I need an essay on the field of cultural political economy. It needs to be 3000 words excluding reference list. I need it to be fully referenced in Harvard style.

Review of International Studies (2003), 29, 79–97 Copyright © British International Studies Association

DOI: 10.1017/S0260210503000056

79

* This work was financially supported by an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. I would like to
thank Louise Amoore, Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Martin Coward, Randall Germain, Erna Rijsdijk,
Timothy Sinclair and an anonymous referee for thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this
article. Special thanks to David Campbell, who offered helpful critiques of several drafts of this
article, and suggested its title.

1 Overviews of poststructuralist IR can be found in, for example, James DerDerian and Michael J.
Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington
MA: Lexington Books, 1989); Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker (eds.), Challenging
Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1996); Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International
Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994); and the 1990 special issue of International Studies
Quarterly, 34.

2 Critical IPE literature includes, for example, Stephen Gill and David Law, The Global Political
Economy (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1988); Craig Murphy and Roger Tooze
(eds.), The New International Political Economy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991); and Martin
Hewson and Timothy J. Sinclair (eds.), Approaches to Global Governance Theory (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1999).

Beyond economism in international
political economy
M A R I E K E D E G O E D E *

Abstract. This article argues that the study of international political economy (IPE) in
general, and the analysis of modern finance in particular, have much to gain from the insights
articulated in poststructuralist international relations. In contrast to recent critiques of
poststructuralism, this article argues that the study of international finance necessitates a
consideration of the discursive practices which bring capitalist concepts such as money, profit
and capital into being. Financial practices do not exist prior to, or independently from, ideas
and beliefs about them. Thus, IPE should recognise the production of economic and financial
knowledge as an important site where power is exercised.

In recent years poststructuralist work has become increasingly significant within the
study of International Relations (IR).1 Poststructuralist scholars have critically
questioned the discipline’s core concepts including the state, rational man and the
separation between the domestic and the international spheres. Although this
approach has been greatly contested, poststructuralists have attempted to open the
discipline of IR to broader concerns than its traditional focus on state/state and
state/market interaction, by paying attention to, amongst other things, the cultural
representation of political practices and the politics of everyday life.

However, there is one area in IR in which remarkably little poststructuralist
intervention has taken place. Despite its important critical tradition, the study of
International Political Economy (IPE) has yet to address some of the questions
raised in poststructuralism. Questioning of the core concepts of IR and critical
reflection on the state/market dichotomy have been two of the main preoccupations
of a developing body of literature which may be called ‘critical IPE’.2 This literature

has done much to question traditional separations between politics and economics,
and to broaden the field of study of IPE. At the same time, critical IPE has not yet
examined how the politics of representation and practices of discourse analysis have
a bearing on its field of study. Many authors still take the economic and financial
domains as unproblematic or material starting points to their enquiries, and fail to
enquire how financial knowledge, including statistics and indices, has been historic-
ally developed. Much of IPE thus remains wedded to a profound separation between
the realm of the ideal and the realm of the real, whereby the politics of represent-
ation are seen to have a bearing only on the former domain, leaving the latter intact
as an incontestable reality. In this article, I will use the label ‘economism’ for IPE
approaches which assume such a prediscursive economic materiality.

IPE’s resistance to poststructuralist interventions is illustrated by a recent article
by Mark Laffey,3 who argues that poststructuralist theory in general, and the work
of David Campbell in particular, have little to offer those studying socioeconomic
relations and the workings of modern capital. Campbell’s theoretical focus on
identity and the discursive networks through which modern subject-positions are
made possible, argues Laffey, ‘obscures the systematic nature of global capitalism
and replicates a liberal notion of global capitalism as economic relations (that is,
economic ‘networks’)’.4 Through assuming that ‘signification is the logic of the
social’, Laffey continues, Campbell forecloses an analysis of the ‘social context of
. . . representation’.5 In other words, the focus on identity and discourse in post-
structuralist work, according to Laffey’s arguments, ignores the empirical context
and consequences of ‘the internationalisation of capital’, through which ‘particular
subjects are differentially empowered in relation to one another’.6 As a result, Laffey
concludes, ‘Campbell’s work erases both capital and labour and reinscribes
conventional distinctions between politics and economics’.7

However, it is only by maintaining the dichotomy between the ideal and the real
(or representation and its ‘social context’), rejected by Campbell, that Laffey can
dismiss poststructuralism in this manner. Apparently, Laffey perceives capital and
labour as existing prior to, and independently from, identity and discourse, as to him
Campbell’s consideration of the latter (discourse) occurs at the expense of the
former (capital and labour). A closer reading of Campbell’s work, however, would
demonstrate that he arrives at a careful consideration of social relations through
studying the politics of representation, and by rejecting the view that ‘the world
comprises material objects whose existence is independent of ideas or beliefs about
them’, in favour of ‘considering the manifest political consequences of adopting one
mode of representation over another’.8 This position entails a problematisation of

80 Marieke de Goede

3 Not all work within IPE is as resistant to poststructuralism as Laffey is. Two notable exceptions are:
Timothy J. Sinclair, ‘Synchronic Global Governance and the International Political Economy of the
Commonplace’, in Hewson and Sinclair (eds.) Approaches to Global Governance Theory; and Ronen
Palan, ‘The Constructivist Underpinnings of the New International Political Economy’, in Ronen
Palan (ed.), Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories (London: Routledge, 2000).

4 Mark Laffey, ‘Locating Identity: Performativity, Foreign Policy and State Action’, Review of
International Studies, 26 (2000), p. 439.

5 Ibid., pp. 439 and 443.
6 Ibid., pp. 435 and 441.
7 Ibid., p. 444.
8 David Campbell, Politics without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War

(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993), pp. 7–8.

the ideal/material distinction, which recognises a distinction between ‘linguistic and
non-linguistic phenomena’, while emphasising that there is ‘no way of bringing into
being and comprehending non-linguistic phenomena except through discursive
practices’.9 Thus understood, practices of capital and labour are shaped, regulated
and brought into being through historically grounded discourses of money and work.

In contrast to Laffey, then, I will argue that political economy in general, and the
analysis of modern capital in particular, have much to gain from the insights
articulated in a body of work which may broadly be called poststructuralism. I will
argue that closer scrutiny of modern finance necessitates a consideration of the
discursive practices which bring capitalist concepts such as money, profit and capital
into being. Financial practices do not exist prior to, or independently from, ideas
and beliefs about them, a point powerfully illustrated by the social and discursive
nature of money and credit. Money, whether in the form of coin, paper, stock or
electronic transfers, takes on value only through a social and discursive network
which underpins the expectation that the monetary instrument retains its value over
time and space.10 It is my argument, then, that understanding the politics of modern
finance requires a rejection of the dichotomy between the ideal and the material, and
starts with a consideration how current discourses of financial rectitude and economic
necessity have taken shape at the expense of other possible financial representations.

In order to make these arguments, I will provide some examples of the contested
and contingent nature of capital, which imply that the existence of capital cannot be
assumed as an unproblematic empirical starting point to academic enquiry. Subse-
quently, I will consider the avenues currently available for students of IPE to take
into account the complex roles of ideas and discourses in the modern globalising
economy. Finally, I will offer some thoughts on how poststructuralist insights
concerning power and identity may be usefully deployed to address questions within
IPE.

What is capital?

Laffey asserts that ‘Marxism is the “Other” through which Campbell’s own subject
position is affirmed’, and offers historical materialism as a theoretical framework
which does address the perceived shortcomings of Campbell’s work.11 Historical
materialism, argues Laffey, pays attention to the social contexts of identity and
representational practices, by prompting questions ‘that point us towards the ways in
which modes of subjectivity, social forms, and global relations are bound up with
but not reducible to the extraction of surplus value, the division of labour, and the
increasingly ubiquitous reach of capital’.12 In fact, ‘the worldwide (global) reach of
capital’s markets’ is perceived to be a fundamental driving force in Laffey’s work,
one which both forms the context of representational practices, and which is a

Beyond economism in IPE 81

9 David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 25.

10 See Nigel Dodd, The Sociology of Money (New York: Continuum, 1994), esp. pp. xxii–xxviii.
11 Laffey, ‘Locating Identity’, p. 437.
12 Ibid., p. 430.

‘causal factor’ behind post-Cold War socioeconomic change.13 To Laffey, capital is
both a transformative agent, capable of ‘self-expansion’, and a ‘social totality’ with
global reach.14

Laffey’s conceptualisation of capital is shared by an extended body of literature
within the field of IPE. ‘Like a Phoenix risen from the ashes’, as one widely accepted
metaphor goes, ‘global finance took flight and soared to new heights of power and
influence in the affairs of nations’.15 Benjamin Cohen’s metaphor attributes a large
capacity of agency to an abstracted image of global finance. This image of finance
as an immortal being, preying upon the capacities of nation-states, can be found in a
variety of academic literature on international finance. Such conceptualisations see
international finance as a ‘mastering force’ undermining national sovereignty and
scope for domestic policy intervention, in contrast to the postwar Bretton Woods
order when finance was the ‘servant’ of economic production, and financial flows
were subjected to capital controls.16

However, the reification of capital as a unitary, sovereign and (all-) powerful agent
(or system) does little to clarify the precise ways in which value and entitlements are
created and distributed in modern capitalist practices. Images of global finance as a
predatory and immortal agency homogenise financial institutions and markets and
assume unproblematic boundaries to this system. This particular representation
accepts as starting point an economic reality measured and defined by contestable
economic indicators. It seems to be precisely the assumption of capital as a funda-
mental driving force behind social change which prohibits Laffey from enquiring
more meticulously into the meanings and measurements of this concept.

It is my argument that the assumption of capital’s unequivocal reality means that
the discursive and ideological constitution of the economic domain is not often
questioned within IPE. The reason why it is problematic to see capital as a social
totality or a unified power, is that this obscures the ‘plurality of capitalist categories’,
and ‘extinguishes their history’.17 The questions prompted by the limitations to
Laffey’s arguments, then, include: what is capital?; how have financial markets been
historically constituted?; how are money, profit and value generated in late-modern
capitalist practices?; what or where are ‘capital’s markets’, which according to Laffey
have ‘global reach’?18 These questions are not meant to make the concept of capital

82 Marieke de Goede

13 Ibid., p. 439.
14 Ibid., pp. 435 and 438. On capital as agent see also Mark Laffey, ‘Adding an Asian Strand:

Neoliberalism and the Politics of Culture in New Zealand 1984–97’, in Jutta Weldes et al. (eds.),
Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities and the Production of Danger (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), esp. pp. 256–9.

15 Benjamin Cohen, ‘Phoenix Risen: The Resurrection of Global Finance’, World Politics, 48 (1996), p.
268.

16 Quotes taken from Eric Helleiner, ‘When Finance was the Servant: International Capital Movements
in the Bretton Woods Era’, in Philip G. Cerny (ed.), Finance and World Politics: Markets, Regimes and
States in the Post-Hegemonic Era (London: Edward Elgar, 1993), p. 20. Other examples include Philip
G. Cerny, ‘The Political Economy of International Finance’, in Philip G. Cerny (ed.), Finance and
World Politics: Markets, Regimes and States in the Post-Hegemonic Era (London: Edward Elgar,
1993); and Philip G. Cerny, ‘The Dynamics of Financial Globalisation: Technology, Market Structure
and Policy Response’, Policy Sciences, 27 (1994), pp. 319–42. Another version of the argument that
the national state is powerless in the face of international finance holds that the state is coopted by
capital. This is argued in Laffey, ‘Adding an Asian Strand’.

17 Glyn Daly, ‘The Discursive Construction of Economic Space: Logics of Organisation and
Disorganisation’, Economy and Society, 20 (1991), pp. 84 and 86.

18 Laffey, ‘Locating Identity’, p. 439.

disappear; they are rather intended to come to a more detailed understanding of
modern financial practices and their flaws and inconsistencies. There are numerous
contemporary and historical examples which illustrate how complex these questions
are, by demonstrating the contingent and contested value of financial instruments,
contracts and definitions.

For instance, even before the 2001 crash of the Nasdaq index, the leading US
stock market index dominated by internet and high-tech stock, the question how to
value ‘new-economy’ stocks was widely debated. In Britain, anxiety over proper
stock valuation surged in March 2000, when nine companies from the technology
and communication sectors joined the FTSE 100, displacing more traditional
industries such as brewing and building. ‘It can be a struggle to value these new
companies’, one Merrill Lynch analyst was quoted in the Financial Times, ‘tradi-
tional measures mean nothing for such companies’.19 Traditional guidelines for the
determination of a ‘stock’s intrinsic value’ are not applicable to internet stocks, argued
another economic analyst, ‘because they have no assets, earnings, or dividends, and
precious little management or definite prospects’.20 Much of the debate has centred
on the question whether the high valuation of internet stocks and the unprecedented
rise in Nasdaq were rational or signs of widespread popular delusion.21

The new-economy debate rallies around the articulation of natural laws and hier-
archies. It is assumed that stocks have an intrinsic value which can be discovered
with the proper economic tools. For instance, when Nasdaq dropped in April 2000,
New York Times economic analyst Gretchen Morgenson wrote: ‘The Nasdaq com-
posite surrendered to the force of gravity last week, falling 7.9 per cent’. She
concluded, ‘the laws of physics apply to new-economy stocks after all’.22 The new-
economy debates do not just attempt to stabilise the meaning and the value of the
‘new’ stocks, but also provide discursive stability for the valuation of more ‘tradi-
tional’ stocks, which was never as consensual and fixed as is now implied. The
discursive fixing of the nature and origins of value of stocks benefits some groups
over others, even if the debate is not simply reducible to competing economic
interests. The new-economy debate entails an (ongoing) redefinition of economic
interests around conflicting perceptions of money, value and economic growth. The
new-economy debate illustrates the contestability of stock value, one of the most
important categories of capital, and thus cannot simply be understood as economic
rhetoric. As Nigel Thrift has written since the collapse of new-economy stock:
‘elements of the new economy will live on. To write it off simply as a discourse is to
misunderstand discourse’s materiality.’23

A second example illustrating the political importance of contested definitions of
capital and value in the modern global economy is the current battle over the

Beyond economism in IPE 83

19 Simon Targett, ‘Old Economy versus New Economy: Where p/e Fails Try Eye-Whites’, Financial
Times, 18 March 2000.

20 Peter Martin, ‘The Internet Enigma’, Financial Times, 2 June 2000.
21 For a discussion of discourses of rationality and irrationality in finance, see Marieke de Goede,

‘Mastering Lady Credit: Discourses of Financial Crisis in Historical Perspective’, International
Feminist Journal of Politics, 2 (2000), pp. 58–81.

22 Gretchen Morgenson, ‘Forces of Nature, Immutable Truths’, Market Watch, New York Times, 2 April
2000.

23 Nigel Thrift, ‘It’s the Romance, not the Finance, that Makes the Business Worth Pursuing’, Economy
and Society, 30 (2001), p. 430.

worldwide formulation and implementation of International Accounting Standards
(IAS). Currently, accounting practices vary widely from country to country, leading
to different ways of measuring such financial categories as costs, capital and
profits.24 The effort to standardise accounting practices globally has led to consider-
able competition between the IAS, which are currently being revised by an
international body appointed by former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker,
and the US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).25 While the US has
been reluctant to abandon its own practices for internationally determined
standards, the recent Enron failure has effected a ‘setback for the cause of US
accounting as a global standard’.26 The politics of creating and promoting unified
international standards operate on two levels. First, as Wade and Veneroso note, the
inclusion of standardised accounting practices in IMF conditionality furthers
Western domination over the global economy. The IAS do not just require the
adoption of certain (Western) standards of measurement by countries desiring IMF
loans, such as Korea, but also command the use of one of five Western accounting
firms (the ‘Big Five’) for the annual auditing of financial institutions.27 More gener-
ally, countries not borrowing from the IMF are also expected to adopt the IAS in
order to gain access to and credibility in the international capital markets. Thus, the
standards are cast as a ‘passport’ to international financial participation.28

Secondly, accounting is political because it favours certain definitions of value
over others. This is argued in a growing body of literature which aims to scrutinise
and democratise the accounting profession.29 As one author puts it: ‘accounting
systems allow only one of the many competing versions of an organisation’s economic
reality to be legitimised’.30 As a result, alternative sources of value are delegitimised,
including ecological responsibility. The competition between IAS and US GAAP
hinges on these competing definitions of economic reality. The US refused to accept
previous international accounting rules because they diminished reported profits of
companies engaged in mergers and acquisitions.31 While the worldwide promotion of
international accounting standards takes place under the guise of technical expertise,
then it objectifies and quantifies contestable definitions of financial value.

84 Marieke de Goede

24 Geoffrey R.D. Underhill, ‘Private Markets and Public Responsibility in a Global System: Conflict
and Cooperation in Transnational Banking and Securities Regulation’, in Geoffrey Underhill (ed.),
The New World Order in International Finance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 34.

25 Floyd Norris, ‘Accounting Standards Committee Named’, New York Times, 23 May 2000; Floyd
Norris ‘Fewer Borders for Global Accounting’, New York Times, 26 January 2001.

26 David Fairlamb, ‘Europe’s Bean Counters are Sneering’, Business Week, 28 January 2002,
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_04/b3767714.htm

27 Robert Wade and Frank Veneroso, ‘The Asian Crisis: The High Debt Model Versus the Wall Street-
Treasury-IMF Complex’, New Left Review, 228 (1998), pp. 11–12.

28 Doug Cameron, ‘Accounting Body to Speed Push for Global Standards’, Financial Times, 25 January
2001.

29 This body of literature is associated with the journal Accounting, Organizations and Society. A few
good examples are: Richard J. Boland, ‘Beyond the Objectivist and the Subjectivist: Learning to Read
Accounting as Text’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 14 (1989), pp. 591–604; Anthony G.
Hopwood and Peter Miller (eds.), Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994); Peter Miller and Christopher Napier, ‘Genealogies of
Calculation’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 18 (1993), pp. 631–47.

30 Boland, ‘Beyond the Objectivist and the Subjectivist’, p. 599.
31 Norris, ‘Accounting Standards Committee Named’; see also Christian Leuz, ‘IAS versus US GAAP:

Information-Asymmetry Based Evidence from Germany’s New Market’, Working Paper, Wharton
Business School, March 2002, http://credit.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/leuz/IASvsUSGAAP

These examples begin to point to the discursive practices that bring capital into
being. Rather than existing as prediscursive social reality, or as the social context of
representation, capital itself seems to be discursively constituted and contested. This
argument is made by geographers Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thrift, amongst
others, whose research into the practices and spaces of money have led them to
conclude: ‘the more one analyses the realm of money and finance, the more one
realises that an attention to discursivity is required to come to an understanding of
it’.32 A focus on financial discourses does not prohibit Leyshon and Thrift from
exploring the ‘lived realities’ of the realm of finance.33 On the contrary, their under-
standing of financial discursivity brings into focus modern practices and spaces of
financial exclusion.34

Despite a growing body of work which problematises the materiality of money
and capital, few of these insights have found their way into research within IPE.35

IPE has incurred increasing criticism that it operates with a restricted definition of
politics that looks almost exclusively to identifiable actions of states and policy-
makers. Such political action is then perceived to be interacting with, but still largely
distinct from, the domain of the economic. ‘This distinction’, Craig Murphy and
Roger Tooze argue in their critique of IPE, ‘is based on the definition of “economics”
as the science investigating wealth production and distribution under scarcity, where
wealth is somehow separate from “politics”, and “politics” takes place where the
realm of economics stops’.36 Politics and economics, or state and market, are seen to
be mutually exclusive domains, pulling society in different directions. As Robert
Gilpin puts it: ‘without both state and market there would be no political economy.
In the absence of the state, the price mechanism and market forces would determine
the outcome of economic activities; this would be the pure world of the economist.
In the absence of the market, the state or its equivalent would allocate economic
resources; this would be the pure world of the political scientist’.37 The continued
conceptual separation between politics and economics in what Murphy and Tooze
call ‘orthodox IPE’ depoliticises the economic sphere and forecloses questioning of
the ways in which economic reality and financial value are ideologically and
discursively produced.38

Still, a number of strands within IPE literature have fruitfully integrated the study
of ideas and ideology into their analyses. These literatures have begun to question
the boundaries between the spheres of the economic and the political. Broadly, there

Beyond economism in IPE 85

32 Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thrift, Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 289.

33 Laffey, ‘Locating Identity’, p. 444.
34 Leyshon and Thrift, Money/Space, esp. pp. 225–59; see also Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thrift, ‘Lists

Come Alive: Electronic Systems of Knowledge and the Rise of Credit-Scoring in Retail Banking’,
Economy and Society, 28 (1999), pp. 434–66.

35 Such work includes, for instance, Daly, ‘The Discursive Construction of Economic Space’; Leyshon
and Thrift, Money / Space; Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing Economic Life’, Economy and
Society, 19 (1990), pp. 1–31.

36 Craig Murphy and Roger Tooze, ‘Getting Beyond the “Common Sense” of the IPE Orthodoxy’, in
Murphy and Tooze (eds.), The New International Political Economy, p. 24.

37 Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1987), p. 8.

38 Roger Tooze and Craig Murphy, ‘The Epistemology of Poverty and the Poverty of Epistemology in
IPE: Mystery, Blindness and Invisibility’, Millennium, 25 (1996), p. 682.

are currently three avenues open for those interested in studying ideas and meaning-
making in IPE. The first is provided by the literature on epistemic communities. The
second flows from the work Susan Strange did on information and has more recently
been taken up by Tony Porter. The third is inspired by Cox’s reading of the Italian
Marxist Gramsci and has been taken up in a literature loosely defined as Gramscian
IPE. I will assess each of these avenues in turn to demonstrate how a poststruc-
turalist political economy can build on, but will depart from, these literatures.

Three models of ‘ideas’ in IPE

First, the epistemic communities approach has been offered as a way in which
‘students of world politics can empirically study the role of ideas in international
relations’.39 It prioritises within IPE and IR an investigation into ‘the manner in
which people and institutions interpret and represent phenomena and structures’,
which makes a difference for the ‘outcomes we can expect in international
relations’.40 The literature on epistemic communities seems to offer a way to
integrate questions of valuation and meaning-making into the study of IPE. John
Ruggie argues that members of epistemic communities share ‘a dominant way of
looking at social reality, a set of shared symbols and references, mutual expectations,
and a mutual predictability of intention’.41 With respect to financial politics, Ruggie
has considered the postwar Bretton Woods order as ‘an intersubjective framework of
meaning that included a shared narrative about the conditions that had made these
regimes necessary and what they intended to accomplish’.42 A financial epistemic
community, Helleiner argues, involves state agencies as well as private actors.43

Ruggie and Helleiner problematise the image of finance as an autonomous and
predatory agency by arguing that governments were an active force in deregulation
and liberalisation of finance capital.

Yet when the concept of epistemic communities is translated into a research agenda,
the approach is reduced to considering the traditional concerns of international
relations, such as state interaction and international negotiation. As the 1992 special
issue of International Organization demonstrates, the epistemic communities agenda is
limited to the study of international negotiations in specialist issue-areas, such as
nuclear arms control and environmental regulation, where scientists are seen to play a
privileged role. Ideas are conceived of as self-contained entities, which ‘circulate from
societies to governments, as well as from country to country’ and inform

86 Marieke de Goede

39 Emanuel Adler and Peter M. Haas, ‘Conclusion: Epistemic Communities, World Order and the
Creation of a Reflective Research Program’, International Organization, 46 (1992), p. 367. Other
sources on epistemic communities include Ethan B. Kapstein, ‘Resolving the Regulator’s Dilemma:
International Coordination of Banking Regulations’, International Organization, 43 (1989),
pp. 323–47; John Gerard Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International
Institutionalisation (London: Routledge, 1998); and the 1992 special issue of International
Organization, 46.

40 Adler and Haas, ‘Conclusion’, p. 370.
41 Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity, p. 55.
42 Ibid., p. 21.
43 Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 198–201.

policymaking.44 The operationalisation of ideas as ‘independent variables’ (as Haas
puts it) allows this literature to assume a sharp dichotomy between ideas and a prior
unproblematic material reality which shapes and informs scientific research. Ideas, in
this argument, are ‘figured as no more than that which is not material . . . which can
be isolated as variables possessing at least some causal autonomy’.45

Similarly to Laffey’s arguments, then, the epistemic communities approach main-
tains a dichotomy between ideas and reality, and argues that a preoccupation with
the former forecloses a consideration of the latter. Thus, in Katzenstein, Keohane
and Krasner’s interpretation, the (so-called) postmodern research agenda, which
seeks to ‘[decentre] established discourse . . . by paying attention to what is marginal
or silent…falls clearly outside of the social science enterprise, and in international
relations research it risks becoming self-referential and disengaged from the world,
protests to the contrary notwithstanding’.46 A similar point is made by Ruggie, who
makes a distinction between meanings and ‘brute facts’, in which the latter exist in
‘the familiar world of material capabilities and similar palpable properties, of pre-
given and fixed preferences, of increases in trade restraints and depreciations of
currencies and so on’.47 These arguments overlook a body of literature in the history
of science which investigates the ways in which scientific facts are culturally, socially
and historically articulated and contested.48 They also foreclose the possibility of
considering the political processes of valuation that underpin the functioning of
money and capital, exemplified by Ruggie’s assumption that currencies exist
independently of mental states, beliefs, desires, hopes and fears.49 In conclusion, then,
the epistemic communities approach operates with a high degree of economism,
which takes the ‘economic sphere to be a distinct, independently existing sphere of
life whose elements have no intrinsic political aspect and, as such, can be definitely
separated from the social, political and legal aspects of life’.50

A second avenue for the inclusion of ideas and information into the study of IPE
is provided by the work Susan Strange has done on the knowledge structure. ‘Money
is information’, Strange writes, ‘it is not gold, silver or copper, not yet banknotes,
cheques, letters of credit or bills of exchange. It is electronic messages crediting or
debiting accounts in computerised recording systems operated by financial institu-

Beyond economism in IPE 87

44 Peter M. Haas, ‘Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination’,
International Organization, 46 (1992), p.27.

45 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 [1992]), p. 218.

46 Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane and Stephen D. Krasner, ‘International Organization and the
Study of World Politics’, International Organization, 52 (1998), p. 678.

47 Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity, p. 90. Ruggie does go on to say that brute facts are ‘mediated
by concepts and theories,’ but does not address this issue further. In the following section he simply
assumes that brute facts form the bases of causation, and are separate from, for instance, ‘beliefs,
desires, hopes and fears’ (Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity, pp. 90–91).

48 This literature includes, for instance, James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson and Harry Harootunian
(eds.), Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice and Persuasion across Disciplines (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1991); Allan Megill (ed.), Rethinking Objectivity (London: Duke
University Press, 1994); Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the
Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Steven Shapin,
A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1994).

49 Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity, pp. 90–91.
50 Richard K. Ashley, ‘Three Models of Economism’, International Studies Quarterly, 27 (1983), p. 467.

tions.’51 For Strange, this is a new phenomenon, brought about by technological
improvements in the means of communication, which have made possible ‘global
financial markets in which, potentially, all operators are in touch with each other all
over the world at all hours of day or night’.52 This has led to a financial order in
which what Strange calls ‘the knowledge structure’ enjoys relative autonomy to the
production and financial structures. The knowledge structure comprehends ‘what is
believed . . . what is known, and perceived as understood; and the channels by which
beliefs, ideas, and knowledge are communicated – including some people and
excluding others’.53

More recently, Strange’s work has been used and elaborated by Tony Porter, who
has identified a late-modern knowledge structure characterised by ‘the increased
speed and intensity with which new abstract knowledge is transformed into routine
unquestioned practices which can then be taken as commonsense reality’.54 To
Porter, the dramatically increased importance of the formulation and dissemination
of technical knowledge in late modernity manifests itself in the financial sphere in
the form of the mathematical creation of new financial instruments, the rearticul-
ation of financial standards and the redefinition of capital in order to include
‘intangibles’ such as human capital.55 Porter’s work starts to take into account the
discursivity of finance, as well as the complexity of defining capital and other
financial categories.

Still, Strange, and to a lesser extent Porter, advance an instrumental definition of
knowledge which supports a dichotomy between the worlds of the ideal and the
material, although this dichotomy becomes increasingly blurred. In Strange’s work on
the knowledge structure, knowledge is conceptualised as a resource, a coherent entity
which can be discovered, stored and communicated. ‘Knowledge is cumulative and
communicable’, Strange asserts, and power is derived from it as power is derived from
other sources such as material, productive or financial capacities.56 As Christopher
May points out, Strange’s ‘instrumentalist view of knowledge-information’ restricts
her consideration of these concepts. May concludes: ‘Having introduced knowledge
in a structural form, Strange immediately attempts to close the Pandora’s box that
she has opened. She can only do this by requiring us to accept that knowledge is a
resource.’57 Similarly, in Porter’s conceptualisation knowledge retains instrumental
features which objectify and reify it. The regulation of ‘the international flow of
knowledge’, Porter argues, is an important resource in the creation and maintenance
of hegemony, which he illustrates with a study of British and US hegemonic cycles.
In this reading, knowledge is a clearly recognisable entity, which can be owned,
contained and shared.58

88 Marieke de Goede

51 Susan Strange, ‘Finance, Information and Power’, Review of International Studies, 16 (1990), p. 263.
52 Ibid.
53 Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Pinter, 1988), p. 119.
54 Tony Porter, ‘The Late-Modern Knowledge Structure and World Politics’, in Hewson and Sinclair

(eds.), Approaches to Global Governance Theory, p. 138.
55 Ibid., pp. 141–8.
56 Strange, States and Markets, p. 122.
57 Christopher May, ‘Strange Fruit: Susan Strange’s Theory of Structural Power in the International

Political Economy’, Global Society, 10 (1996), p. 184, emphasis in original.
58 Tony Porter, ‘Hegemony and the Private Governance of International Industries’, in A. Claire Cutler,

Virginia Haufler and Tony Porter (eds.), Private Authority in International Affairs (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1999), p. 276.

The third avenue for the inclusion ideas or practices of meaning-making into the
study of IPE has been provided by Cox’s reading of the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci.59 Cox advances a research agenda which prioritises the historical study of
international structures, in order not just to understand how these ‘impose pressures
and constraints’ on agents, but also in order to map out possibilities for emancipa-
tory change.60 The importance of understanding hegemony in a Gramscian sense is
that it provides an opportunity to question that which is assumed to be natural, such
as perhaps the meaning and value of money. ‘Hegemony . . . in the gramscian
meaning’, Cox argues, includes ‘a structure of values and understandings about the
nature of order that permeates a whole society. . . . In a hegemonic order these
values and understandings are relatively stable and unquestioned. They appear to
most actors as the natural order of things’.61

Cox’s reading of hegemony has been elaborated and applied to the study of
international finance most notably by Stephen Gill and David Law, who seek to
explain rather than assume the economic interests of international actors by looking
at the ideological debates informing them. The departure from Bretton Woods in
favour of a more liberal international financial order was caused, Gill and Law
argue, by a transformation in the way business and government leaders of different
countries perceived ‘the general conditions of existence of the international order’.62

International change in this field takes place though consensus rather than through
coercion, Gill argues, making it imperative for the classes profiting most from a
certain order to phrase their narrow class interests in terms of universal interests.
This is precisely what happened with the political shift towards neoliberalism in the
late 1970s and 1980s, according to Gill, when Thatcher claimed that ‘there was no
alternative to her supply-side monetarist policies’.63 Gill concludes that we have
arrived at a transnational financial structure with its own discursive practices which
act ‘to discipline deviations from the orthodoxy of neo-liberal economics and serve
to constitute the limits of the possible in matters of global finance and sovereign
debt’.64

Although Gramscian IPE has opened possibilities to study the structural limits to
our perceptions of international economic reality, it is subject to its own structural
and conceptual limits which exclude from consideration some of the questions
raised by money’s discursivity. Because it derives largely from a Marxist framework,
gramscian IPE takes class as its most basic unit of analysis. Although political
consciousness of these class-units is not inherent or self-evident according to Gramscian
IPE, class identity is seen to precede the political. This theoretical position is made

Beyond economism in IPE 89

59 Gramscian IPE includes, for example, John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge, Mastering Space:
Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1995); Robert W. Cox
and Timothy J. Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
and Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).

60 Cox and Sinclair, Approaches to World Order, p. 8.
61 Ibid., p. 517, emphasis added.
62 Stephen Gill and David Law (1993) ‘Global Hegemony and the Structural Power of Capital’, in Gill,

Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, p. 104.
63 Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990), p. 95.
64 Stephen Gill, ‘The Global Panopticon? The Neoliberal State, Economic Life, and Democratic

Surveillance’, Alternatives, 20 (1995), p. 11.

clear in a recent article by Cox, who points out that ‘Consciousness was not, for
Gramsci, a direct derivative of class; it was an historical construction’.65 Class
consciousness thus belongs to the domain of the political for Gramsci and Cox, in
which ‘an evaluation of the degree of homogeneity, self-awareness, and organisation
attained by the various social classes’ takes place.66 Class identity, on the other hand,
precedes this political level and belongs to the domain of the ‘objective relations . . .
brought about by the level of development of the material forces of production’.67

This latter domain is comparable to Ruggie’s world of brute facts, or in Gramsci’s
words, ‘a refractory reality: Nobody can alter the number of firms or their employees,
the number of cities or the given urban population, etc’.68

However, as I have briefly discussed above, the process of counting assets, profits
and so forth in accounting practices is highly contested and is currently the subject
of international negotiation and standardisation. The counting of economic reality
requires definitions, categorisations and classifications which are already political in
themselves. It moreover requires a large and reliable statistical apparatus and ade-
quate financial resources. In addition, considering class identity to be part of a pre-
political reality is highly problematic. As Laclau and Mouffe have argued, (class)
identity is dependent upon social and historical processes of identification. These
processes of identification are not exhaustively determined by material circum-
stances, but have to be articulated through contingent and political discourses.
Laclau and Mouffe conclude: ‘there is no logical connection whatsoever between
positions in the relations of production and the mentality of the producers’.69 The
point to be emphasised here is that in Gramscian IPE, culture, discourse and
ideology remain largely in the domain of the superstructure, and of secondary
importance to the study of the economic base which ultimately determines the
objective economic interests of agents.

These three avenues for studying practices of meaning-making, ideas and dis-
course within IPE thus remain limited by a degree of economism. Despite their
important insights and critical potential, the three approaches discussed all assume
the existence of a prepolitical domain which cannot be questioned or criticised
within the confines of the theory. Although the reach of the prepolitical domain
varies, with the epistemic communities approach most ready to leave intact the
domain of neoclassical economics as a technical given, while historical materialism
refuses a clear boundary between economics and ideas, and opens up the domain of
economic production to critical questioning, the indisputable materiality of eco-
nomic factors and objects is assumed in both.

The reason why I take issue with Laffey’s argument that poststructuralist work
‘reinscribes conventional distinctions between politics and economics’ is because
these distinctions rest upon a prior conceptual separation between the material
sphere of the economic and the ideational sphere of the political, which is precisely

90 Marieke de Goede

65 Robert W. Cox, ‘Civil Society at the Turn of the Millennium: Prospects for an Alternative World
Order’, Review of International Studies, 25 (1999), p. 15.

66 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 181; Cox, ‘Civil Society’, p. 26.

67 Cox, ‘Civil Society’, p. 25.
68 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 180.
69 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic

Politics (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 84–5.

being questioned within poststructuralist work.70 Laffey’s objection to Campbell’s
accounts is that they ‘begin and end with representation’, and fail to consider the
(supposedly) prediscursive realm of socioeconomic relations and the ‘global division
of labour’.71 However, in order to transcend the politics/economics distinction and
move beyond economism in IPE, it is necessary to challenge the very dichotomy
between representation and reality that Laffey wishes to reintroduce.

IPE and poststructuralism

Poststructuralism offers the possibility to open up the domain of economic and
financial reality to political questioning, a possibility denied by the prepolitical
nature of a realm of hard facts or a refractory reality. Moving beyond economism
requires the recognition that neither the politics/economics distinction, nor the
idealism/realism distinction, exist beyond their historical articulation. As Ashley
writes: ‘[A]ll such distinctions are products of history, or, more correctly, of political
struggles to shape, reproduce, or transform social orders and symbolic systems’.72

Michael Shapiro has reread the work of Adam Smith as one place in which the
modern separation between the political and the economic has historically been
articulated. According to Shapiro, modern economics as written by Smith, amongst
others, assumes value to be derived directly from objects. This is a metaphor of
intrinsicality, in which ‘objects satisfy senses . . . their value derives from their
material relationship with the body’.73 In this way, modern economics forgets the
(social, cultural, discursive) contexts through which objects take on value, and the
interpretative struggles that determine what ‘value’ is to mean. In contrast, Shapiro
argues, practices of value and valuation are less ‘an individual choice than an
enactment of a social code . . . the value of an object for a subject emerges within a
linguistic act that is . . . anchored in history’.74 In other words, ‘interpretation
produces value’, instead of value existing objectively and prior to interpretative
struggles.75 In finance, this raises the questions how historically grounded practices
attribute value to monetary instruments, including gold, paper, stocks or derivatives,
and how current financial discourses have taken shape at the expense of alternative
financial possibilities and representations.

Despite its efforts to move beyond the ideal/material dichotomy which defines
much of international relations research, many critics have misinterpreted poststruc-
turalist work as proposing to study ‘merely’ text, rhetoric and ideas.76 As I have

Beyond economism in IPE 91

70 Laffey, ‘Locating Identity’, p. 444.
71 Ibid., pp. 444 and 440.
72 Ashley, ‘Three Models’, p. 471.
73 Michael J. Shapiro, Reading ‘Adam Smith’: Desire, History and Value (London: Sage, 1993), p. 62.
74 Ibid., p. 66.
75 Ibid., p. 81, emphasis in original.
76 See, for instance, Stephen D. Krasner, ‘The Accomplishments of International Political Economy’, in

Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds.), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stephen D. Krasner, ‘Wars, Hotel Fires and Plane
Crashes’, Review of International Studies, 26 (2000), pp. 131–6; and Heikki Patomäki and Colin
Wight, ‘After Postpositivism? The Promises of Critical Realism’, International Studies Quarterly, 44
(2000), pp. 213–37.

argued, these critics maintain the dichotomy between the realm of the material and
that of the ideal, and assume that poststructuralists are solely concerned with the
latter. A response to such criticisms is provided in a recent essay by philosopher of
science Bruno Latour, which was provoked when a concerned interviewer asked him
the question ‘do you believe in reality?’ ‘Is reality something like God’, Latour
wondered at this question, ‘the topic of a confession reached after a long and
intimate discussion?’77 In fact, Latour explains, what his work questions is not
reality but the historically constructed dichotomy between the world of the ideal and
the world of the real, which subsequently has made possible the discursive abstrac-
tion of human passions, beliefs, hopes and fears from scientific endeavours. This
discursive move, which Latour (and others before him) attributes foremost to
Descartes, underlies the possibility of distinguishing the human mind, with all its
weaknesses and passions, from the ‘outside world’, which then can (or cannot) be
positively known. ‘Only a mind put in the strangest position’, Latour writes, ‘look-
ing at the world from the inside out and linked to the outside by nothing but the
tenuous connection of the gaze, will throb in the constant fear of losing reality’.78

Within IR theory, Jim George has similarly traced the ideal/material dichotomy to
Descartes and argues that this imagination of a ‘world out there’ in IR means that
‘reality now becomes the realm of the unchangeable and inevitable’.79

However, if there were such distinction between the world of the ideal and the
world of brute material reality in IPE, where would it be? And how would we know
it? I have already noted the difficulties inherent in the process of counting (factories,
workers, cities) proposed by Gramsci, as any process of counting requires definitions,
categorisations and financial resources which puts it firmly into the realm of politics.
In other words, whatever material reality Gramsci (and many others) have in mind is
never knowable without human intervention and interpretation. The counting of
factories becomes a priority only within a discursive framework which attributes a
certain meaning to the existence of factories and workers, in Gramsci’s case the
meaning of class-struggle and emancipation. A similar argument can be made in
response to Krasner’s worries about ‘big time violent death’ in our uncertain
political environment.80 As far as I know, the first poststructuralist who denies that
realities exist in which people die as a result of a bullet in the head, has yet to be
located. What is contested, however, is the meaning of death and violence, particu-
larly large-scale political violence. As Campbell puts it:

the body lying on the ground, the bullet in the head, and the shell casing lying not far away –
tells us nothing itself about the meaning and significance of those elements. . . . For example,
did the body and the bullet get to be as they are because of suicide, manslaughter, murder,
ethnic cleansing, tribal war, genocide, a war of inter-state rivalry, or . . .? Each of those terms
signifies a larger discursive formation through which a whole set of identities, social relations,
political possibilities and ethical outcomes are made more or less possible.81

92 Marieke de Goede

77 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), p. 1.

78 Ibid., p. 4, emphases in original.
79 Jim George, ‘Understanding International Relations After the Cold War: Probing Beyond the Realist

Legacy’, in Shapiro and Alker, Challenging Boundaries, pp. 42–3.
80 Krasner, ‘Wars, Hotel Fires’, p. 134.
81 David Campbell, ‘International Engagements: the Politics of North American International Relations

Theory’, Political Theory, 29 (2001), p. 444.

In comparison, Latour’s scientific expedition in search of material reality found
instead what he calls ‘circulating reference’, whereby the processed information of
each step in a scientific process forms a resource for the next step in a ‘chain of
translation’.82 Between language and nature (or the ideal and the real) says Latour,
‘there is neither correspondence, nor gaps, nor [are they] even two distinct onto-
logical domains’.83 Latour follows the chain of translation through which the soil of
an Amazon forest is collected, measured, sampled, numbered, transported, tested
and analysed, to result in a scientific publication.84 Nor can we say that the actual
Amazonian soil was the unmediated material input for this chain of reference. A
process of meaning-making, scientific discussion and fund-raising preceded the
expedition of these scientists, convincing them they needed this soil, in this forest, at
this particular time, just as their final publication will form a resource for future
expeditions, both their own and those of rival scientists.

The process of circulating reference, moreover, enables power to be exercised from
what Latour has called ‘centres of calculation’. These are scientific nodal points
from which the chains of reference are commanded and in which their successive
stages are overseen and collected. ‘Inside these centres’, Latour writes, ‘specimens,
maps, diagrams, logs, questionnaires and paper forms are accumulated and are used
by scientists and engineers to escalate the proof race’.85 Latour shows not just that a
dichotomy between the ideal and the material is untenable, then, but also that
scientific processes are already implicated in particular modes of power which enable
and prioritise certain scientific endeavours over others.

Appropriating Latour’s arguments to the study of finance, it becomes clear that
the conceptualisation of the realm of finance and capital as a network of centres of
calculation offers an alternative to the conceptualisation of finance as a powerful
agent or an ‘overarching and seamless web’.86 This alternative emphasises the discur-
sive nature of financial instruments, while encouraging empirical research of the
ways in which value and entitlements are generated and distributed in modern
capitalism. Thrift and Leyshon have proposed to conceptualise finance as a series of
complex networks of authority which include ‘particular devices, particular
monetary skills, and particular attitudes toward, and beliefs about, what money is’.87

These monetary networks do not exist in an abstracted global space or continuous
(24-hour) time, but manifest themselves in particular ways in concrete geographical
locations such as the City of London and New York’s financial district.88 ‘Inter-
national financial centres’, Thrift concludes, ‘are centres of representation . . . [they]

Beyond economism in IPE 93

82 Latour, Pandora’s Hope, p. 27.
83 Ibid., p. 24.
84 Ibid., pp. 24–79.
85 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Milton

Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), p. 232.
86 Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thrift, ‘Moral Geographies of Money’, in Eric Helleiner and Emily

Gilbert (eds.), Nation-States and Money: the Past, Present and Future of National Currencies
(London: Routledge, 1999), p. 161.

87 Ibid.
88 This argument has earlier been made by Saskia Sassen, who rejects the view that the global economy

in general and financial markets in particular exist unhindered by geographic location and
infrastructure. See Saskia Sassen, ‘The State and the Global City: Notes Towards a Conception of
Place-Centred Governance’, Competition and Change, 1 (1995), pp. 31–50; Saskia Sassen, The Global
City: London, New York, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

are centres of discursive authority, able to describe what constitutes “news” and how
that “news” is interpreted’.89 Rather than ‘replicating a liberal notion of global
capitalism’,90 the notion of finance as a series of authoritative and discursive
networks advanced by Thrift and Leyshon opens up the fundamental categories of
knowledge of liberal capitalism to critical questioning.

By rejecting the dichotomy between objects and our ideas or beliefs about it,
poststructuralist work offers a way to take seriously the role of ideas, ideology and
discourses within the study of IPE while avoiding the limits of economism. In the
work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, the power of ideology is no longer
seen as a more or less conscious distortion of the truth in order to further particular
(class) interests, but rather as bound up with complex and historically grounded
technologies of truth production. Foucault proposes to reject the concept of
ideology in favour of the study of historically constituted ‘apparatuses of know-
ledge’.91 In this manner, knowledge, ideas and ideology no longer follow material
production and institutions, but are a requirement for material and institutional
possibilities. ‘[I]ndeed’, Foucault argues, ‘we must produce truth in order to produce
wealth in the first place’.92 The power of financial ideas exists in the spaces in which
‘production of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of know-
ledge’ takes place, including ‘methods of observation, techniques of registration,
procedures of investigation and research’.93

Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, amongst others, have used Foucault’s work in
order to understand modern economic governance. Their work breaks with the more
narrowly defined interactions of politics and economics discussed above. Foucault’s
notion of government, Miller and Rose argue,

highlights the diversity of powers and knowledges entailed in rendering fields practicable
and amenable to intervention. It suggests that the analysis of ‘policy’ cannot be confined to
the study of different administrative agencies, their interests, funding, administrative
organisation and the like. A complex and heterogeneous assemblage of conditions thus
makes it possible for objects of policy to be problematised, and rendered amenable to
administration.94

Before events and phenomena can be discussed in policy forums or be the subject of
international negotiations – thus before they come into focus within IPE – they must
be ‘rendered into information’, in the form of, for instance, ‘written reports, draw-
ings, pictures, numbers, charts, graphs, statistics’.95 It is these discourses that bring
economic and financial reality into being, and that render certain (policy) interven-
tions more possible than others. With respect to finance, it is important to note
MacKenzie’s argument that finance theory is performative, meaning it brings about

94 Marieke de Goede

89 Nigel Thrift, ‘On the Social and Cultural Determinants of International Financial Centres: The Case
of the City of London’, in Stuart Corbridge, Ron Martin and Nigel Thrift (eds.), Money, Power,
Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), p. 335, emphasis in original.

90 Laffey, ‘Locating Identity’, p. 439.
91 Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and

Other Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1980 [1976]), p. 102.
92 Ibid., p. 93, emphasis added.
93 Ibid., p. 102.
94 Miller and Rose, ‘Governing Economic Life’, pp. 3–4. See n. 35.
95 Ibid., p. 7.

the market reality that it intends to describe ‘as if it were an external thing’.96 As
MacKenzie shows in his in-depth study of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital
Management (LTCM), ‘finance theory itself has played an important role in its
assumptions becoming more realistic’, and thus is fully part of the materialisation of
financial markets.97 In conclusion, then, it is not the case that, as Navon purports,
‘facts are facts with or without human consent’.98 Facts, especially economic and
financial facts, are produced through human writing, reporting, calculating and
analysis, and these practices should be analysed within IPE as important domains
where economic power is exercised.

It is important to emphasise that these particular discourses of financial know-
ledge and rationality make real material distributions and effects possible: they
channel credit access and they create and distribute financial resources. In a recent
article, Judith Butler seeks to counter the claims that poststructuralist work fails to
address questions of economic equality and redistribution. Instead of being ‘merely
cultural’ or belonging to the realm of the superstructure, Butler argues, the discourses
of gender and sexuality which are discussed in her work are fully part of material life
and political economy. ‘[I]s it possible to distinguish, even analytically, between a lack
of cultural recognition and a material oppression’, writes Butler, ‘when the very
definition of legal “personhood” is rigorously circumscribed by cultural norms that
are indissociable from their material effects?’99 Discourses of sex and gender, Butler
concludes, underpin a ‘specific operation of the sexual and gendered distribution of
legal and economic entitlements’.100 Similarly, it can be argued that objectified and
authoritative discourses of capital underpin the distribution of financial entitlements.

If the creation and distribution of economic and financial entitlements are regul-
ated through definitions of personhood, the importance of conceptualising identity
within IPE becomes clear. More precisely, it becomes important to enquire into the
identities of legitimate speakers within the financial domain. The technical nature of
the processes of registering, charting and calculating which bring financial know-
ledge into being, means that financial agents are not so much consciously and
purposefully wielding power, but are themselves initiated through, as well as limited
by, discourses of the right and proper within the financial domain.101 Finance is
defined through general regulative practices that determine what can and cannot be
legitimately said within its domain. These regulative practices determine what it is
possible to speak of within the historically constituted financial sphere; which events
are recorded as evidence and which utterances are recognised as valid. These same
limits govern which statements are considered futile and irrelevant to the financial
domain; which evidence is inadmissible, which utterances are invalid.102 Thus, the

Beyond economism in IPE 95

96 Donald MacKenzie, ‘Physics and Finance: S-Terms and Modern Finance as a Topic for Science
Studies’, Science, Technology & Human Values, 26 (2001), p.136.

97 Ibid., p.133. About LTCM, see also Marieke de Goede, ‘Discourses of Scientific Finance and the
Failure of Long-Term Capital Management’, New Political Economy 6 (2001), pp. 149–70.

98 Emmanuel Navon, ‘The “Third Debate” Revisited’, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), p. 625.
99 Judith Butler, ‘Merely Cultural’, New Left Review, 228 (1998), p. 41.

100 Ibid.
101 Cf. David Campbell, ‘Political Prosaics, Transversal Politics, and the Anarchical World’, in Shapiro

and Alker, Challenging Boundaries, p. 18.
102 Michel Foucault, ‘Politics and the Study of Discourse’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter

Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1991 [1968]), pp. 59–60.

regulative practices which govern the limits of the financial domain act upon the
ways participants in this sphere understand their roles, interests and possibilities.

At the same time however, it is precisely their initiation as financial professionals
that makes possible authoritative agents in the financial sphere, who articulate,
reaffirm but sometimes also resist discourses of financial rationality. Butler emphasises
the instability of power and the multiplicity of possible resistances by placing
emphasis on the continued necessity of performance and enunciation of (financial)
governance. ‘If . . . a structure is dependent upon its enunciation for its
continuation,’ Butler writes, ‘then it is at the site of enunciation that the question of
its continuity is to be posed ’.103 In other words, despite the rigorous training and
education financial agents are initiated by, their performances do not flawlessly
reproduce previous formulations, but may reformulate, rearticulate, transform, and
even fundamentally question financial orthodoxies.

Conclusions

In conclusion, then, it is my argument that a poststructuralist understanding of
financial practices offers two important focal points which have hitherto received too
little attention within IPE. First, it prioritises investigation into how understandings
of economic reality and rationality in themselves exercise a particular power, thus
politicising financial knowledge. In an era when financial practices are closed off
from democratic politics through the assertion that finance is too specialist for
broad-based public debate, questioning technical financial knowledge becomes one
of the most important sites of political critique. As Porter points out, ‘[t]he produc-
tion of knowledge is increasingly entering into the constitution of objects (such as
tradeable products) and relationships (property rights and capital) that convention-
ally have been regarded as natural or material’.104 IPE approaches which assume the
existence of an undeniable economic reality limit their own scope for criticism of
economic knowledge, and often rely on conventional financial indices and statistics
for the measurement and definition of this reality.

Second, a poststructuralist IPE considers as political the boundaries to currently
accepted disciplinary domains and raises the question how the economic and the
political have been defined as mutually exclusive entities in the first place. The
positioning of capital as powerful agent or global system homogenises financial
practices as a coherent sphere with unproblematic boundaries. In contrast, Foucault’s
insights on the ‘limits of the sayable’ within a historically constituted disciplinary
domain teach that a better understanding is needed of how and why issues are in- or
excluded from the domain of capital. A poignant example is discussed by Marianne
Marchand, who has argued with respect to the public discussion surrounding
NAFTA that raising particular issues in economic debates is rendered difficult
because the regulation of the domain of legitimate discourse ‘perceive[s] these issues
as departing from assumed standards of rationality and objectivity, and conse-

96 Marieke de Goede

103 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 19,
emphasis added.

104 Porter, ‘The Late-Modern Knowledge Structure’, p. 151. See n. 54.

quently view[s] them as social issues, and of secondary importance or external to the
economic model under discussion’.105 At the same time, however, an understanding
of financial professionalism means that it is not possible to attribute the restricted
definition of economic issues to the personal deviance or ignorance of financial
practitioners. Instead, economic and financial education should be researched as
major sites of the production of subjectivities that, in their turn, produce and restrict
the financial domain. In the financial sphere, the field of possibility of behaviour is
regulated through criteria of responsibility, rationality and morality, which are
defined and taught in diverse practices ranging from credit-rating and children’s
education in financial rectitude to expensive and prestigious MBA degrees.106

Finally, it should be noted that seeking to move beyond economism in IPE does
not entail a wholesale rejection of Laffey’s political preoccupations. On the contrary,
such a move is motivated by a search for alternatively imagined financial futures and
possibilities of political resistance to modern financial practices, which all too often
take on the appearance of natural and material necessity. It is here that the political
and ethical agenda of poststructuralism is articulated: it (partly) consists of ‘making
strange’ or denaturalising the orders and possibilities that have taken on the appear-
ance of necessity and objectivity.107 Foucault’s political agenda must be seen in light
of his constant encouragement to struggle ‘against the effects of the power of a
discourse that is considered to be scientific’.108 Now that finance in general, and
globalised investment banking, derivatives trading and speculation in particular, have
taken on the appearance of economic necessity and scientific respectability, post-
structuralism requires a proper place within the study of political economy. Quoting
Foucault, Campbell concludes that a poststructuralist ‘ethos of criticism is thus far
from being simply a negative and destructive enterprise. It is, as Foucault argues…“a
matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are
not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no
longer be accepted as such. Practising criticism is a matter of making facile gestures
look difficult.” ’109

Beyond economism in IPE 97

105 Marianne Marchand, ‘Selling NAFTA: Gendered Metaphors and Silences Gender Implications’, in
Eleonore Kofman and Gillian Youngs (eds.), Globalisation: Theory and Practice (London: Pinter,
1996), p. 258.

106 Some of this research is already being done, within as well as outside IPE. On credit rating see for
instance: Leyshon and Thrift, ‘Lists Come Alive’; and Timothy J. Sinclair, ‘Between State and
Market: Hegemony and Institutions of Collective Action under Conditions of International Capital
Mobility’, Policy Sciences, 27 (1994), pp. 447–66. On education in financial rectitude, see for instance:
Gill, ‘The Global Panopticon?’, esp. pp. 25–7; and Adam Harmes, ‘Institutional Investors and the
Reproduction of Neoliberalism’, Review of International Political Economy, 5 (1998), esp. pp. 112–14.

107 Donna Gregory, ‘Foreword’, in DerDerian and Shapiro, International/Intertextual Relations, p. xiv.
108 Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, p. 84.
109 Campbell, Writing Security, p. 215.

Academic Writing in Political Economy

A Basic Survival Guide for Students

CONTENT

S

PAGE NUMBER

HOW T

O

ORGANIZE AN ESSAY

3

DEVELOPING GOO

D

RESEARCH SKILLS

5

PARAPHRASING AND DIREC

T

QUOTES

7

ESSAY WRITING SHORTCUTS

8

ACTIVE READING

10

CLARITY IN ACADEMI

C

WRITING

11

CONCLUSION 11

FURTHER ADVICE ON ACADEMIC WRITING 1

2

2

on’t panic. This is the golden rule of good academic writing for students whether you
are a final-year undergraduate or postgraduate student writing your dissertation, a first-
year student with your essay deadline looming, or preparing for end-of-year exams.

Achieving a good standard of academic writing is often hard work, but with proper planning for
assignments, active attention to developing your writing skills, and – most important – practice
you will gradually improve your capacity to write high-quality essays and other assignments, until
it is difficult to recall the challenge of writing your first academic essay.
Developing your academic writing skills does not (usually) occur naturally, and involves
sustained individual effort and persistence. It is common for university students to progress
through their undergraduate degree – or even graduate study – lacking a clear grasp of what is
expected in academic writing, and how their own writing skills might be improved. One reason
for this is that students often receive what seem to be opaque comments on their assessed work
from university lecturers. This may include appropriate feedback exhorting a student to improve
their analytical skills, the clarity of their writing, the structure of their essays, or to more critically
reflect on the sources they use, but which is often not accompanied by advice on how these areas
identified for improvement can be acted upon in practice. This short introduction to academic
writing aims to assist you in bridging the gap between areas identified for improvement with
respect to your written work, and the techniques you can use to realize this improvement. In
short, it aims to give you a brief overview of the essential ‘tools of the trade’ in academic writing,
by providing a basic survival guide for students taking political science courses at all levels of
undergraduate and graduate study. In particular, it is intended to be useful for International
Political Economy (IPE) students, who confront a particular set of challenges in – and common
misconceptions about – writing essays on political economy topics.

D

3

HOW TO ORGANIZE AN ESSAY

• An essay structure should include an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion
• The body of your essay should follow a clear and compelling logic

orrect structuring of the different sections of an essay is essential for achieving a logical
analysis and for organizing a comprehensive discussion of complex phenomena, as well
as for the clear and persuasive communication of your own ideas and arguments. For

many students encountering academic writing for the first time, however, this slippery notion of
‘structure’ – and how to go about correctly structuring a written assignment such as an essay, an
exam essay, or a shorter written assignment such as a briefing paper – is shrouded in mystery.
Understanding how to organize a piece of academic writing well is not a closely-guarded secret –
quite the opposite in fact, there are numerous sources of university support and countless
textbook guides on academic writing that provide detailed explanations of how to structure your
written work to achieve maximum impact and quality. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize
that the organization and design of written university assignments, like most components of
academic writing, refers to a more sophisticated and time-intensive process of organizing ideas
and information compared with what you may be familiar with from your previous education
(including A levels).
A written piece of academic work such as an essay assignment can be thought of as similar to
a decent three-course meal at your favourite restaurant: it will have an appetizer (your
introduction); a main course (the body of your essay); and a dessert which rounds out your meal
(your conclusion). The first stage in this process – the ‘appetizer’ – is your introduction. This
should introduce the reader to the central focus of your essay topic, including relating this to
wider debates in the relevant subject based on the existing scholarly literature. It will aim to whet
the reader’s appetite by outlining the central argument you will mount in your essay, while also
explaining how you will construct and pursue this line of argument through a careful analysis of
the topic and the use of evidence to back up your claims.
In addition, your introduction should explicitly set out the structure of your essay. This may
be as straightforward as a short paragraph at the end of your introduction like: ‘This essay will
proceed as follows. The first section will… This is important because it shows… The second
section will… , which helps to illustrate the importance of… The third section closely examines
the process of… and ties together the earlier discussion of… in section one and … in section two
by… Finally, the conclusion will summarize the key argument and findings of the essay, and will
discuss how the central argument – that… – is important for broader debates in International
Political Economy because…’ – and so on. This should provide signposts to your reader of where
you are going – what you are going to do in the essay – and why. Academic writing assignments
involve making important choices about what you will choose to concentrate on – and what you
will leave aside – and these choices should be clearly and logically justified to the reader.
The main body of your essay – the reader’s ‘main meal’ in the three-course dinner metaphor –
should contain the substantive content of your research, analysis, and argument. You should aim
to implicitly address the following general questions:

C

4

• What are the big debates (e.g., in IPE) that relate to this topic?
• What are the more specific debates in the existing scholarly literature on this particular

topic?
• How does your essay address/fit into these larger debates?
• What is your central argument, and how is this constructed?
• What does your essay add up to? What are your key findings?
• So what? Why does this matter?

It is usually considered best practice to organize a sizable university essay through the use of
appropriate sub-headings to organize your text (some lecturers prefer that sub-headings are not
used, however, so it is always important to check this if you are unsure). These different sections
should proceed logically (it should be obvious to the reader why you order the different sections
in a particular way), and must be carefully connected through appropriate transitions and making
explicit connections between different points. If you are using sub-headings, these should usually
contain several paragraphs (i.e., one sub-heading for each paragraph is not appropriate), while
paragraphs should usually contain between a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 6-8 sentences.
Some of the most common errors in students’ academic writing include overly-short paragraphs
(of 1-2 sentences), or overly-long paragraphs that stretch on for more than a page – sometimes
multiple pages – without a break.
Correct paragraphing is vital for ensuring that your written work achieves your intended aims
in terms of clarity and maintaining a logical structure. Many of your paragraphs may follow a
structure similar to the following: the first sentence will make the key statement of the paragraph,
which tells the reader what is the main topic/issue that will be discussed in this paragraph; this
may be followed by an example of the point that has been made in the statement, to illustrate
how this broad point works in practice; finally, your paragraph may include a closing sentence or
several sentences that more thoroughly explain the key point and the relevance/implications of
the example that is used, while also ideally providing a logical transition to the following
paragraph.
The final section of your essay – the ‘dessert’ – is the conclusion, which should round off the
entire piece of work in a coherent and, ideally, an interesting way. This should summarize the key
findings and your central argument – reminding the reader of what you have concentrated on in
the essay and what you have found out – without simply repeating word-for-word what you have
said previously in either the main body or the introduction. Usually new information will not be
introduced in the conclusion unless this is strictly relevant to how you are completing your
assignment, but you may wish to note areas for further research that are suggested by your
analysis and argument. It is often highly useful for students to examine academic articles relating
to their respective topic/subject to see how other authors organize their own introductions, the
body of their papers, and how they frame their conclusions to round their articles off in a
coherent fashion. In this sense, you are reading academic literature not only for content, but also
for understanding the structure and the process of academic writing.

5

DEVELOPING GOOD RESEARCH SKILL

S

• Read widely from a range of sources and perspectives
• Use data and evidence with care

t is usual for a number of students to look blank whenever the topic of ‘research skills’ is
raised. The concepts and practices associated with high quality research in university study
often remain obscure for many students, and especially for those at the start of their degree

program. Yet developing good research skills is an essential component of good academic
writing. This will involve developing your ability to use numerous sources of information. The
starting place for students’ research is usually the existing scholarly literature on a particular topic
from within their own subject, such as International Political Economy. Beyond this, a range of
other sources may be relevant depending on the nature of the assignment and the topic being
addressed, which could include media sources, publicly-available speeches, documents, reports,
working papers, conference papers, and so on. Finding the right balance here can often be tricky.
In a large essay assignment, for example, this may involve a selection of the existing academic
literature combined with additional sources of primary and secondary information or data.
Within International Political Economy, an essay on the challenges and opportunities for
reform of an international institution such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would
ideally begin with the existing debates in the academic literature on IMF reform. Yet it would
also be important to carefully examine relevant documents the IMF has produced, many of
which are publicly available on the organization’s own website or in the university library. The
intellectual value of these sources – and how they can be used – will vary depending on the
authors. For example, Working Papers on IMF reform written by staff members tell a different
part of the story – from a different perspective – than formal policy papers/reports by staff,
which would in turn tell a different story in contrast with formal speeches given by the head of
the organization, the IMF Managing Director, or IMF Press Releases that represent the
organization’s official view on an issue. Documents, speeches, and position papers may also be
available from national institutions or agencies within states, such as the Bank of England, the
UK and US Treasuries, the Federal Reserve, the US Congress, and so on with respect to an essay
on the topic of IMF reform. Likewise, informal multilateral forums such as the Group of Twenty
have statements and communiqués relating to reform of the IMF that are available to download
from the web. Not all of these sources need to be incorporated within an undergraduate essay –
especially if this is a relatively short assignment of 2,000 words – but you will not be able to
judge what is and what is not relevant or important to include if you do not first look at these
different sources of information in your attempts to piece the story together.
International Political Economy students also tend to believe (often incorrectly) that they must
include hard data/economic statistics in their written work to gain a good grade. This is partly
true, and the careful use of economic statistics and other sources of data can potentially help to
strengthen the empirical foundations of an essay. If, for example, you are addressing an essay
question on the impact of the 2007 US subprime crisis on mortgage defaults, you will be

I

6

expected to provide some data to illustrate this relationship (which is often much easier to
communicate via a simple graph rather than attempting to incorporate a long series of figures in
the main body of your essay). Likewise, if you are studying the aggressive use of monetary policy
in different countries to combat the effects of the 2008-09 global financial crisis, you will
probably find it easier – and it will be more useful for the reader – if you provide a snapshot that
can illustrate this, such as a graph comparing interest rate changes among the economies you are
investigating.
It is often the case, however, that poor use of statistics – or, in the worst cases, simply slotting
in some numbers because you believe this is important for its own sake – weakens the quality of
an essay rather than strengthening it. A general rule of thumb here is that hard data/economic
indicators/statistics must be used carefully and clearly, they should fit the topic at hand, and any
graphs should be clearly explained in the text. Another option – which is seldom used by
undergraduates but can prove more useful than loading your essay with statistics – is to create
your own illustrative diagram(s) to trace the chain of causation with respect to a particular issue,
or to show how influence is exercised in a particular sphere of International Political Economy.
There are a wide range of sources of information available for you to use in your written
assignments at university, which are too numerous to provide an exhaustive list here. At a
minimum you should aim to develop proficiency with using the following sources: the library
database (and especially the e-library) to search for relevant books, edited volumes, and journal
articles from the scholarly literature; and web-based sources, including both local, national,
regional, and international institutions where this is appropriate, as well as the websites of non-
governmental organizations, companies, research institutes and thinktanks, and so on. Google
Scholar (http://scholar.google.co.uk) is an exceptionally useful site that can help you identify
relevant books/articles on a particular topic, although it does not include all the publications that
may be useful to you (some of which may not be available through the library).
A note of caution is important here: do not expect to be able to type your essay question into
Google and instantly find an article or book that directly addresses this. Some students struggle
to grasp that research does not usually involve simply finding out what someone else has written
that directly addresses your particular topic or question and then finding a way to reproduce this
through paraphrasing and direct quotes. Rather, to answer essay questions you will often need to
first disaggregate the question and to search for relevant sources of information on the distinct
component parts of the question. The trick then becomes how carefully and creatively you can
weave these (sometimes quite different) literatures together to coherently address the question
you have selected. It is always important to read as widely and thoroughly as possible around a
topic for any written assignment at university. By undertaking comprehensive active reading you
will also be building your research and critical thinking skills – thereby killing multiple birds with
one stone.

7

PARAPHRASING AND DIRECT QUOTES

• Use direct quotes sparingly
• Paraphrase to demonstrate that you understand an author’s ideas

nce again, a common misconception among students is the belief that the use of
extensive direct quotes in an essay is indicative of good research and writing skills, or
even substitutes for an argument and provides self-evident support for your case. This

view is categorically incorrect. Direct quotes should be used sparingly and to achieve a clear
purpose. There is one over-riding reason for paraphrasing (putting another author’s ideas in your
own words), rather than simply slotting in a direct quote from the books and journal articles you
have read for your essay research: correct and careful paraphrasing indicates to the reader that
you clearly comprehend the subject you are talking about and the points another author makes
(or doesn’t make, as the case may be). Conversely, overuse of direct quotes as space-fillers or
substitutes for your own ideas and analysis suggests that you do not have a clear grasp of other
authors’ arguments, or even of the topic on which you are writing.
Direct quotes are most likely to be useful: (1) for particularly good pieces of prose (some
sentences, like the famous lines from FDR’s Infamy Speech or terms such as George W. Bush’s
reference to an ‘Axis of Evil’ are better used as direct quotes rather than paraphrased for this
reason); and (2) if quotes can provide one of your sources of evidence. If, for example, you are
writing an assignment on the impact of a particular World Bank President on the World Bank’s
development policies and practices, then direct quotes from speeches delivered by the World
Bank President might provide a key source of your evidence that an individual actor holds
certain views and has pursued a particular agenda with respect to development policy. Even
when deployed as sources of evidence, however, it is usually wise to use direct quotes sparingly
and only to achieve a clear purpose.

O

8

ESSAY WRITING SHORTCUTS

• Shortcut #1: Remain consistently engaged throughout the course
• Shortcut #2: Avoid false shortcuts

tudents occasionally report the incorrect but fervently-held belief that following a list of
essay writing shortcuts is the best route to a high mark in their university studies – or, more
commonly, that shortcuts provide the best route to a ‘respectable’ grade, without requiring

you to put in the hard yards in terms of research, planning and organization, and writing, editing,
and proof-reading. This is almost always wrong. In every case, you will achieve more in terms of
learning outcomes relating to academic writing skills through remaining consistently engaged
throughout a course.

Of particular importance is APAC:
• Attendance at all Lectures and Seminars
• Participation in Seminars
• Active Reading
• Clarity in Writing Style

To say that attendance at all lectures and seminars is a shortcut for essay writing should be stating
the obvious, but it is often surprising that a minority of students – especially in large
undergraduate courses – fail to regularly attend their scheduled classes, especially close to essay
submission time. This is a grave mistake. Through attending all lectures and seminars students
are likely to receive extra hints and tips on completing course assignments in general, and in
particular you will have further opportunities to gain answers to your questions on how to
complete assignments and how you might improve the quality of you work. More broadly,
attendance at lectures – even when the subject doesn’t directly relate to the essay topic you are planning to
address – helps to provide greater context that will help you develop a more comprehensive
understanding of the course content. This is a major benefit when it comes to completing
written assignments.
Like regular attendance, participation in seminars is a must for students seeking to enhance
their academic writing skills. Not only will you get more out of the course in general, but active
participation in class debates, discussions, and question and answer sessions will help to round
out your understanding of the key concepts and issues a course focuses on, thereby enabling you
to develop a wider and deeper repertoire of skills that can be drawn upon for academic writing
assignments. In particular, active participation in seminars will help you to develop your critical
thinking skills – the same skills that are essential to good academic research and writing. It is a
truism to state that students who do not regularly attend lectures and seminars, or fail to actively
participate in classes, have to work harder to achieve the same grades as those who do.
University students always face significant pressures on their time. It is important to try to
strike a balance between your personal life and your university studies, although most students
find that the demands of university study will often dominate their schedule. As a result, it can be

S

9

tempting to skimp on completing the regular recommended/required readings for a particular
course, or to skip them entirely for those topics that are not directly related to the essay question
you are likely to select. Again, this is a mistake. Regular completion of required course readings
helps to broaden your understanding of the key concepts, issues, and debates in a particular
subject, all of which is essential for good academic writing even when the essay question you
choose to address is more narrow and specific. Students who do not complete the regular
readings also have to work harder to achieve the same quality in their assignments as those who
do.
It is important not to simply skim readings or to read passively, active reading is essential (see
below for further advice on how to read actively). Regular active reading for a course therefore
represents an essay writing shortcut precisely because it will give you a broader and deeper holistic
understanding of a subject, while spreading the workload more gradually and evenly across the
term rather than trying to cram this into a few days when an assignment is nearly due. In
addition, active reading helps students develop their academic writing skills through increasing
familiarity with academic writing norms, including language styles, techniques of structuring a
discussion, ways of mounting an argument, the appropriate use of supporting evidence, and so
on.
When you come to the process of actually sitting down and writing an essay or other
assignment – having completed your research and collated your notes – one final important
‘shortcut’ is the need to be clear in your writing to help you communicate your ideas as
persuasively and logically as possible. Clarity in writing style becomes a shortcut in its own right
once you recognize the virtues of writing plainly and avoiding, on the one hand, everyday
colloquial language that may not be suitable for formal academic writing, and, on the other hand,
adopting flowery and complicated prose (see the extract below from Strunk and White’s The
Elements of Style on the virtues of clarity in writing).
Beware of false shortcuts. Many potential ‘shortcuts’ should be avoided at all costs. Examples
of these include using data/figures/graphs for their own sake in the hope of receiving a better
grade simply because you have ‘hard data’, using flowery language and complex terms for their
own sake in the hope of appearing to be more clever than you are, or extensively citing a
lecturer’s own publications in the hope of achieving grade inflation via flattery. Other popular
false shortcuts that reappear each year include the following: reliance on easy access sources
(such as introductory textbooks, course lectures/seminars, web pages, and especially sourcing
information from Wikipedia, which is always obvious to the trained eye) at the expense of more
relevant and detailed scholarly texts; cobbling together information for your essays from course
lectures without conducting wider research, which represents intellectual laziness; and over-
reliance on direct quotes without sufficient explanation of your own, or without translating other
authors’ ideas into your own words to demonstrate that you have fully understood them.

10

ACTIVE READING

t is important to read actively in order to take in and process complex information, to
familiarize yourself with unknown terms (which you will subsequently need to understand
for essays/class discussion), and to organize your notes in order to avoid having to re-read

texts later on. Some basic steps that will help you to read actively are as follows:

• Check the reading list and ensure that you know before you begin why you are reading a
particular text.

• List all unfamiliar words or terms, then look up and write down the definitions.

• Write down your version of the author’s key argument (and be sure to organize your

notes to save time searching for material later on). This helps to emphasize key points in
your mind, and will make it easier to recall later.

• Identify the subtopics or themes in the article or book, and design a question that you

would ask for each (be sure to write such questions down), this will help to keep your
mind focused on the material.

• Indicate what other ideas the reading substantiates, contradicts, or amplifies. Think

how the reading fits in with material covered earlier in the course – what are the key
points on which authors agree or disagree? Do you find one author’s explanation more
compelling than another’s, and, if so, why?

• Summarise your reactions and overall evaluation of the text.

In particular, write down any questions that you might have, based on the readings, which you
can raise in subsequent class discussions. No matter how straightforward your questions might
seem to be, you can be sure that they are likely to have occurred to other students as well.

I

11

CLARITY IN ACADEMIC WRITING

tudents often fail to appreciate the importance of achieving clarity in academic writing.
The following extract from William Strunk and E.B. White’s excellent short guide on
writing style and grammar The Elements of Style neatly illustrates the significance of this:

Clarity is not the prize in writing, nor is it always the principal mark of a good style.
There are occasions when obscurity serves a literary yearning, if not a literary
purpose, and there are writers whose mien is more overcast than clear. But since
writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. And although there is no
substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one. Even to a writer
who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, “Be obscure clearly!
Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!” Even to writers of market letters,
telling us (but not telling us) which securities are promising, we can say, “Be cagey
plainly! Be elliptical in a straightforward fashion!”

Clarity, clarity, clarity. When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to
start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax.
Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some
point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter
sentences.

Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope:
death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers
caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveller
expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod
telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When
you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it
are only fair.

CONCLUSION

hese tips and hints for achieving good academic writing provide only the basic
building blocks that can help you develop your writing skills while studying at
university – much more is needed in terms of essay writing practice, reviewing and

learning from your feedback on essays, and perhaps reading more substantive published
texts on how to write academic essays. If you focus on honing your skills with these basic
‘tricks of the trade’, however, you will almost certainly find your ability to master the art of
academic writing has improved, which will provide you with vital tools for surviving your
university studies – and performing well – and will prove useful to your future careers in
whatever path you choose to pursue.

S
T

12

FURTHER ADVICE ON ACADEMIC WRITING

William Strunk and E.B. White (1999) The Elements of Style (Longman)

§ www.stat.ufl.edu/~presnell/Various/Strunk-and-White/etes_htm.htm
§ www.strunkandwhite.com

Palgrave Study Skills
§ www.palgrave.com/skills4study/index.asp

Julie Copus (2009) Brilliant Writing Tips for Students (Palgrave Macmillan)
§ www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=311844

Janet Goodwin (2009) Planning Your Essay (Palgrave Macmillan)
§ www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=315264

Bryan Greetham (2009) How to Write Your Undergraduate Dissertation (Palgrave Macmillan)

§ www.bryangreetham.org.uk

Kate Williams and Jude Carroll (2009) Referencing and Understanding Plagiarism (Palgrave Macmillan)
§ www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=327629

The Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

On Economism
Author(s): G. Warren Nutter
Source: The Journal of Law & Economics, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Oct., 1979), pp. 263-268
Published by: The University of Chicago Press for The Booth School of Business,
University of Chicago and The University of Chicago Law School
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ON ECONOMISM*

G. WARREN NUTTER**

The University of Virginia

Finally, some mention must be made of the limitations of the whole economistic view
of life and conduct-the view, that is, in terms of the use of means to achieve ends.

Frank H. Knight’

THE boundaries of a scholarly discipline, Ronald Coase reminds us,2 are
set by competition with contiguous disciplines. The wanderings of econo-
mists into previously alien territory, which seem to be expanding steadily,3
are therefore to be welcomed not only because they shed new light on old
problems but also because they stimulate competition in the search for truth.
But one must not make too much of a good thing, and there is a danger that
some economists may become dizzy with success and claim too much for
their discipline and too little for other social sciences.

As a possible case in point, we find Gary Becker saying that he has “come
to the position that the economic approach is a comprehensive one that is
applicable to all human behavior, be it behavior involving money prices or
imputed shadow prices, repeated or infrequent decisions, large or minor
decisions, emotional or mechanical ends, rich or poor persons, men or wom-

* It is an occasion of great sadness to publish the last article which Warren Nutter was to write
before his untimely death. The heart sinks at the realization that nevermore will we read
another of his contributions. But we can rejoice in the knowledge that someone of Warren
Nutter’s ability, integrity, and selflessness devoted himself to economics and to the cause of
liberty. We may still study and learn from the many important contributions which he made to
our subject. Those of us who knew Warren Nutter personally could not but admire him
immensely. “He nothing common did or mean.” What mattered to him, above all, was the
truth. During his last painful illness with cancer, his spirit never faltered. He showed extraordi-
nary courage as he continued with his work. He told me, in submitting this article for publica-
tion, that he no longer had sufficient energy to write a long article. But such energy as he had
was devoted to his studies. His dedication to scholarship was complete. It was a privilege to
have known such a great human being.-R.H.C.

** I am indebted to William L. Breit, Roland N. McKean, John H. Moore, John K. Whitaker,
Leland B. Yeager, and John H. Young for their comments, though I have not abided by all
their objections. This essay has resulted from research supported by a grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, which I gratefully acknowledge.

1 Frank H. Knight, On the History and Method of Economics 295 (1956).
2 See Ronald H. Coase, Economics and Contiguous Disciplines, in the Organization and

Retrieval of Economic Knowledge 481-91, esp. 482-83 (Mark Perlman ed. 1977).
3 For a list of work done by economists in other disciplines, see id. at 483. See also Gary S.

Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior 9 (1976).

263

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264 THE JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS

en, adults or children, brilliant or stupid persons, patients or therapists,
businessmen or politicians, teachers or students.”4 This is a rather sweeping
claim, one bound to raise questions and doubts. At least it has done so in my
mind, and the purpose of this essay is to expose some of my doubts about the
feasibility of economism, or the universal application of economic method
and theory to analysis of human behavior and social activity.

In addressing this issue, one immediately faces the problem of defining
“economics” and runs the risk of getting bogged down in fruitless meth-
odological disputation. I propose to avoid this problem by accepting Beck-
er’s concept of the “economic approach” as a point of departure, since there
is no need for the purpose at hand to get more deeply involved in definitions.
As Becker puts it, “the combined assumptions of maximizing behavior,
market equilibrium, and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflinch-
ingly, form the heart of the economic approach as I see it.”‘

Let us focus on “maximizing behavior” and ask what it means in sub-
stance as well as form. In a purely formal sense, to say in economic parlance
that a person is engaged in maximizing behavior is to say nothing more than
that he chooses among alternative courses of action in such a way as to
maximize utility within resource constraints confronting him. Content is
given to this otherwise empty formal statement by the accepted economic
paradigm of the utility function and of the operative resource constraints,
which paradigm sets forth the framework of general functional relations
within which the maximizing process is to take place. That paradigm con-
sists in the conventional concepts of indifference curves and budget lines,
specified in terms of their basic functional characteristics.

This is not the occasion to give a rigorous account of the foundations of
utility theory, nor am I qualified to do so. Instead, I want to concentrate on
key principles inherent in the economic paradigm of utility, the first being
the universal substitutability of goods for each other at the margin. Simply
put, this principle asserts that a consumer can be compensated for the loss of
a quantity of any one good from the bundle he is consuming by the addition
of a quantity of some-any–other good.6 A diminishing marginal rate of
substitution being assumed as well, the principle of universal substitutability
of goods, is, I believe, inherent in the maximizing process that Becker treats

I Id. at 8.

In his important path-breaking article on the relation of economics and sociobiology, Eco-
nomics from a Biological Viewpoint, 20 J. Law & Econ.1 (1977), Jack Hirshleifer claims
somewhat less for economics, viewing it as perhaps the dominant social science but not as the
universal one. See, for example, id. at 3 & 51-52.

5 Gary S. Becker, supra note 3, at 5.
6 In this formulation, a pure complement is not considered to be a separate good but rather a

part of the good that it complements.

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ON ECONOMISM 265

as part of the economic approach. Indeed, the conception that there is some
single psychological expression of value called utility that can be maximized
through consumption implies that all economic goods are substitutable for
each other.

But is that true of all goods that motivate rational human behavior? Are
all goods-the myriad of things of value–substitutable for each other in the
mind of man? That is to say, are they all translatable into some common
measurable quality called utility? Is there a single calculus of goodness that
encompasses all valuations of things made by a representative person? If so,
how do we explain the conduct of the Malthusian consumer, the martyr, the
patriot, the ideologue, the addict, the fanatic, and so on?

The Malthusian case is such an integral part of the lore of economics that
there is hardly a need to discuss it, but it will be useful to do so anyhow in
order to prepare the line of reasoning to be followed in other cases. Suppose,
therefore, that there is some minimum daily consumption of food required to

keep a person alive,7 and let that quantity be represented by OA in Figure I,

y

A

0 A x
FIGURE I

where x represents the consumption of food and y the consumption of all
other economic goods. The curve AA’ depicts the fact that the marginal rate
of substitution of other goods for OA of food is infinite. There is no quantity
of other goods that will compensate the Malthusian consumer for a reduction
in food. The curve AA ‘-which should be conceived as extending indefinitely
upward-cannot properly be called an indifference curve because succes-
sively higher points on it represent successively greater utility in the tradi-

7 There is a hair-splitting problem in specifying what it means to “keep a person alive,” but I
assume that it may be ignored without harming the general line of argument here.

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266 THE JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS

tional sense. To use a term coined some years ago by Ian Little,8 it can be
called simply a “behavior line.” If constrained to OA of food, the Malthusian
consumer would prefer to be as high on AA’ as possible, but any point on AA’
is preferred absolutely to any point to the left of it. The consumer prefers any
life-sustaining condition to death. To the right of OA, the utility function
would be represented by the kind of indifference map normally assumed in
economics. To the left of OA, the utility function simply vanishes.

The case of addiction is similar. For the purposes at hand, it seems appro-
priate to define a good as being addictive if the very consumption of it, other
relevant things the same, alters the utility function so that there is an in-
crease in the marginal rates of substitution of other goods for the addictive
one. Complete addiction occurs when the utility function relating consump-
tion of the addictive good (x) to consumption of other goods (y) degenerates
to a single behavior line, such as AA’. In other words, once complete addic-
tion occurs, the utility function vanishes to both the left and right of AA’.9

The situation is in a sense reversed for the martyr, who will sacrifice his
life if necessary rather than recant or renounce a belief. It is not clear how
one might depict the relations among values involved in such a case. If the
belief in question can be conceived as having a quantitative dimension rep-
resented by x in Figure I, then OA is the minimal configuration of belief that
the potential martyr holds as an absolute value: no consumption of economic
goods y can induce him to diminish his professed belief from OA. So far so
good, but what about the trade-off with life itself? How can y be conceived
in a quantitative sense as comprehending life itself as well as economic
goods? The fact is that situations confronting potential martyrs and requir-
ing choices of them typically are not quantitative in nature. Sir Thomas
More was given the choice of either signing the Act of Succession and living,
or not signing it and dying. It is not uncommon in many other social contexts
for choices to be posed in analogous either-or fashion. In any event, a moti-
vational pattern similar to that of the martyr applies to the terrorist, the
fanatic, the dedicated partisan, and the simple patriot, each of whom is
ready to die for a cause.

If such cases seem rare and extreme, we may turn to situations in which
life itself is not at stake but the values motivating behavior are virtually

8 I.M.D. Little, A Critique of Welfare Economics 24 (2d ed. 1960).
9 In their recent essay on the stability of tastes, see De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum, 67

Am. Econ. Rev. 76 (1977), Stigler and Becker use a rather different definition of addiction than
the one used here, but this matter need not be examined further as far as the issues at hand are
concerned. It is, however, worth noting that, in the Becker-Stigler analytical framework, x and
y would be inputs of goods used in the household to produce an addictive “commodity”-say,
euphoria. Complete addiction as defined in the present article would then imply that the
production function relating inputs x and y to outputs of euphoria would degenerate to the
single vertical isoquant AA’.

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ON ECONOMISM 267

unsubstitutable for economic goods. An example is provided by the recent
controversy over legalizing abortion. “Unalterable opposition” characterizes
many antiabortionists, who constitute a large segment of the American pub-
lic, and such a persistent and unyielding attitude implies nonsubstitutability
of economic goods for the value attached to prohibition of abortion.
It should be readily recognized that the examples given here involve what

has come to be known as lexicographical ordering of goods. 10 I would offer
the following general proposition. First, a representative person has several
to many separate realms of value, each containing its own set of goods that
are subjectively comparable with and substitutable for each other. Second,
the bundles of goods in each separate realm are subjectively related to each
other in accord with the economic paradigm; that is, they are weakly ordered
in terms of a single-dimensioned preference scale, each indifference relation
being reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. Third, bundles of goods from
different realms of value are lexicographically (and hence strongly) ordered;
that is, there is a dominance ordering for the different preference scales
corresponding to realms of value. Fourth, goods in one realm of value may
be objectively substitutable for those in another, but they are not subjec-
tively substitutable. Let me illustrate the various parts of this proposition by
some rather practical examples.
Imagine a representative “consumer” with different realms of value called

morals, tastes, and wants which yield serenity, felicity, and utility, respec-
tively. Suppose one realm dominates the next in the stated order, the domi-
nance ordering being transitive. Subject to constraints in the form of objec-
tive substitutability of goods, the consumer then proceeds to optimize the
mix of morals, moving next to tastes and finally to wants.
Suppose there is an objective trade-off between income and honesty, and

that crime pays: for some amounts of lying, stealing, and cheating, our
consumer can expect to increase his income. If honesty is in the realm of
morals and income in the realm of wants, our consumer will show the same
honesty in his dealings no matter how well crime pays. Only if both are in
the realm of wants will he be more or less honest depending on how well
crime pays. Since there are people who will lie, cheat, steal, and even kill for
a price, there are ample examples of the second sort. But so are there of the
first sort. If a universal social science based on the economic approach is to
evolve, it will have to be possible to generalize on the assortment and content
of realms of value in at least a given community of people, or to superimpose
a single realm that integrates all others. I doubt that future efforts to con-

10 For a lucid explanation of lexicographical ordering and some of its more important impli-
cations see D. Banerjee, Choice and Order: Or First Things First, 31 Economica 158 (n.s.
1964). For a comprehensive survey of the literature, see Peter C. Fishburn, Lexicographic
Orders, Utilities, and Decision Rules: A Survey, 20 Management Sci. 1442 (1974).

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268 THE JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS

struct such a universal science will be any more successful than past ones,
such as Benthamite utilitarianism. It would seem to be indisputable that
precise duplication of realms of value among a group of people will be
approached in only the most homogeneous of societies, if indeed homoge-
neity means anything more than such duplication.

There are other persuasive reasons why the search for a universal social
science is likely to be unsuccessful, not the least being the substantial role
played in social affairs by nonpurposive, nonrational behavior, a point re-
peatedly stressed by the late Frank Knight and reflected in the quotation
from his work given at the beginning of this article. There is also the impor-
tant role played by coercion. The economic approach is of virtually no use in
analyzing behavior brought about through the use of force or the threat of its
use, because the economic paradigm applies to voluntary choice, difficult as
it may be to define accurately.

None of these criticisms are intended to belittle the importance and sig-
nificance of economics as a social science, both of which are demonstrated by
the pervasiveness of markets in societies that permit them to flourish. The
existence of a market implies the applicability of the economic paradigm,
though the converse obviously does not hold. And therein arises the reason
to search for areas of social activity and human behavior not characterized
by markets but appropriately analyzed by the economic approach. How the
discipline of economics fares in revealing previously unrecognized social rela-
tions depends on the competition of disciplines in terms of both subject
matter and techniques, as Coase has noted. I expect economics to fare well in
this competition, but in the end to reveal, describe, and explain no more
than an island of man’s behavior.

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• Contents

263
264
265
266
267
268

• Issue Table of Contents

Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Oct., 1979), pp. 213-407
Front Matter
Keynes and Chicago [pp. 213-232]
Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relations [pp. 233-261]
On Economism [pp. 263-268]
Payola in Radio and Television Broadcasting [pp. 269-328]
The Northern Pacific Case [pp. 329-350]
The International Salt Case [pp. 351-364]
Self-Interest, Ideology, and Logrolling in Congressional Voting [pp. 365-384]
Indivisibility, Decreasing Cost, and Excess Capacity: The Bridge [pp. 385-397]
A Decentralized Method for Utility Regulation [pp. 399-404]
A Decentralized Method for Utility Regulation: A Comment [pp. 405-407]

CULTURAL
POLITICAL
ECONOMY

LECTURER
DR AMIN SAMMAN

Rhind Building, D515

Office hours: Thursday, 14.00–16.00

Amin.Samman.1@city.ac.uk

Please sign up for appointments online
http://www.supersaas.com/schedule/Amin_Samman/Office_Hours

http://city.ac.uk

http://www.supersaas.com/schedule/Amin_Samman/Office_Hours

OUR
APPROACH
The objectives of this module are twofold:

1. To introduce the key concepts, approaches, and debates in
this field

2. To provide an opportunity for in-depth study of the cultural
logics at work in one or more aspect of contemporary
capitalism

The first is meant to enable the second:

• Our core objective is to use these concepts and debates to
study the concrete issues and problems that define the
contemporary cultures of global capitalism

WEEK 1
OUTLINE

1. What is cultural political economy?

2. Economism and beyond

3. Module structure

4. Housekeeping

WHAT IS CULTURAL

POLITICAL ECONOMY

?
Cultural political economy is a new interdisciplinary field of study
that focuses on the cultural and political logics of economic
practices and processes

• Unlike IR (and to a certain extent IPE), there is not yet a clearly
defined canon of thinkers, methods, or even questions

• There are however a growing number of trends supporting the
development of cultural political economy thinking:

v New ‘cultural political economy’ research agendas in established
disciplines and fields of study

v Academic journals like Economy and Society and Journal of
Cultural Economy, which cut across established disciplines

CULTURAL POLITICAL
ECONOMIES
Today the terms are combined in many ways, often reflecting
histories and conditions in distinct ‘home disciplines’

Home discipline Approach

IR International political sociology

IPE Constructivism, Post-structuralism, Feminism

Political economy Cultural political economy

Sociology Economic sociology, Cultural economy

Social theory Libidinal political economy

Literary studies New economic criticism, Economic humanities

ECONONISM
AND BEYOND
One way to understand the thrust of cultural political economy is
as a rejection of ‘economism’

• Economism is a specific variety of ‘essentialism’

• Essentialism presumes that the complexity of human affairs
can be pared back to reveal an underlying simplicity in the
form a single, determining logic

• Economism is economic essentialism
v The logic of society is rooted in production, profit and so on,

implying that other ‘non-economic’ factors can be regarded as
inessential to social development and reproduction

MODES OF
ECONOMISM
Economism implies neither a specific understanding of markets,
nor a specific normative judgment about their social value

Orthodox Marxism
Vision of a determining economic base and a dependent or
epiphenomenal superstructure; typically anti-capitalist

Liberal political economy
Application of neoclassical assumptions and models to
political questions; typically pro-capitalist

In both cases, preferences of agents or classes are deduced from
their relations to the factors or means of production

CRITIQUES OF
ECONOMISM
In (I)PE, the critique of economism has taken three main forms:

• Recently there have been attempts to synthesise 2 and 3 under the
heading of ‘cultural political economy’ (Jessop/Sum)

• Beyond (I)PE, economism was never such a problem; non-
economistic approaches have taken shape under different banners

Banner Contribution Context

1. Constructivism Role of ideas in shaping individual
economic preferences

Directed at liberal
political economy

2. Neo-Gramscianism Role of ideology in shaping economic
common sense

Conversation with
Marxism

3. Post-structuralism Role of discourse in constituting
economic reality itself

Conversation with
Marxism

MODULE
STRUCTURE
Part I. Cultural political economies

• Economism and beyond

• Constructivist and cultural political economy
• Cultural economy and the economic humanities
• Gender and feminist political economy
• Libidinal political economy

Part II. Cultures of contemporary capitalism

• Money and desire

• Representing and mediating crisis
• Contemporary capitalism in popular culture

• Money and finance in contemporary art
• Cultures of cyber-capitalism

TEACHING
FORMAT
The module is taught through a series of 10 lectures and 10
seminars, each of which will last 50 minutes

• Core ideas and debates will be presented in the lectures

• You will have the opportunity to ask questions and develop
your thinking in the discussion-based seminars

• Lectures will be followed by seminars on the same topic

• For example, next week we will hold lectures and seminars
on Topic 2 (‘Constructivist and cultural political economy’)

MODULE
ASSESSMENT
One 3,000-word essay; due on 14 April 2020

• The essay must combine theoretical discussion with empirical
analysis of a topic covered in Part II of the module

v e.g., money / crisis / popular culture / art / technology

• Before reflective learning week you will be provided with a list
of essay questions to choose from

• It is possible to develop your own question, but it is vital that
you have this approved by me before you begin preparing your
essay

GROUND
RULES
This is an advanced module that covers cutting-edge areas of
scholarship. I am here to guide you through the field, but in return
there are things you must do:

• Attend all lectures and seminars

• Actively listen and take notes during lectures

• Read and prepare summaries for both required readings in
advance of each seminar

• Come to each seminar ready to share your thoughts on the
readings, and to freely discuss the set questions for each week

IS THERE A
TEXTBOOK?
The short answer is ‘no’, but here is a list of some useful books

Abdelal, Blyth and Parsons (2010) Constructing the
International Economy

Constructivism / IPE

Best and Paterson (2010) Cultural Political Economy Other cultural and sociological approaches / IPE

De Goede (2006) International Political Economy and
Poststructural Politics

Post-structuralism and neo-Gramscianism / IPE

Du Gay and Pryke (2002) Cultural Economy: Cultural
Analysis and Commercial Life

Cultural economy / Sociology

Peterson (2003) A Critical Rewriting of Global Political
Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual
Economies

Post-structuralism and feminism / IPE

Sum and Jessop (2013) Towards a Cultural Political
Economy: Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy

Neo-Gramscian cultural political economy / (I)PE

Woodmansee and Osteen (1999) The New Economic
Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and
Economics

Economic criticism / Literary studies

USING
MOODLE

• Reading List available through Quick Links

• Module outline available as PDF document

• Lecture slides uploaded each week

• Discussion questions listed for each topic
d

NEXT WEEK
CONSTRUCTIVIST & CULTURAL

POLITICAL ECONOMY