Overcoming neoliberal globalization: social-ecological transformation from a Polanyian perspective and beyond

ABSTRACT

The ecological crisis has intensified in many respects. Prominent proposals to deal with the crisis are discussed under the header ‘sustainability transformations’ or even ‘Great Transformation’. We argue that most contributions suffer from a narrow analytical approach to transformation ignoring the largely unsustainable dynamics of global capitalism and the power relations involved in it. Thus, a ‘new critical orthodoxy’ of knowledge about transformation is emerging which runs the danger to contribute to a spatially and socially highly uneven green capitalism. This article claims that the current debate on social-ecological transformation can be enriched by a Polanyian understanding but also based on regulation theory. We distinguish between three types of transformation: incremental adaptation of the current institutional systems, institutional change in favour of a new ‘green’ phase of capitalism, and a post-capitalist great transformation that implies a profound structural change of the mode of production and living.     

‘Just transition’? Conceptual challenges meet stark reality in a ‘transitioning’ coal region in Australia

ABSTRACT

‘Just transition’ (JT) is an increasingly popular concept developed by unions and adopted and adapted by academics, environmentalists, government and non-governmental organizations, and international institutions in recognition of the need to address social concerns and inequities emerging from efforts to address environmental problems. It has been noted, however, that ‘JT’ lacks both conceptual clarity and empirical evidence of its practical applications. This paper examines the ‘theory’ and practice of ‘JT’ by first considering the competing interpretations and conceptual understandings of ‘JT’ and second, the challenges of realizing a ‘JT’ in an Australian coal region where transition is occurring. The paper argues that achieving ‘JT’ requires more than government provisions and interventions and that unions must perform an active part in the ‘JT’ process through their relations with employers, workers, government, and community. It suggests the lack of clarity within the ‘JT’ literature may be the concept’s lasting strength.     

Advancing careers through ‘merit’: a rationalized-sensemaking narrative in hierarchical organizations

ABSTRACT

This contribution provides an in-context exploration of how middle-managers make sense of their career progress, and particularly focuses on ‘merit’ to understand how careers are driven in a hierarchical organization. The study exposes ‘merit’ as a fragmented and individualized construction that links back to the participants’ broader life ambitions and identity footprint. It also shows a tendency for maintaining trust in ‘merit’ above other circumstantial and opportunity factors, even in face of events which undermine the application of the merit-based principle. ‘Merit’ is hence portrayed to be a rationalized narrative in careers’ trajectory; a marker used by participants to make sense of events in a coherent manner, consequently experiencing self-efficacy and reducing uncertainty. The findings add complexity to the ‘meritocracy’ debate, calling for new critiques which address its underlying inequality dimension while also contemplating the individual psychological purpose driving ‘merit’ beliefs.     

New ways of working (NWW): work space and cultural change in virtualizing organizations

ABSTRACT

This study offers a grounded theory of ‘new ways of working’ (NWW), an organizational design concept of Dutch origin with a global relevance. NWW concern business solutions for flexible workspaces enabled by digital network technologies. Theoretically, NWW are analysed with reference to Lefebvre’s theory on the ‘production of space’ and are defined along three dimensions: the spatiotemporal ‘flexibilization’ of work practices, the ‘virtualization’ of the technologically pre-defined organization, and the ‘interfacialization’ of meaning making in the lifeworld of workers. Empirically, NWW are explored in a case study of an insurance company which in 2007 radically implemented NWW. The case study consists of a longitudinal – before and after implementation – research based on ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in 2007 and 2010. The article contributes with a conceptual framework for the analysis and management of NWW, and highlights contradictions and ambiguities in the implementation and appropriation of this innovative organizational design.     

Karl Polanyi as a spatial theorist

ABSTRACT

The ‘spatial’ turn in political economy has re-invigorated Marxian analysis, allowing for new research programmes into urbanization, geopolitics, and social movement activity amongst other topics. This tendency emerged through a critical re-reading of Marx and Gramsci, amongst others, uncovering spatial analyses embedded in the logic of their arguments. Conversely, Karl Polanyi’s interlocutors have tended to add geographical analysis as an additional layer of theory, reading space ‘in’ to the text. However, a close reading reveals that a concern with space permeates Polanyi’s analysis. As such, it is possible to read space ‘out’ of Polanyi, adding a level of theoretical rigour and logical consistency when applying his insights to geographic topics. This article carries out an exegesis of Karl Polanyi’s work, uncovering a theoretical framework that deals with space, place, scale, fixity, and motion. From this vantage point, the article considers the potential implications of this new geographical reading of Polanyi.     

Fathers,others: The sacrificial victim in Freud,Girard, and Levinas

Abstract

This paper derives from an interest in murder. This interest began through reading fictional narratives which ceaselessly stage and restage scenes of murder; but it has also become clear that a range of theoretical texts are no less preoccupied with the basic question, ‘Why kill?’ (see Davis, 2000). In particular, the three theorists I shall discuss here, Freud, Girard and Levinas, directly address the question of murder, its causes and consequences. In each case, the theoretical question turns out to depend upon a minimal core narrative in which the stakes of murder are crystallized; rival theoretical accounts are thus also bound up in a competition of stories. As this paper traces a common concern from Freud's Totem and Taboo, through Girard's La Violence et le sacré, to Levinas's Totalité et infini, the question ‘Why kill?’ gets entangled with the dynamics of storytelling and the issue of what it means to do theory.     

The fanta-sy of global products: fizzy-drinks,differentiated ubiquity and the placing of globalization

ABSTRACT

If globalization is conceived as an outcome of negotiations between places and relational processes, how do researchers capture such amorphous complexity? Drawing upon the framework of assemblage theory this paper unpicks the plethora of processes and practices encompassed within the problematic term ‘globalization’. Focusing on the ‘banal’ object of a can of Fanta, we demonstrate how this exists in an assemblage which maintains coherence across space (i.e. is universally recognizable) yet is spatially differentiated in its components. Shedding light on how these processes coalesce in place we argue for the acknowledgement of the ‘ubiquitous’ in making place and the importance of difference in underpinning the ‘global’.     

Modelling Mindsets of an Agency

Abstract

This article introduces a culturally based socio-cognitive agency meta-model built from ‘living systems’ theory. The agency is adaptive. It has a normative personality with an epistemic state determined by its three formative traits, which have a control function and can take bi-polar epistemic values (‘enantiomers’). Combined together, they give eight different cognitive types, i.e. eight different types of personality mindset. These personality mindset types are influenced by the culture and the social environment to which the agency is bound. The traits can be used to explain the what, why, and how of dynamic agency behaviour in complex situations.     

Renewable energy transition under multiple colonialisms: passive revolution,fascism redux and utopian praxes

ABSTRACT

This essay outlines intermedia theory’s contribution to the emerging multiple colonialisms framework and argues that a socio-ecological reproduction feminist approach to the multiple colonialisms problematic is critically necessary for thinking through the contradictions of renewable energy transition. A multiple colonialisms framework needs to be a kind of utopian theorizing, I argue, just as any feminist renewable energy transition seeking to realize energy democracy and energy justice must create a utopian collective praxis that regenerates common-being and reproduces common wealth. Drawing on research on a network of petroleum-free subaltern feminist agricultural cooperatives in Medak, India, and on the creativity of their media practices, this article examines the social contradictions of energy democracy and just transition politics in a conjuncture defined by green passive revolution and fascism redux. The essay proposes the concepts of ‘subaltern counter-environments’ and ‘molecular media’ to decolonize energy democracy and just transition discourse and to articulate the importance of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics for a degrowth strategy of regenerative delinking through and against the state. Molecular media created by the Feminist Energy Futures research collaboration at the University of Alberta seek to regenerate the bias of time in our contemporary intermedia ecology where the bias of spectacularized and colonized space is otherwise dominant so that regenerative delinking strategies can endure social contradictions they embody through subaltern counter-environments they can create.     

Ultimate concerns in late modernity: Archer,Bourdieu and reflexivity

Through a critique of Margaret Archer's theory of reflexivity, this paper explores the theoretical contribution of a Bourdieusian sociology of the subject for understanding social change. Archer's theory of reflexivity holds that conscious ‘internal conversations’ are the motor of society, central both to human subjectivity and to the ‘reflexive imperative’ of late modernity. This is established through critiques of Bourdieu, who is held to erase creativity and meaningful personal investments from subjectivity, and late modernity is depicted as a time when a ‘situational logic of opportunity’ renders embodied dispositions and the reproduction of symbolic advantages obsolete. Maintaining Archer's focus on ‘ultimate concerns’ in a context of social change, this paper argues that her theory of reflexivity is established through a narrow misreading and rejection of Bourdieu's work, which ultimately creates problems for her own approach. Archer's rejection of any pre‐reflexive dimensions to subjectivity and social action leaves her unable to sociologically explain the genesis of ‘ultimate concerns’, and creates an empirically dubious narrative of the consequences of social change. Through a focus on Archer's concept of ‘fractured reflexivity’, the paper explores the theoretical necessity of habitus and illusio for understanding the social changes that Archer is grappling with. In late modernity, reflexivity is valorized just as the conditions for its successful operation are increasingly foreclosed, creating ‘fractured reflexivity’ emblematic of the complex contemporary interaction between habitus, illusio, and accelerating social change.     

‘Hypernudge’: Big Data as a mode of regulation by design

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on regulatory governance scholarship to argue that the analytic phenomenon currently known as ‘Big Data’ can be understood as a mode of ‘design-based’ regulation. Although Big Data decision-making technologies can take the form of automated decision-making systems, this paper focuses on algorithmic decision-guidance techniques. By highlighting correlations between data items that would not otherwise be observable, these techniques are being used to shape the informational choice context in which individual decision-making occurs, with the aim of channelling attention and decision-making in directions preferred by the ‘choice architect’. By relying upon the use of ‘nudge’ – a particular form of choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives, these techniques constitute a ‘soft’ form of design-based control. But, unlike the static Nudges popularised by Thaler and Sunstein [(2008). Nudge. London: Penguin Books] such as placing the salad in front of the lasagne to encourage healthy eating, Big Data analytic nudges are extremely powerful and potent due to their networked, continuously updated, dynamic and pervasive nature (hence ‘hypernudge’). I adopt a liberal, rights-based critique of these techniques, contrasting liberal theoretical accounts with selective insights from science and technology studies (STS) and surveillance studies on the other. I argue that concerns about the legitimacy of these techniques are not satisfactorily resolved through reliance on individual notice and consent, touching upon the troubling implications for democracy and human flourishing if Big Data analytic techniques driven by commercial self-interest continue their onward march unchecked by effective and legitimate constraints.     

Why Postmodern Theory may be a Problematic Basis for Therapeutic Practice: A Feminist Perspective

Both poststructural and social constructionist thinking are imbued with a masculine bias. First, I demonstrate that Foucault's theory of power and knowledge fails to take into account the female experience of power and the gendered nature of knowledge production. With the support of psychoanalytic theory I also claim that Foucault's theory of the ‘social’, ‘discursive’ production of ‘selves’ omits the contribution of the prelinguistic but no less ‘social’ mother–infant relationship, and in so doing obscures the prelinguistic foundations of emotionality. This poststructural reduction of ‘selves’ to, and subsequent subsuming of emotionality within, the instance of ‘language’, ‘discourse’ or ‘narrative’, is, I claim, replicated in the social constructionist thinking of Gergen and Bruner. Finally, I consider some of the consequences of a therapeutic practice which has its foundations in these two interrelated bodies of thought, suggesting, from a feminist perspective, that a major shortcoming of this narrative practice is its failure to attend to emotionality.     

Representations of vulnerability,innocence and evil in the murder of a disabled person

Abstract

This article uses the murder of a young man with learning disabilities as a case study to comment on the representations used in the reporting of crime against disabled people. It uses social representations theory as a theoretical lens to assist us to see that portrayals of both victim and perpetrators by the media and others serves to distance them from each other, and from mainstream society. It highlights how this process of ‘othering’ serves to disadvantage disabled people and places a disproportionate emphasis on individual characteristics.     

Disintegrating chronology

This paper utilises the rhetorical device of chronology, a device which helps to instantiate the ‘modern’ world, in order to demonstrate the “reversible imminence” of that world. It seeks to build upon other attempts at ‘postmodern’ writing which have relied on flouting modernist conventions to signify themselves as ‘innovative’. But rather than constructing another new ‘style’ that cuts across conventions in writing, the paper seeks to complement such ‘innovation’ through intensifying its reliance on one of these conventions. The paper illustrates how a diligent and detailed application of the demands of chronology can result in a history that deconstructs itself, or to put it another way, how a faithful adherence to one of the demands of ‘modernist’ writing can itself create a text that fragments into ‘postmodernist’ writing.

The author examined participants’ accounts of the emergence of refinery based computerised oil management systems. These accounts sought to instantiate at least partially enduring organisational and self identities through rhetorics of progress in the face of disorder. However, much of this disorder may be seen to be an effect of extended ordering practices. The chief threat to the maintenance of identities thus turns out to be the ordering practices upon which these identities depend. An impression of progress was seen to rely upon a re-presentation of reflexive process as discrete events, as innumerable black boxes, enabling a (re)integration through separation. But when the author brought these boxes and their contents back together, ‘progress’ disintegrated.

Who makes up real things, dad?

Nobody and everybody; they make themselves up. The thing is that because the real stories just happen, they don’t always tell you very much. Sometimes they do, but usually they’re too . . . messy.’

Iain Banks, The Crow Road.     

Motherless Subjects and Mothered Selves: The Implications of Jacques Lacan’s and Donald Winnicott’s Writings on the Formation of the ‘I’ for American Studies

ABSTRACT

This article contrasts the theories of ego formation put forward in Jacques Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Stage’ and Donald Winnicott’s ‘The Mirror Role of the Mother,’ and discusses their methodological implications for the field of American studies. While Lacan theorises subjectivity as irreparably split and (self-)alienated, Winnicott offers an optimistic version of a self which is sustained in its going-on-being by a nourishing maternal presence. These disparate conceptualisations of the human being produce two powerful frames through which to approach culture. Yet, while Lacan is widely recognised in the American studies scholarship, Winnicott remains virtually unknown. This article aims to enhance the visibility of the British author by outlining the productivity of his ideas for any cultural or literary analysis. By stressing the foundational significance of the primary bond Winnicott’s theory intervenes in the recent critiques of neoliberal capitalism which remain halted in a Lacanian-like melancholic mode, masked by a cultural command of perpetual enjoyment. The Winnicottian perspective challenges Lacan’s fixation on the unattainable objects of desire, reiterated by the neoliberal myth of self-perfection through consumption, and offers an alternative pattern of human sociality, based on relational, self-reflexive moderation.     

Cooptation and non-cooptation: elite strategies in response to social protest

ABSTRACT

The risk of cooptation – of being absorbed by powerful elites without gaining new advantages – is an important concern in studies of social movements and social change. Through cooptation, elites undermine movements by stripping them of their credibility as agents of change. This paper aims to explain why, despite its powerful rationale, cooptation does not occur more frequently. Building on political process theory and relational sociology, it demonstrates that cooptation appears rational only on the condition that cooperation is valued lower than political domination. But elite-movement interaction may result in mutually strategic relationships that are conditional on each side’s recognition of the other’s interest. Two empirical cases illustrate this possibility: the US Civil Rights Movement and Latin American participatory budgeting. In both cases, the actors involved chose a strategy of ‘mutually assured autonomy’ over cooptation.     

Capital,conflict and convergence: a political understanding of neoliberalism and its relationship to capitalist transformation

ABSTRACT

In this article we argue against influential analyses of neoliberalism that prioritize variegation and the role of ideas as key theoretical foci relevant to understanding neoliberalism’s diffusion into myriad national and political settings. Rather, we contend that crucial to understanding neoliberalism is the role of politically-produced convergence around market rationality that reflects two core processes: the reorganization of production and the ascendency of financialization. We present a theorization and analysis of neoliberalism’s political production and diffusion over time, explaining its contested evolution and impact across diverse settings (both ‘North’ and ‘South’) and emphasizing its ever-intensifying symbiotic relationship with the consolidating world market in which the former has increasingly come to serve as the latter’s operating system (OS). Further, we posit that neoliberalism’s form, function and impact demand analytically prioritizing the leverage of constellations of ideological and material interests within the contradictory context of consolidating relations of production and financialization. Our analysis thus challenges many previous expositions of neoliberalism for their failure to locate neoliberalism’s manifestation as arising out of social conflict within particular junctures that privilege certain social forces and ideas over others. We also distinguish our position by highlighting how manifestations of neoliberalism in various settings have combined to yield a greater world market in which variegation has gradually given way to ever-intensifying disciplinary pressures towards market-policy conformity (mono-policy). While current populist movements may well turn out to be important counter movements to neoliberal hegemony, especially if they can internationalize, the disciplining effect of the world market renders many nationally-oriented policy alternatives costly and politically fraught.     

Breaking the silence: parentally suicide-bereaved youths’ self-disclosure on the internet and the social responses of others related to stigma

‘Suicide stigma’ contributes to the silencing of parental suicide within family and social networks. This article departs from a narrative theoretical framework on grief and identity to analyse suicide-bereaved youths ‘breaking the silence’ through self-disclosure in self-initiated chat threads on the Internet, which is their way of actively seeking social support, telling of their experiences and opening up space for a renegotiation of the meanings around suicide. The article investigates which narrative frameworks for the interpretation of suicide are operating in these contexts, and whether and, if so, how stigma is reproduced or counteracted. Two frameworks are identified: ‘Who is to blame for suicide?’; and ‘What caused the suicide?’. The former is utilized by the newly bereaved chat-initiators, who attribute blame for suicide to the parent and/or themselves in accordance with stigmatizing discourses. These are reproduced in the responses first and foremost of the non-suicide-bereaved, who construct a dichotomy between the deceased parent as ‘perpetrator’ and the child as ‘victim’ in order to relieve blame. A lack of contact with other suicide-bereaved youths can reinforce feelings of otherness. Identities, however, can potentially be de-stigmatized by the meanings drawn from the latter framework.     

‘Capturing Anarchists Across Borders’: The Transnational Dimensions of Italian Antimilitarist Campaigns, 1911–14

Abstract

This article engages with questions of the integration of different scales of analysis in the study of labour and radical movements: ‘transnational’, ‘national’ and ‘local’ or ‘trans-local’. The article places the study of transnational anarchism in a ‘national’ and ‘trans-local’ perspective. The analysis of the intersection between the networks of those who migrated from Italy and those who remained provides a fruitful means to uncover dynamics within the transnational anarchist movement and the interplay, in both directions, between home country, exile communities and host countries. The article focuses on the crucial, but still unexplored, contributions of communities of Italian anarchists abroad (in, among other places, London, Paris, Berne, Marseille, Barre and Buenos Aires) to the anti-militarist campaigns against the Italian colonial enterprise in Libya from 1911 to 1914, in terms of propaganda, theoretical debate, financing and countercultural production. The investigation of the initiatives of anarchist exiles and how they coordinated with their comrades in Italy provides a significant case study, not only to understand network-based transnational anarchism but also to reflect on mechanisms of political migration and their influence on the development of social conflicts.     

Trotsky’s error: multiplicity and the secret origins of revolutionary Marxism

ABSTRACT

Uneven and Combined Development uniquely incorporated societal multiplicity into Marxist theory. So why did its first application end in Stalinist dictatorship? This paper seeks an answer by turning the idea back on itself, applying it first to Trotsky’s doctrine of ‘permanent revolution’ and then to Marx’s original idea of revolution. Trotsky hoped that Russia’s ‘revolution of backwardness’ would be rescued by ‘advanced’ revolutions in the West, modelled on the French revolution. But what if – as this paper argues – that event too was ultimately a ‘revolution of backwardness’? Two implications follow. First, Trotsky’s ‘permanentist’ strategy was logically flawed: if all modern revolutions have been internationally-generated catch-up revolutions, then the idea of Bolshevism being rescued by ‘advanced revolutions’ elsewhere fails. But second, the consequences of multiplicity reach even deeper than Trotsky realized: they underlie and explain the original political formation, and troubled history, of revolutionary Marxism itself.