting positions of intimacy and remoteness.     

Commodities in action: measuring embeddedness and imposing values

Recent approaches in political economy look at the effects of technology and social values on economic action. Combining these approaches with those of economic anthropologists, this article poses that the way the economy is instituted can be understood by looking at reasons actors have for participating in actor‐networks of production, distribution and consumption. Using the author's research on American recycling, this article first shows that much of the‘making’or instituting of the economy happens outside the market, through political machinations, contracts and standards. Second, it suggests that these relationships impose value upon goods differently than do market relations. The details of the recycling‘chain’show the ways actors shape the network and demonstrate that the social values that add‘economic value’to goods are not uniform, but are highly contextual. Starting from Mark Granovetter's notion of 'social embeddedness', the article explains that the measure of social embeddedness is not as important as the values imposed upon other actors through social structure in the economy. It calls for a close observation of economic action in the locales within which production takes place to understand better the‘actions‐at‐a‐distance’where the politics of technology, social movements and power create the empirical, instituted economy.     

Switching labels: The role of Weberian ideas in market change. A case study of the German wine market

How do cultural ideas shape market construction? What do ideas ‘do’ to actors in markets? The paper presents an empirical case study of the reconstitution of the German wine market following an EU legislative intervention. I use Bourdieu's theory of fields to analyse the actors’ economic, social and cultural capitals and the impact of these capitals on the actors’ positioning in the political debate. Sensitised by recurring problems in the empirical data analysis, I then, however, argue that Weber's notion of ideas, as presented in his famous switchmen metaphor, is better suited than, or indeed should serve as a complement to, Bourdieu's frame of analysis. It is better suited, I argue, because it refers to a unique and irreducible source of culture while Bourdieu's capitals remain ‘tools' in a struggle for power and dominance in the field.     

Techno economic systems and excessive consumption: a political economy of ‘pathological’ gambling

This article argues that gambling is a paradigmatic form of consumption that captures the intensified logic at the heart of late modern capitalist societies. As well as a site of intensified consumption, it claims that gambling has also become the location of what has been described as a new form of ‘social pathology’ related to excess play. Drawing on Castells' (1996) notion of techno‐economic systems, it explores the ways that intersections between technology, capital and states have generated the conditions for this situation, and critiques the unequal distribution of gambling environments that result. It argues that, while the products of these systems are consumed on a global scale, the risks associated with them tend to be articulated in bio‐psychological discourses of ‘pathology’ which are typical of certain types of knowledge that have salience in neo‐liberal societies, and which work to conceal wider structural relationships. We argue that a deeper understanding of the political and cultural economy of gambling environments is necessary, and provide a synoptic overview of the conditions upon which gambling expansion is based. This perspective highlights parallels with the wider global economy of finance capital, as well as the significance of intensified consumption, of which gambling is an exemplary instance. It also reveals the existence of a geo‐political dispersal of ‘harms’, conceived as deteriorations of financial, temporal and social relationships, which disproportionately affect vulnerable social groups. From this, we urge an understanding of commercial gambling based on a critique of the wider social body of gambling environments within techno economic systems, rather than the (flawed) individual bodies within them.     

A Note on Animal and Political Economy in Quesnay

In this article, I argue that François Quesnay’s physiocratic writings on economics entail the working through not only of formal principles of circulatory flow developed in his earlier physiological writings on “animal economy” but also the construction of a model of political economy that depends directly on an animal economy understood as the efficient administration of animal labor. Although the contradictions of this model already foreshadow those of today’s dominant model of economic administration, I argue that Quesnay’s economic writings nonetheless contain an invitation for us to rethink the connection between the economic and the ecological domains.     

Place,people and processes in waste theory: a global South critique

Scholars across the humanities and social sciences have long sought to theorize waste, and more particularly the relationship between humans – their history, society, culture, art and thought – and their discards. My contention, though, is that these theories, since Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966) and Thompson’s Rubbish Theory (1979), have been predominantly based in and on global North contexts and, concomitantly, have taken as their axiom the distance between our cultures, lives, experiences and our material rejects. By intersecting existing cultural theories of waste with two important emerging schools of thought – environmental justice and new materialism – I argue that the exclusion or side-lining of places, notably in the global South where countless people live on a day-to-day basis with, on, and off waste, leads to certain imbalances, biases and gaps. Most notably, the livingness and agency of material rejects is often overlooked in theories that oppose humans and other-than-human waste. By way of conclusion, I propose the notion of ‘living waste’ – a more literal and material take on Bauman’s well-known concept ‘wasted lives’ – as a new point of departure for a reconceptualization of waste that might escape the prevailing dualisms and account simultaneously for ‘full-belly’ and ‘empty-belly’ contexts, human (wasted) lives and other-than-human waste materials, and understandings of lived experiences of waste.     

Postmodern rural geography? A reply to Murdoch and Pratt

Jonathan Murdoch and Andy Pratt's thoughtful response (Journal of Rural Studies9, 411–427) to Philo (1992) (Neglected rural geographies: a review. Journal of Rural Studies8, 193–207) is considered. Their suggestions about the engagement between rural studies and the intellectual currents of ‘postmodernism’ are important ones, and offer both an extension of the claims made by me and a critique of my own lack of self-reflexivity. I outline my partial agreement with their analysis, but offer certain qualifications arising from a different understanding of ‘postmodernism’. I indicate my approval of their call for a ‘sociology of postmodernism’ alert to the making of ‘the rural’ as a concept in circulation, but argue that central to this call is the necessity of investigating the senses of rurality held by all manner of ‘other peoples’ beyond the academy. In this respect, then, the approach of Murdoch and Pratt may be more consistent with my own ‘postmodern rural geography’ than it might first appear.     

Orientating disability studies to disablist austerity: applying Fraser’s insights

Many disabled people in Britain have experienced profound challenges brought about by a government policy programme characterised by ‘austerity’. Drawing on the work of Fraser and Polanyi, this article explores new ways in which disability studies can become theoretically orientated to the task of explaining and challenging what has become an issue of overbearing importance for many disabled people. It is argued that Fraser’s notion of bivalency encapsulates the combination of cultural and economic challenges which characterise ‘disablist austerity’. Fraser’s development of Polanyi’s work is used to argue that disability studies should be orientated to large-scale economic challenges as well as cultural and discursive concerns that are more often the object of study in the field.     

Sino-liberalism: the socialist market and the neoliberal concept of freedom

The very notion of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ presents us with numerous paradoxes, such as the way it challenges former distinctions made between democratic and Communist systems. This paper examines the rhetorical dimensions of Milton Friedman’s seminal text, Capitalism and freedom (1962), and demonstrates how literary analysis can make an important contribution towards our understanding of the formation of neoliberal ideology. Drawing on critiques of Chinese capitalism mounted by Zhu Wen in his 1994 short story ‘I Love Dollars’, and the essays in Yu Hua’s China in ten words collection (2011), I show the extent to which the perceived discordance between neoliberalism and socialism is grounded in bi-polar Cold War formations. This examination of neoliberal ideals across three literary genres highlights the layers of fiction, and truth, that are present equally within those designated categories of prose, non-fiction, and economic tract.     

Art,climate change and (other) eco materials: rethinking the cosmopolitanization of aesthetics and the aesthetics of cosmopolitanization with Ulrich Beck

Based on fieldwork in Japan and Hong Kong, I ask how methodological cosmopolitanism, as formulated by Ulrich Beck, may afford new and highly needed modes for grappling with climatically concerned art and aesthetic practices across geographical regions. I will argue that methodological cosmopolitanism serves as an important framework for approaching such art practices, and suggest that two overall intertwined strands concerning aesthetic practices engaged in global issues of climate change, emerge from this – the cosmopolitanization of aesthetics and, reversely, the aesthetics of cosmopolitanization. Departing from my fieldwork among farming artists in the Hong Kong countryside and in the Japanese satoyama – rural mountain – areas, I will, on the one hand, argue that art practices are ‘cosmopolitanized’ by the awareness of global risks, manifested in anticipation of the comprehensive climatic changes (in)discriminately affecting across nations and regions. At the same time, and importantly, art practices are actively attending to this ‘risky’ cosmopolitanization, giving aesthetic voice, form and ‘visuality’ to unfolding climatic issues and concerns and hereby practising what I will call an ‘aesthetics of cosmopolitanization’.     

DEEWAANA (the mad one): the lover of music

The notion of deewaanapan or madness (as in being crazy about something) is deployed in this essay to make sense of musicophiliac behaviour in twentieth century Mumbai. I argue that new insights into the formation of ‘publics’ in the non-western metropolis can be gained through a focus on phenomena that embody ‘social subjectivity’. A major phenomenon of this kind is the devotion to Hindustani or North Indian classical music which spread through Mumbai starting from the late nineteenth century. The affective response of musicophiliacs is forged not in solitude but in a space of sociality. This idea also encompasses the actual performance of the khayal genre which became prominent in the twentieth century. The khayal represented a sense of intimacy and interiority which also needs to be understood as ‘social’ and ‘public’.     

Economic sociology as disequilibrium economics: a contribution to the critique of the new economic sociology

This paper analyses the problem of the asocial view of the market at the theoretical core of contemporary economic sociology. Despite much emphasis on the apparent interpenetration of society and the economy, contemporary economic sociology is rooted in an analytical distinction between the two spheres. The implicit reliance on the neoclassical economic conception of the market helps to explain why the ‘new economic sociology’ often collapses into disequilibrium economics, where disequilibrium becomes the central but unstated prediction of a good deal of the work in the paradigm. Using a sample of contributions from the field, I demonstrate that a strong tendency running through much of the new economic sociology tends to understand society as a fundamentally distortionary force. To resolve this problem, I argue that an independent field of economic sociology necessitates a distinction between social relationships and social relations.     

The upside‐down roots of a transnational advocacy network: applying an ‘organizational ecology’ approach to the anti‐GMO network

In this article, I examine a transnational advocacy network opposed to the introduction of genetically modified crops and supportive of organic agriculture in India. I argue that this network illustrates some of the consequences of ‘upward oriented linkages’, in which professional NGO brokers focus on constructing relationships with other professional or elite partner bodies such as donor organizations, global retailers and the English language media. The ‘upside‐down’ tree that results has roots pointing upwards to global partners and to domestic elite actors but is less responsive, and less tightly bound, to mass organizations and to its purported non‐elite constituency of marginal farmers. I make this case through a methodological approach I term ‘organizational ecology’ in which I explore the idea of NGO based advocacy organizations as filling ‘niches’ in the larger political ecology of rural India and within this ‘ecology’ forming symbiotic connections to other organizations.     

Igniting Constructionist Imaginations: Social Constructionism’s Absence and Potential Contribution to Public Sociology

Why have social constructionists remained absent from debates over public sociology? I argue that constructionist scholarship would be particularly amenable to Michael Burawoy’s notion of ‘organic’ public sociology, given the ability of constructionist scholars to orient awareness contexts in order to help engender constructionist imaginations. This approach requires that constructionists take on a different view of the role of the analyst. I also discuss some of the problems Canadian academics have had engaging with the media in their efforts to engage in ‘traditional’ public sociology, as well as what a constructionist public sociology may look like practice. I conclude by addressing potential challenges to a constructionist public sociology within Canada, including reference to sociology’s disciplinary coherence and how we can approach—and what we mean by—‘publics’.     

The Embedding of Russian State-Sanctioned Multipolarity in the Post-Soviet Conjuncture

This article demonstrates the manner in which key Russian officials engaged with and propagated the notion of multipolarity in the wider post-Soviet conjuncture—first in the 1990s and intensively during Vladimir Putin's first two presidencies. I argue that this demonstrates an earlier disarticulation of neoliberalism, globalisation, unipolarity, and hegemony than that offered in the nascent ‘multipolar turn’ in the sub-disciplines of International Political Economy and International Relations. Embedding understandings of multipolarity that cohere to state strategy, key Russian officials invite us to efface the divide between academic and political practice when understanding how world order concepts are propagated and normalised. A multifaceted treatment of multipolarity does not render it analytically dubious; rather, it cements its importance as a common sense and ‘polysemic’ understanding of global political affairs serving an explicit political function.     

Independent living: the frontier of communitarian welfare? 1

We hear so much about the ‘cost’ of care, today;and so little about the value society places upon ‘care’ and welfare, which, in turn, can promote economic, social and civic participation within society at large. The question of what should be supported and valued in contemporary society needs exploring critically. In the following I explore three well-established responses to the question of how society should support and deal with disadvantage. I argue that communitarian politics/thought and the independent living movement have key roles to play in forging a better society for disabled people.     

Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday: From Bananas to Bingo

Abstract

Feminist studies of political economy have long pointed to the multifaceted ways in which global transformations are constituted by deeply gendered economic practices at the everyday level. Nonetheless, the increased analytical focus on the everyday within the study of international political economy (IPE) frequently fails to connect with feminist theories and gendered approaches. In this introductory essay, we argue that any discussion of a ‘turn’ towards the everyday in IPE must acknowledge the role of feminist contributions that predate, and indeed make possible, this shift in IPE scholarship's analytical gaze towards the everyday. We map out what might be understood as feminist political economies of the everyday—highlighting the points of connection between feminist scholarship on the everyday, as well as the ways in which feminist scholars engage with the notion of an everyday political economy in quite distinct and diverse ways—a diversity that reflects the methodological and theoretical pluralism of feminist political economy scholarship as well as the ever broadening geographical scope of feminist research.