Introduction The Methodology of aNeiv Political Economy (original) (raw)

The Political Economy of Rural Development: Modernisation Without Centralisation?

Sociologia Ruralis, 2007

Norwegian rural sociologist Ottar Brox (b. 1932) is one of the most prominent social scientists in Norway and has influenced the country's academic, political and lay discourses on rural development for close to half a century. He has published a large number of academic works on a wide range of sociological issues, of which his outstanding 1966 volume, Hva skjer i Nord-Norge? ('What happens in northern Norway?') has attained the status of a classic of Norwegian sociology. From his position as professor at the then newly established 'frontier' university in Tromsø, the world's northernmost university, he furthermore played an important role in the 1972 campaign against Norwegian membership of the EEC, which resulted in Norway's no vote on membership. Brox also served one term in the socialist Left party in the Norwegian parliament (1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977), since when he has consistently represented a critical voice in Norwegian society, within academia as well as in the political and public debate.

Bernstein H. Political economy of agrarian change: Some key concepts and questions

RUDN Journal of Sociology, 2017

This paper draws on lectures given in recent years at the China Agricultural University, on author's book Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change [1] and on a recent article [3]. The author supplied as few references as possible to very large literature in English on agrarian change both historical and contemporary; there is an ample bibliography in [1], which is expanded in [2—5]. The paper outlines in schematic fashion some key concepts in the political economy of agrarian change with special reference to capitalism historically and today; some key questions posed by the political economy of agrarian change, and how it seeks to investigate and answer them; two sets of more specific questions about agrarian transition to capitalism and agrarian change within capitalism (internal to the countryside, bringing in rural-urban interconnections, pointing towards the place of agriculture within larger 'national' economies, and concerning the character and effects of the capitalist world economy). With the aid of the last group of questions, the author discusses three themes, which they are deployed to investigate: the agrarian origins of capitalism, the distinction between farming and agriculture generated by capitalism, and the fate(s) of peasant farmers in the modern world of capitalism. The author believes that one cannot conceive the emergence and functioning of agriculture in modern capitalism without the centrality and configurations of new sets of dynamics linking agriculture and industry, and the rural and urban, and the local, national and global. The three themes all feed into the fourth and final theme, that of investigating the fate(s) of the peasantry in capitalism today, which resonates longstanding debates of the 'disappearance' or 'persis-tence' of the peasantry, albeit now in the conditions of contemporary 'globalization'. The author does not deny some of the critique of the contemporary globalization, or at least its effects; his problem is the advo-cacy of 'solutions' premised on an unconvincing, pre-given and idealized 'peasant way' that lacks the analytical means (and desire) to confront processes of class formation in the countryside. This paper outlines, in schematic fashion, some key concepts in the political economy of agrarian change with special reference to capitalism historically and today. It also indicates some of the key questions posed by the political economy of agrarian change, and how it seeks to investigate and answer them. By political economy I mean the field of social relations and processes/dynamics of production and reproduction. Applied to some types of society, and notably capitalist societies, the foundational, although not

Political economy of agrarian change: Some key concepts and questions

RUDN Journal of Sociology

This paper draws on lectures given in recent years at the China Agricultural University, on author's book Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change [1] and on a recent article [3]. The author supplied as few references as possible to very large literature in English on agrarian change both historical and contemporary; there is an ample bibliography in [1], which is expanded in [2-5]. The paper outlines in schematic fashion some key concepts in the political economy of agrarian change with special reference to capitalism historically and today; some key questions posed by the political economy of agrarian change, and how it seeks to investigate and answer them; two sets of more specific questions about agrarian transition to capitalism and agrarian change within capitalism (internal to the countryside, bringing in ruralurban interconnections, pointing towards the place of agriculture within larger 'national' economies, and concerning the character and effects of the capitalist world economy). With the aid of the last group of questions, the author discusses three themes, which they are deployed to investigate: the agrarian origins of capitalism, the distinction between farming and agriculture generated by capitalism, and the fate(s) of peasant farmers in the modern world of capitalism. The author believes that one cannot conceive the emergence and functioning of agriculture in modern capitalism without the centrality and configurations of new sets of dynamics linking agriculture and industry, and the rural and urban, and the local, national and global. The three themes all feed into the fourth and final theme, that of investigating the fate(s) of the peasantry in capitalism today, which resonates longstanding debates of the 'disappearance' or 'persistence' of the peasantry, albeit now in the conditions of contemporary 'globalization'. The author does not deny some of the critique of the contemporary globalization, or at least its effects; his problem is the advocacy of 'solutions' premised on an unconvincing, pre-given and idealized 'peasant way' that lacks the analytical means (and desire) to confront processes of class formation in the countryside.

New approaches to political economy

Socio-Economic Review, 2019

The discussion on ‘New Approaches to Political Economy (PE)’ gives us a state-of-the-art overview of the main theoretical and conceptual developments within the concept of political economy. Thereby, it invites us to broaden our knowledge regarding manifold novel approaches, which make use of more complex methods to study the less stable, less predictable, but faster changing realities of smaller or bigger geographical regions. In this discussion forum, Amable takes a closer look on the nature of ‘conflict’ as well as the relationship between conflict and institutional change or stability. After stressing the relevance of comparative capitalism in general, Regan also zooms in on the political conflicts in comparative political economy from three different perspectives (electoral politics, organized interest groups and business-state elites), where he finds new avenues, tensions and research agendas are opening up. From a different perspective, Avdagic reviews the broad developments ...

Rural social and solidarity economy initiatives from Central and Eastern Europe – In contexts

2018

To better understand regional polarisation, spatial researchers are turning to the concept of "peripheralisation". While "periphery" is a rather static notion, with the term "peripheralisation", the dynamics behind processes in which "peripheries" are produced through various social relations, can be grasped (Kühn 2015). While researchers who focus on peripheries are interested in remote locations or spaces with sparse populations, researchers of peripheralisation focus on the political, economic, social and communicative processes through which peripheries are made. Based on this multi-dimensional approach to peripheralisation, peripheries are not only determined by geographical location or the quality of the transport infrastructure (Kühn and Weck 2013: 24), but they are socially produced too, through the process of peripheralisation, which is driven by the action of certain actors. Peripheralisation is the result of purposive decisions and their-often unintended-side effects (Leibert and Golinski 2016: 257). Based on this multi-dimensional approach, peripheries are produced and reproduced through mechanisms of out-migration, disconnection, dependence, stigmatisation (Kühn and Weck 2013: 24) and social exclusion (Leibert and Golinski 2016). A person, a group or an area might all be subjected to the process of peripheralisation (Meyer and Miggelbrink 2013: 207). Consequently, peripheralisation is not an independent process, but a logical consequence of centralisation (Leibert and Golinski 2016: 257). Centralisation and peripheralisation are charachterised by antithetic socio-spatial processes, such as authonomy-dependency, inclusion-exclusion, hegemony-stigmatisation, growth-decline, in-migration-out-migration (Kühn 2015: 375). Centralisation therefore results in the concentration of people, economic and political power and infrastructure in metropolitan regions at the expense of other, often rural regions. 2.1.1. Stigmatisation As Lang (2013, 2015: 176) argues regional development policy is always normative (even if its arguments are based on empirical data) and framed by individual and collective values linked to specific understandings and conceptualisations of development, desired policy outcomes and funding priorities. "Such understandings, conceptualisations and priorities can be seen as the results of discourses linked to particular governance arrangements which are only partly state-led." (ibid) As perceptions of desirable forms of socio-spatial development are socially constructed and are only partially the results of rational reasoning, areas, groups and people can get subjected to stigmatisation in development discourses. In certain development discourses, through overlooking the structural processes causing the structural weaknesses, remote rural areas get stigmatised as "declining", "backward", "laggingbehind", "non-innovative". Demographisation is a current discourse in German regional policy justifying the phasing out of public and economic infrastructure from remote, rural settlements.

Introduction to Political Economy in the Modern State

Political Economy in the Modern State, 2018

Political Economy in the Modern State is Harold Innis's transitional and, in some respects, transformational book. It is the bridge between his economics and communications studies. Arguably, in terms of his ontology and epistemology, it is his most insightful text. Ironically, it has also been his least understood and appreciated. Among other things, Political Economy in the Modern State (PEMS) sheds light on Innis's complex political and cultural concerns-concerns that occupied him in his later years. Indeed, in PEMS, Innis provides the intellectual scaffolding for his final six years of scholarship. 1 Innis lived from 1894 to 1952. He remains, in the eyes of many, Canada's pre-eminent scholar. That was not always the case. Friend, colleague, and biographer Donald Creighton noted that his first decade as a faculty member at the University of Toronto (1920-30) was filled with frustration and loneliness. 2 During that time, Innis was the only one on staff researching Canadian economic history, and what was to become his monumental book-The Fur Trade in Canada (1930)-had been rejected by several publishers. 3 By the early 1930s, however, this had changed. The praise Innis then received rested primarily on his staples thesis of Canadian economic history. Recognized internationally not only as a leading figure in economic history but also in the social sciences and humanities, 4 Innis nonetheless began to forsake his staples research (we believe in the mid-1930s). Instead, he set out to develop a new and underappreciated area of inquiry: the political economy of communication, media, culture, and civilization. 5 One might well ask: "Why would Innis do this?" 6 And further: "What distinguishes this later work from his earlier research?" In this introduction, we maintain that neither Innis's staples thesis nor his communications writings can be understood adequately in isolation from one another. Nor can they be fully understood without a working knowledge of PEMS. We will argue that, through this book, Innis sought not only to address contemporary policies and debates in economics but also to transcend them by adopting an ambitiously historical, holistic, and reflexive approach. In fact, the focus of his work shifted from developing a theory of economic history as a guide for x Robert E. Babe and Edward A. Comor emerging economies (especially Canada's) to political and ontological concerns regarding the very survival of Western civilization Regarding this latter concern, in his preface to PEMS, Innis states that, "the first essential task is to see and break through the chains of modern civilization that have been created by modern science" (vii). In an ensuing chapter he declares also that the "collapse of Western civilization [began] with the [twentieth] century" (94). In another essay republished in PEMS we read that "the impression that universities can be bought and sold, held by business men and fostered by university administrators trained in playing for the highest bid, is a reflection of the deterioration of western civilization; to buy universities is to destroy them and with them the civilization for which they stand" (75). 7 In PEMS Innis manifested his inauguration of an extraordinarily grand project. He perceived, at the conclusion of the Great Depression, the onset of the Second World War, and later the dawn of the Cold War, an imminent collapse: "We are faced with the prospect of a new Dark Ages" (138). This expectation required him to respond in a way that would facilitate, at the very least, a deepened understanding of the social and institutional conditions besetting this civilization. Innis related the crisis, in part, to contemporary mass media. More foundationally, however, the book reflects Innis's overwhelming concern with power, which, in his contemporary context, was a dangerously centralized, contradictory, and unreflexive configuration 8 of political, economic, and cultural dynamics. The very title of the book requires examination. For a century and a half before Innis, "political economy" had been an academic discipline, often accredited to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776). Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were many other classical political economists, perhaps most notably David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. By choosing "political economy" as part of his title, then, Innis was indicating a treatise that would investigate what political economy had become in the modern era-the era of "the modern state." In particular, Innis maintained that, in the context of the modern state, a complex of relations, structures, and mediations was undermining the conditions under which political economy as previously understood could proceed (126). This resulted, sadly, in a weakening of political economy as an instrument in the search for truth. The search for truth, he stressed, is inconsistent with the overly specialized and mechanistic forms of thinking characterizing mainstream scholarship of the contemporary period. Moreover, he attributed this new mode of scholarship, in xii Robert E. Babe and Edward A. Comor Among his colleagues, Innis's shift in research was puzzling. 11 His son, Donald Innis, later revealed that his father was depressed by the fact that this new work was ignored even by those he knew personally to have similar interests. John Nef, Chester Wright, and Frank Knight all acknowledged receiving mailed copies of what Innis sent them, but none responded. 12 A cursory overview of the contents of PEMS makes obvious how it links the author's two main research areas. The first seven chapters concern themes that Innis developed or returned to in his final three books. These directly involve media, communications, culture, public opinion, education, advertising, propaganda, present-mindedness, time/ space, and misunderstanding/understanding (arguably, the theme most overlooked by Innis's commentators). Chapters 9 through 14, at first glance, differ markedly from the first seven insofar as they are devoted to economic history or political economic concerns (as commonly understood). These concerns include trade imbalances, staples, overhead costs, unused capacity, liquidity preference, the dynamics of centralization and decentralization, geography/topography, militarization, debt, taxation, transportation, navigation, and tariffs and preferences. As we suggest later in this introduction, these essays invite readers to reflect on Innis's political and cultural concerns (and related communications themes) from the perspective of what then constituted his better-known work. Furthermore, we argue that they reveal the bases of Innis's then emergent conceptual apparatus. Their inclusion in PEMS grounds his communications concepts in the soil of his overarching political economy. Situated between the first seven "media/communication/culture" chapters and the later six "economic" chapters are the titular chapter (chapter 7), and chapter 8, "The Penetrative Powers of the Price System." The latter is the one that most clearly reconciles and integrates Innis's past and future research. As Tom Easterbrook explains, Innis came to recognize that the "key to economic change and much of its dynamic must be sought in changes in communications, for the penetrative power of the pricing system is but one aspect of the penetrative power of systems of communication." 13 By this account, then, Innis had good reason for placing "Penetrative Powers" at the centre of his book, situated immediately after the title chapter. Although it is important to recognize the continuity in Innis's thought between his early and later periods, and in particular PEMS as mediating and to an extent reconciling these two periods, it is equally vital to understand PEMS as constituting a fundamental rupture. In