Cultural Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies

Bob Jessop / January 26, 2015

This on-line version is the pre-copyedited, preprint version. The published version can be
found here:
Cultural political economy and critical policy studies, Critical Policy Studies 3 (3-4),
336-356, 2009.
Abstract: This article introduces cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in
the social sciences, including policy studies. The version presented here combines critical
semiotic analysis and critical political economy. It grounds its approach to both in the
practical necessities of complexity reduction and the role of meaning-making and
structuration in turning unstructured into structured complexity as a basis for going on
in the world. It explores both semiosis and structuration in terms of the evolutionary
mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention and, in this context, also highlights the
role of specific forms of agency and specific technologies. These general propositions are
illustrated from economic imaginaries (other types of imaginary could have been
examined) and their relevance to economic policy. Brief comments on crisisinterpretation and crisis-management give this example some substance. The conclusion
notes some implications for research in critical policy studies.
Keywords: complexity; crisis; crisis-management; cultural political economy; cultural
turn; crisis-management; finance-led accumulation; Green New Deal; neo-liberalism;
Cultural political economy is an emerging post-disciplinary approach that highlights the
contribution of the cultural turn (a concern with semiosis or meaning-making) to the
analysis of the articulation between the economic and the political and their embedding in
broader sets of social relations. Explicit arguments in favour of cultural political
economy as such emerged in several contexts in the 1990s as part of and/or in reaction to
the then prevailing cultural turn. It was also prefigured in classical political economy, the
German Historical School, and some versions of critical political economy and/or old
institutionalisms; and there are similar currents in other fields of social scientific inquiry.
Given the range of cultural turns and the starting points from which they have been made
as well as the widely different definitions of political economy (and its critique), there is
no consensus among scholars on the nature of cultural political economy. The version
presented here is by no means intended to be prescriptive: indeed, such an ambition
would conflict with the meta-theoretical foundations set out below. Nonetheless this
version does involve a novel synthesis of critical semiotic analysis and critical political
economy that has major implications for cultural and social analysis. Its novelty can be
seen in five features that together distinguish this version of cultural political economy
(hereafter CPE) from others on similar terrain: (1) the manner in which it grounds the
cultural turn in political economy in the existential necessity of complexity reduction, (2)
its emphasis on the role of evolutionary mechanisms in shaping the movement from
social construal to social construction and their implications for the production of

hegemony; (3) its concern with the interdependence and co-evolution of the semiotic and
extra-semiotic; (4) the significance of technologies, in a broadly Foucauldian sense, to the
consolidation of hegemony and its contestation in the remaking of social relations; and
(5) its de-naturalization of economic and political imaginaries and, hence, its contribution
to Ideologiekritik and the critique of specific forms of domination. Even within this
version of CPE, different authors give more weight at different times to different features.
For example, the present author is especially interested in issues of complexity reduction,
evolutionary mechanisms, and the critique of political economy both as a discipline and a
field of social relations (Fairclough, Jessop, and Sayer 2004; Jessop 2004, 2007, 2008;
Jessop, Fairclough, and Wodak 2008); Fairclough retains a strong interest in critical
discourse analysis and is developing argumentation theory (e.g., Fairc
lough and
Iecu-Fairclough 2010); Sayer explores the moral and evaluative aspects of social
imaginaries and practices, taking human flourishing as his criterion (e.g., Sayer 2005);
and Sum emphasizes the production of hegemony, governmental technologies, and the
critique of discourses of competitiveness and their articulation to knowledge brands (Sum
1995, 2004, 2005, 2009a, 2009b, 2010). These concerns are complementary and reflect
specific objects of inquiry. After sketching these features, I argue for intellectual valueadded in the critique of political economy and illustrate this from a brief account of the
CPE approach to crisis.[1]
An Approach to CPE
While CPE is applied mainly, as its name implies, in the field of political economy, the
general propositions and heuristic that inform it can be applied elsewhere by combining
the same semiotic analysis with concepts appropriate to other social forms and
institutional dynamics. I will suggest below that this also holds for policy studies.
Complexity reduction, semiosis, and structuration
Cultural turns can be thematic, methodological, or ontological: in other words, one could
examine hitherto neglected research topics, propose a new entrypoint into social analysis,
or argue against other positions that culture is foundational to the social world. The
present version of CPE all three turns but emphasizes the last. The cultural turn includes
approaches oriented to argumentation, narrativity, rhetoric, hermeneutics, identity,
mentalities, conceptual history, reflexivity, historicity, and discourse (for a good survey of
different turns, see Bachmann-Medick 2006; for useful introductions to critical discourse
analysis, see Fairclough 2003; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; van Dijk 1987; Wodak and
Meyer 2009). Most versions of the cultural turn regard semiosis as causally efficacious as
well as meaningful and, in this sense, suggest that it serves not only to interpret actual
events and processes and their emergent effects but also to contribute to their explanation.
Thus, in emphasizing the foundational nature of meaning and meaning-making in social
relations, CPE does not seek to add culture to economics and politics as if each
comprised a distinct area of social life; nor, analogously, does it aim to apply cultural
theory as a useful tool in policy analysis.[2] Instead it stresses the semiotic nature of all
social relations.

The approach to CPE advocated here begins from the role of complexity reduction as a
condition of going on in the world and argues that semiosis (the intersubjective
production of meaning)[3] is one mechanism whereby complexity is reduced. The aim
here is not to theorize or model complexity as such but to explore how actors and
observers reduce complexity. Because the world cannot be grasped in all its complexity
in real time, actors (and observers) must focus selectively on some of its aspects in order
to be active participants in that world and/or to describe and interpret it as disinterested
observers. This enforced selection occurs as actors/observers attribute meaning to some
aspects of the world rather than others. While the real world pre-exists complexity
reduction (and is also transformed in some respects in and through complexity reduction),
actors/observers have no direct access to that world apart from the sheer facticity of the
concrete historical situations into which they are thrown. They do not encounter the
world as pre-interpreted once-and-for-all but must engage with and reflect on it in order
to make some sense of it. The aspects that particular actors/observers regard as
significant depend on specific meaning systems.[4] Meaning-making not only reduces
complexity for actors (and observers) but also gives meaning to the world (Luhmann
1990: 81-2; for some implications of this line of argument for public policy and
administration, see Morl 2005). These construals may also contribute to the
constitution of the natural and social world insofar as they guide a critical mass of selfconfirming actions premised on their validity (see below).
A second aspect of complexity reduction concerns the emergent pattern of social
interactions, including direct or indirect human interactions with the natural world. If
these are not to be random, unpredictable, and chaotic, it is essential that possible
connections and sequences of action are limited; and, if adaptation in response to
changing circumstances is to be possible, there should also be scope for flexibility and
innovation in such structuration. These two forms of complexity reduction work to
transform meaningless and unstructured complexity into meaningful and structured
complexity and succeed insofar as the world becomes meaningful to actors and social
interactions undergo structuration. Many other meanings are thereby excluded and so are
many alternative social constellations. Because complexity reduction has both semiotic
and structural aspects, we should treat the cultural and the social as dialectically
related moments of the social world. Its cultural moment refers to meaning-making and
the resulting properties of discursive formations (such as distinct discourses, genres,
genre chains, styles, or inter-textuality) regardless of their condensation, or otherwise, in
social structures. And its social moment concerns the extra-semiotic features of social
practices and the resulting properties of social interaction (such as social cohesion and
institutional integration, dilemmas and contradictions, and institutional logics) that
operate behind the backs of agents and may not correspond to their meaning-making
efforts. The scope for disjunction and non-correspondence between the cultural and social
moments makes it necessary to study both in their articulation.
The particularity of the cultural and the social indicates the need for a clear distinction
between social construal and social construction (cf. Sayer 2000: 90-93). All actors are
forced to construe the world selectively as a condition of going on within it. But, while all
construals are equal before complexity, some are more equal than others. Given the

potential for infinite variation in construals, we must explore how their selection and
retention are shaped by emergent, non-semiotic features of social structure as well as by
inherently semiotic factors. Although every social practice is semiotic (insofar as social
practices entail meaning), no social practice is reducible to its semiotic moments.
Semiosis involves more than the play of differences among networks of signs and is
therefore never a purely intra-semiotic matter without external reference. It cannot be
understood or explained without identifying and exploring the extra-semiotic conditions
that make semiosis possible and secure its effectivity including its embedding in
material practices and their relation to the constraints and affordances of the natural and
social world. Although individual words or phrases have no one-to-one relation to the
objects to which they refer, the world still constrains language and ways of thinking. This
occurs over time, if not at every point in time. Not all possible discursive construals can
be durably constructed materially and attempts to do so may have unintended effects
(Sayer 2000).
For the present CPE approach, construal and construction have four interrelated aspects:
semiosis, agency, technologies, and structuration. While three of these will already be
familiar to most readers, technologies merit a brief comment. They include diverse social
practices that are mediated through specific instruments of classification, registration,
calculation, and so on, that may discipline social action. Technologies have a key role in
the selection and retention of specific imaginaries insofar as they provide reference points
not only in meaning-making but also in the coordination of actions within and across
specific personal interactions, organizations and networks, and institutional orders. In this
sense they are important meaning-making instruments deployed by agents to translate
specific social construals into social construction and hence to structure social life.
Policies, policy decisions techniques, policy instruments and policy evaluation are
important technologies in this regard because each, in its own way, contributes to the
selection and retention of its associated policy discourses, often transforming them at the
same time (cf. Sum 2009c on policy technologies relating to competitiveness).[5] This is
why one must look beyond agenda setting, policy discourses and policy formulation to
examine how policies actually get implemented and with what effects, whether intended
or not.
CPE draws on different theoretical and empirical approaches for each of these aspects but
aims to produce a coherent rather than eclectic account. Its analysis of semiosis is
inspired by diverse cultural turns; its approach to agency is inspired by various analyses
of assujetissement (subjectivation), identity formation, learning, and reflexivity
(including, in the present context, of course, policy learning); its analytical toolkit for
technologies includes, inter alia, Foucault on disciplinary normalization and
governmentality, governmentality studies more generally, actor-network theory, and
research on material culture; and its view of structuration builds on Jessops strategicrelational approach (1982, 2007), which, in the present context, would study the strategic
selectivity of advocacy coalitions, partnerships, policy networks, policy transfer
mechanisms, and other aspects of policy regimes. Attention to all four aspects and their
interaction is required to explain why and how some construals are selected, get
embodied/embrained in individual agents or routinized in organizational operations, are

facilitated or hindered by specific social technologies and affordances, and become

embedded in specific social structures ranging from routine interactions via institutional
orders to large-scale social formations. Success-failure in this regard also depends on how
specific construals correspond to the properties of the raw materials (including social
phenomena such as actors and institutions) that provide the target and/or tools of attempts
to construct social reality. As indicated, this provides the basis for thinking about
semiosis in terms of variation, selection, and retention and hence about the actors and
factors that affect the movement from construal to construction.
In stressing the interdependence and co-evolution of these interrelated semiotic (cultural)
and extra-semiotic (structural) moments in complexity reduction and their consequences
for meaning-making and social structuration, CPE aims to avoid two complementary but
unequally threatening theoretical temptations. The first occurs in forms of structuralism
and social determinism that reduce agents and actions to passive bearers of selfreproducing, self-transforming social structures. There is little support nowadays for such
positions. The second temptation is the sociological imperialism of radical social
constructivism, according to which social reality is reducible to participants meanings
and understandings of their social world. This sort of reductionism generates an arbitrary
account of the social world that ignores the unacknowledged conditions of action as well
as the many and varied emergent properties of action that go un- or mis-recognized by the
relevant actors. It also ignores the many and varied struggles to transform the conditions
of action, to alter actors meanings and understandings, and to modify emergent
properties (and their feedback effects on the social world). It also leads to the voluntarist
vacuity of certain lines of discourse analysis, which seem to imply that agents can will
almost anything into existence in and through an appropriately articulated discourse. CPE
offers a third way between a structuralist Scylla and a constructivist Charybdis. It aims
to explore the dialectic of the emergent extra-semiotic features of social relations and the
constitutive role of semiosis. It is in this context that the notion of the imaginary is
introduced and elaborated below.
Variation, selection, and retention in semiosis
Another feature of the CPE approach recommended here is its integration of the three
evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention into semiotic analysis.
This does not entail the sort of evolutionism that posits pre-determined sequences.
Rather, an evolutionary turn highlights the dialectic of path-dependency and path-shaping
that emerges from the contingent co-evolution of semiotic and extra-semiotic processes
that make some meaningful efforts at complexity reduction more resonant than others.
This calls for a shift from a mainly semiotic analysis of individual texts or discursive
genres to a concern with the semiotic and extra-semiotic mechanisms that together shape
the variation, selection, and retention of particular imaginaries in a continuing dialectic of
path-dependent path-shaping. Discourse analysis tends to focus on specific texts in
particular contexts, to undertake static comparative analyses of certain types of text at
different times, or to study changes in linguistic corpora. A thorough CPE analysis would
include the role of extra-semiotic (material) as well as semiotic factors in the contingent
emergence (variation), subsequent privileging (selection), and ongoing realization

(retention) of specific discursive and material practices (for two approaches to these
processes, compare Sum 2004, 2005 with Fairclough, Jessop, and Sayer 2004 and Jessop
2004).
A useful concept here is sedimentation. This covers all forms of routinization that lead,
inter alia, to forgetting the contested origins of discourses, practices, processes, and
structures. This gives them the form of objective facts of life, especially in the social
world. In turn, politicization covers challenges to such objectivation that aim to
denaturalize the semiotic and material (extra-semiotic) features of what has become
sedimented. Sedimentation and (re-)politicization are not confined to a specific political
domain (separate from others); they are contingent aspects of all forms of social life
(Glynos and Howarth: 2007). Indeed, the role of extra-semiotic mechanisms seems to
grow in the movement from the disruption of sedimented discourses and relatively
structured complexity through the (re-)politicization of discourse and the rise of relatively
unstructured complexity and thence to new forms of sedimentation and structuration.
Co-evolution of semiosis and structuration
Third, turning to wider evolutionary and institutional issues in political economy, there is
constant variation, witting or unwitting, in apparently routine social practices.
Simplifying the analysis in Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer (2004) and extending it to
include material as well as semiotic factors, the following factors shape the co-evolution
of semiosis and structuration:
Continuing variation in discourses and practices, due to their incomplete mastery, their
skilful adaptation in specific circumstances, new challenges or crises, or other semiotic or
material causes.
Selection of particular discourses (the privileging of just some available, including
emergent, discourses) for interpreting events, legitimizing actions, and (perhaps selfreflexively) representing social phenomena. Semiotic factors act here by influencing the
resonance of discourses in personal, organizational and institutional, and broader metanarrative terms and by limiting possible combinations of semiosis and semiotic practices
in a given semiotic order. Material factors also operate here through conjunctural or
entrenched power relations, path-dependency, and structural selectivities.
Retention of some resonant discourses (e.g., inclusion in an actors habitus, hexis, and
personal identity, enactment in organizational routines, integration into institutional rules,
objectification in the built environment,[6] material and intellectual technologies, and
articulation into widely accepted accumulation strategies, state projects, or hegemonic
visions). The greater the range of sites (horizontally and vertically)[7] in which resonant
discourses are retained, the greater is the potential for effective institutionalization and
integration into patterns of structured coherence and durable compromise. The
constraining influences of complex, reciprocal interdependences will also recursively
affect the scope for retaining resonant discourses.
Reinforcement insofar as certain procedural devices favour these discourses and their
associated practices and also filter out contrary discourses and practices. This can involve
both discursive selectivity (e.g., genre chains, styles, identities) and material selectivity

(e.g., the privileging of certain dominant sites of discourse through structural biases in
specific organizational and institutional orders). Such discursive and material
mechanisms recursively strengthen appropriate genres, styles, and strategies and
selectively eliminate inappropriate alternatives and are most powerful where they operate
across many sites to promote complementary discourses across society.
Selective recruitment, inculcation, and retention by relevant social groups,
organizations, institutions, etc., of social agents whose predispositions fit maximally with
requirements the preceding requirements.
This list emphasizes the role of semiosis and its material supports in securing social
reproduction through the selection and retention of mutually supportive discourses.
Conversely, the absence or relative weakness of one or more of these semiotic and/or
extra-semiotic conditions may undermine previously dominant discourses and/or block
the selection and retention of appropriate innovative discourses. This poses questions
about the regularization of practices in normal conditions and about possible sources of
radical transformation, especially in periods of crisis. These are often moments of
profound disorientation due to rapid social change and/or crises that trigger major
semiotic and material innovations in the social world. It should be noted here that the
semiotic and extra-semiotic space for variation, selection, and retention is contingent, not
pre-given. This also holds for the various and varying semiotic and material elements
whose selection and retention occurs in this ecological space. In a complex world there
are many sites and scales on which such evolutionary processes operate and, for present
purposes, what matters is how local sites and scales come to be articulated to form more
global (general) sites and scales and how the latter in turn frame, constrain, and enable
local possibilities (Wickham 1987). These interrelations are themselves shaped by the
ongoing interaction between semiotic and extra-semiotic processes.
Applying these general principles to political economy (especially in capitalist social
formations), two complementary lines of reflection and research are proposed. On the one
hand, given the infinity of possible meaningful communications and (mis)understandings
enabled by semiosis, how do extra-semiotic as well as semiotic factors affect the
variation, selection, and retention of semiosis and its associated practices in ordering,
reproducing and transforming capitalist social formations and their various spatiotemporal features? More concretely, given the meaning-making and path-shaping
potential of competing economic and political imaginaries, why do only some of these
get selected and institutionalized and thereby come to co-constitute and embed economic
subjectivities, interests, activities, organizations, institutions, structural ensembles, and
the dynamics of economic performance? In short, how do such imaginaries come to
provide not only a semiotic frame for construing the world but also contributing to its
construction? And, on the other hand, given the structural contradictions, strategic
dilemmas, and overall improbability of capitalist reproduction, especially during its
recurrent crises, what role does semiosis play in construing, constructing, and temporarily
stabilizing capitalist social formations at least within specific spatio-temporal fixes and
their associated zones of relative stability?[8] Again, more concretely, and by way of
illustration, in the face of economic and political crises, what contribution do established

or new economic and political imaginaries make, if at all, to crisis-management and

resolution?
Two provisional hypotheses grounded in these general considerations suggest themselves
at this point, though neither has been fully tested in CPE work. First, the relative
importance of semiosis declines from the stage of variation in imaginaries through the
stage when they are selectively translated into specific material practices and institutional
dynamics to the stage when they are embodied in a structurally coherent set of social
relations with a corresponding spatio-temporal fix. Second, the relative weight of
semiotic and extra-semiotic mechanisms varies across social fields. No great leap of
imagination is needed to suggest that extra-semiotic mechanisms are less important in
theology and philosophy than in natural scixence and technology and that, conversely,
that semiosis matters more in the former than the latter. However, because every field is
always-already semiotic and also socially structured, each has its own mix of semiotic
and extra-semiotic mechanisms.
Governmental technologies, hegemony, and domination
This fourth feature merits special comment because it is often overlooked in discourse
analysis and heterodox political economy. In this version of CPE technologies refer not to
the productive forces involved in the appropriation and transformation of nature but to
the mechanisms involved in the governance of conduct and, a fortiori, in the production
of hegemony. While the fashionable Anglo-Foucauldian governmentality studies
approach explores the many efforts to decompose power into political rationalities,
governmental programmes, technologies and techniques of government (Miller and Rose
2008), it tends to focus on micro-social relations at the expense of broader macro-social
issues such as hegemony, domination, state power, or capital accumulation. Unlike
Foucault, these students of governmentality are less interested in how the micro-analytics
of power gets scaled up to macro-level questions about political economy and the state
(Foucault 2008: 186). Foucault himself explored how capitalism had penetrated deeply
into everyday life, especially as it required diverse techniques of power to enable capital
to exploit peoples bodies and their time, transforming them into labour power and labour
time respectively to create surplus profit (for discussion, see Jessop 2010). CPE combines
this line of critical inquiry with Gramscian interests in the forms and mechanisms of
hegemony, passive revolution, and domination. At stake here is how micro-technologies
come to be assembled and articulated to form more encompassing and enduring sets of
social relations that are embedded in the habitus, hexis, and the common sense of
everyday life but also provide the substratum of institutional orders and even broader
patterns of social domination. Such questions are addressed in Sums synthesis of
Foucault and Gramsci, through which she examines how techniques of government are
strategically (hence selectively) deployed across different discourses and sites of action to
produce hegemony and consolidate states of domination (Sum 2004, 2005). To
Foucauldian notions such as disciplinary normalization, governmentality, expertise, and
truth regimes, Sums work on economic competitiveness and clusters adds concepts such
as knowledge apparatuses (e.g., numbers, standards, programmes, guidelines, scorecards)
and knowledge brands as well as common discursive stratagems (e.g., naturalization,

inevitabilization, otherization, nominalization) (Sum 2009a and 2009c). She also relates
such governmental technologies to issues of sub-hegemony, resistance, counterhegemony, and the possibilities of fraud, corruption, and force as alternative means of
securing domination.
Ideologiekritik and the critique of domination
Complementing its distinctive approach to critical semiotic analysis, CPE aims to
contribute to the critique of orthodox political economy regarded both as a discipline and
as a field of social relations. As a discipline, political economy tends to naturalize or reify
its basic categories (such as land, machines, the division of labour, money, commodities,
the information economy), to offer impoverished accounts of how subjects and
subjectivities are formed, and to neglect the question of how different modes of
calculation emerge, come to be institutionalized, and get modified. CPE critiques the
categories and methods of orthodox political economy and emphasizes the inevitable
contextuality and historicity of its claims to knowledge. It follows critical political
economists in regarding capital not as a thing but as a social relation between persons,
established by the instrumentality of things (cf. Marx 1967: 717). Thus it views technical
and economic objects as socially constructed, historically specific, more or less socially
(dis)embedded in broader networks of social relations and institutional ensembles, more
or less embodied (incorporated and embrained), and in need of continuing social
repair work for their reproduction. The same points hold for the categories of
mainstream political science and/or (neo-)realist international relations theory. The
former tends to take the institutional separation of the economic and political for granted
and to focus on how the governmental institutions are deployed to pursue objective
interests. Realist and neo-realist international relations theory also tends to naturalize
national states and national interests in explaining the necessary logic of state action. In
contrast, the present CPE approach examines state power as the discursively- and
institutionally-mediated condensation of a changing balance of forces. It examines
struggles to shape the identities, subjectivities, and interests of the forces engaged in
political struggle as well as to transform the state system and its various selectivities.
Moreover, regarding political economy as a complex field of socially constructed social
relations with distinctive emergent properties and effects, CPE involves a form of
political intervention that goes beyond Ideologiekritik. The latter serves at best to reveal
the immanent contradictions and inconsistencies in relatively coherent meaning systems,
[9] to uncover the ideal and material interests behind meaning systems and ideologies
more generally, and to contribute to the re-politicization of sedimented, taken-for-granted
discourses and practices. CPE also aims to explore the semiotic and extra-semiotic
mechanisms involved in selecting and consolidating the dominance and/or hegemony of
some meaning systems and ideologies over others. This in turn offers more solid
foundations to understand the nature of different forms of social domination, to develop
Herrschaftskritik (critique of domination), and to contribute thereby to critical policy
studies.
On economic imaginaries

I now consider how these general remarks can be re-specified in investigations of the
economic field broadly interpreted. In other contexts, it would be more appropriate to
elaborate them in relation to other fields of social practice, such as technology, law,
politics, education, science, or religion. Let me note immediately that the economy is a
historically constituted category with changing denotation and connotations and that its
meaning is heavily contested (on the conceptual history of the economy as an economic
category, see, for example, Burkhardt 1992; Fey 1936; Finley 1973; Foucault 2008; Marx
1963; Polanyi 1968; Tribe 1978). Nonetheless its use simplifies a complex social world
and has semiotic and material consequences in making sense of that world and organizing
economic activities. Let me note, second, that, through variation, selection, and retention,
economic ideas may have a performative, constitutive force in shaping economic forms
and relations (see, for example, Callon 1998; MacKenzie et al., 2007; Mirowski 1994).
CPE contributes to these social scientific commonplaces by highlighting the role of
discursively-selective imaginaries and structurally-selective institutions in the making
of economic practices and, a fortiori, economic policies. Imaginaries are semiotic systems
that frame individual subjects lived experience of an inordinately complex world and/or
inform collective calculation about that world. They comprise a specific configuration of
genres, discourses and styles and thereby constitute the semiotic moment of a network of
social practices in a given social field, institutional order, or wider social formation
(Fairclough 2003). Genres are distinctive ways of acting and interacting viewed in their
specifically semiotic aspect and, as such, they serve to regularize (inter)action. Examples
include initial public offering documents, political party manifestos, and university
mission statements. Discourses represent other social practices (and themselves too)
together with relevant aspects of the material world from the vantage point of particular
positions in the social world. Illustrations include particular economic discourses, such as
mercantilism, liberalism, the social market economy, or revolutionary syndicalism.
Styles are ways of being, identities in their specifically semiotic (as opposed to
bodily/material) aspect. Two instances are the new managerial style depicted by
Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) and the flexible, entrepreneurial, risk-taking, selfresponsible individual of advanced liberalism (Miller and Rose 2008). Genres, discourses
and styles are dialectically related. Thus discourses may be enacted as genres and
inculcated as styles and, in addition, get externalized in a range of objective social and/or
material facts (e.g., nature as modified by human action, physical infrastructure, new
technologies, and new institutional orders). Viewed in these terms, an economic
imaginary is a semiotic system that gives meaning and shape to the economic field. The
knowledge-based economy, for example, can be read as a distinctive semiotic order that
(re-) articulates various genres, discourses, and styles around a novel economic strategy,
state project, and hegemonic vision and that affects diverse institutional orders and the
lifeworld (see Jessop 2004, 2008). Whereas the imaginary is a general term for semiotic
systems that shape lived experience in a complex world, institution belongs to a family
of terms that identify mechanisms that embed lived experience across different social
spheres.
In terms of what orthodox economics misleadingly describes as the macro-level, CPE
distinguishes the actually existing economy as the chaotic sum of all economic activities

(broadly defined as concerned with the social appropriation and transformation of nature
for the purposes of substantive provisioning)[10] from the economy (or, better,
economies in the plural) as an imaginatively narrated, more or less coherent subset of
these activities occurring within specific spatio-temporal frameworks. The totality of
economic activities is so unstructured and complex that it cannot be an object of effective
calculation, management, governance, or guidance. Instead such practices are always
oriented to subsets of economic relations (economic systems, subsystems, or ensembles)
that have been semiotically and, perhaps organizationally and institutionally, fixed as
appropriate objects of intervention. Economic imaginaries have a crucial constitutive role
in this regard. They identify, privilege, and seek to stabilize some economic activities
from the totality of economic relations and transform them into objects of observation,
calculation, and governance. Technologies of economic governance, operating sometimes
more semiotically, sometimes more materially,[11] constitute their own objects of
governance rather than emerging in order to, or operating with the effect that, they govern
already pre-constituted objects (Jessop 1990, 1997).
Economic imaginaries are always selectively defined due to limited cognitive capacities
and to the discursive and material biases of specific epistemes and economic paradigms.
They typically exclude elements usually unintentionally that are vital to the overall
performance of the subset of economic (and extra-economic) relations that have been
identified. Such exclusions limit in turn the efficacy of economic forecasting,
management, planning, guidance, governance, etc., because such practices do not
(indeed, cannot) take account of excluded elements and their impact. Moreover, if they
are to prove more than arbitrary, rationalistic, and willed (Gramsci 1971: 376-7), they
must have some significant, albeit necessarily partial, correspondence to real material
interdependencies in the actually existing economy and/or in the relations between
economic and extra-economic activities. Similar arguments would apply, with appropriate
changes, to so-called meso- or micro-level economic phenomena, such as industrial
districts or individual enterprises.
Imagined economies are discursively constituted and materially reproduced on many sites
and scales, in different spatio-temporal contexts, and over various spatio-temporal
horizons. They extend from one-off transactions through stable economic organizations,
networks, and clusters to macro-economic regimes. While there is usually massive
scope for variation in individual transactions, the medium- to long-term semiotic and
material reproduction demands of meso-complexes and macro-economic regimes narrow
this scope considerably. Recursive selection of semiotic practices and extra-semiotic
processes at these scales tends to reduce inappropriate variation and thereby secure the
requisite variety (constrained heterogeneity rather than simple uniformity) that supports
the structural coherence of economic activities. Stable semiotic orders, discursive
selectivities, social learning, path-dependencies, power relations, patterned
complementarities, and material selectivities all become more significant, the more that
material interdependencies and/or issues of spatial and intertemporal articulation increase
within and across diverse functional systems and the lifeworld. Yet this growing set of
constraints also reveals the fragility and, indeed, improbability of the smooth
reproduction of complex social orders.

Economic imaginaries at the meso- and macro-levels develop as economic, political, and
intellectual forces seek to (re)define specific subsets of economic activities as subjects,
sites, and stakes of competition and/or as objects of regulation and to articulate strategies,
projects and visions oriented to these imagined economies. Among the main forces
involved in such efforts are political parties, think tanks, bodies such as the OECD and
World Bank, organized interests such as business associations and trade unions, and
social movements; the mass media are also crucial intermediaries in mobilizing elite
and/or popular support behind competing imaginaries.[12] These forces tend to
manipulate power and knowledge to secure recognition of the boundaries, geometries,
temporalities, typical economic agents, tendencies and counter-tendencies, distinctive
overall dynamic, and reproduction requirements of different imagined economies (Daly
1991; Miller and Rose 2008). They also seek to develop new structural and
organizational forms that will help to institutionalize these boundaries, geometries, and
temporalities in an appropriate spatio-temporal fix that can displace and/or defer capitals
inherent contradictions and crisis-tendencies. However, by virtue of competing economic
imaginaries, competing efforts to institute them materially, and an inevitable
incompleteness in the specification of their respective economic and extra-economic
preconditions, each imagined economy is only ever partially constituted. There are
always interstitial, residual, marginal, irrelevant, recalcitrant and plain contradictory
elements that escape any attempt to identify, govern, and stabilize a given economic
arrangement or broader economic order (Malpas and Wickham 1995; Jessop 2002).
These provide important sources of resistance and help preserve a reservoir of semiotic
and material resources that enable dominant systems (through the agency of their
associated social forces) to adapt to new challenges through their re-articulation and
recombination in the service of power.
Relatively successful economic imaginaries presuppose a substratum of substantive
economic relations and instrumentalities as their elements. Conversely, where an
imaginary has been successfully operationalized and institutionalized, it transforms and
naturalizes these elements and instrumentalities into the moments of a specific economy
with specific emergent properties. This process is mediated, as indicated above, through
the interaction among specific economic imaginaries, appropriately supportive economic
agents individual or collective with appropriate modes of calculation and behavioural
or operational dispositions, specific technologies that sustain and confirm these
imaginaries (e.g., statistics, indexes, benchmarks, records), and structural constellations
that limit the pursuit of contrary or antagonistic imaginaries, activities, or technologies.
A cultural political economy of crisis
A significant moment in the development of economic imaginaries is the emergence of
crises affecting economic identities and performance. Crises often create profound
cognitive and strategic disorientation and trigger proliferation in interpretations and
proposed solutions. As the critical policy studies literature emphasizes, a crisis is never a
purely objective, extra-semiotic moment or process that automatically produces a
particular response or outcome. A CPE approach combines semiotic and material
analyses to examine: (a) how crises emerge when established patterns of dealing with

structural contradictions, their crisis-tendencies, and strategic dilemmas no longer work

as expected and, indeed, when continued reliance thereon may aggravate matters; (b) how
contestation over the meaning of the crisis shapes responses through processes of
variation, selection, and retention that are mediated through a changing mix of semiotic
and extra-semiotic mechanisms. A crisis is most acute when crisis-tendencies and
tensions accumulate across interrelated moments of a given structure or system, limiting
manoeuvre in regard to any particular problem. Shifts in the balance of forces may also
intensify crisis-tendencies by weakening or resisting established modes of crisismanagement (Offe 1984: 35-64). This creates a situation of more or less acute crisis, a
potential moment of decisive transformation, and an opportunity for decisive
intervention. Thus crisis situations are unbalanced: they are objectively overdetermined
but subjectively indeterminate (Debray 1973: 113). This opens space for strategic
interventions to significantly redirect the course of events rather than muddle through in
the (perhaps forlorn) hope that the situation will eventually resolve itself. Moreover, as
Milton Friedman (1962: 32) put it hyperbolically but tellingly: [o]nly a crisis produces
real change.
When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying
around. This indicates that a war of position, i.e., preparing the cultural and social
ground for crisis-induced strategic interventions, will also prove important to the nature
and outcome of crisis-management and crisis response. In short, crises are potentially
path-shaping moments that provoke responses that are mediated through semiotic-cummaterial processes of variation, selection, and retention.
First, even in normal times, there is continuing variation as actors deliberately or
unintentionally redefine the sites, subjects, and stakes of action and articulate and
experiment with innovative strategies, tactics, projects and visions. This is even more
likely during crises as various forms of disorientation stimulate alternative discourses and
practices rooted in old and new semiotic systems and practical routines. Diverse
economic, political, and socio-cultural narratives may intersect as they seek to give
meaning to current problems by construing them in terms of past failures and future
possibilities. While many visions will invoke, repeat, or remix established genres,
discourses, and styles; others may develop, if only partially, a poetry for the future that
resonates with new potentialities (Marx 1996: 32-34).
Second, while most of this variation is arbitrary and short-lived, lacking long-term
consequences for overall social dynamics, some innovations do get selected. In the case
of interpretations of the crisis and its implications, for example, the plausibility of
narratives and their associated strategies and projects depends on their resonance (and
hence capacity to reinterpret and mobilize) with the personal (including shared)
narratives of significant classes, strata, social categories, or groups affected by the crisis.
Moreover, although many plausible narratives are advanced, their narrators will not be
equally effective in conveying their messages and securing support for the lessons they
hope to draw. This depends on the prevailing web of interlocution[13] and its discursive
selectivities, the organization and operation of the mass media, the role of intellectuals in
public life, and the structural biases and strategically selective operations of various
public and private apparatuses of economic, political, and ideological domination.[14]

Such matters take us beyond questions of narrativity and specific organizational or

institutional genres towards issues of the extra-discursive conditions of narrative appeal
and stable semiotic orders and their reinforcement by various structural mechanisms.
That these institutional and meta-narratives resonate powerfully does not mean that they
should be taken at face value. All narratives are selective, appropriate some arguments,
and combine them in specific ways. So we must also consider what goes unstated or
silent, repressed or suppressed, in specific discourses. Nonetheless, if the crisis can be
plausibly interpreted as a crisis in the existing economic order, minor reforms may first
be tried to restore that order. If this fails or the crisis is initially interpreted primarily as a
crisis of that order, more radical changes may be explored. In both cases conflicts are
likely over the best policies to resolve the crisis and allocate its costs as different social
forces propose new visions, projects, programmes, and policies and a struggle for
hegemony develops.
Third, we must explore the discursive and extra-discursive mechanisms that select some
discourses for further elaboration and articulation with other discourses and that
contribute to their subsequent institutionalization. There is many a slip between the
discursive resonance of new imaginaries in a given conjuncture and an enduring
institutional materiality. It is one thing to (re-)politicize discourses in the context of the
apparently unstructured complexity associated with crisis, it is another to move to
sedimented (taken-for-granted) discourse and seemingly structured complexity. This
raises the question of the correspondence, always limited and provisional, between new
imaginaries and real, or potentially realizable, sets of material interdependences in the
economy and its embedding in wider sets of social relations (for studies on the
knowledge-based economy, see Jessop 2004, 2008; on competitiveness, Sum 2009c; on
the Green New Deal, see below).
This poses crucial problems around delimiting the origins of a crisis in space-time,
establishing whether it is purely economic or has broader roots and effects, and reducing
its complexities to identifiable causes that could be targeted in the search for solutions
(cf. Gramscis comments on the complexity of the origins of the Great Depression and,
hence, the difficulties of identifying them, 1995: 219; and, for a study of the 1997 Asian
crisis in South Korea on these lines, see Ji 2003). Economic imaginaries have a crucial
role to play in both respects. In addition, of course, complexity reduction is never wholly
innocent. It is intimately connected to diverse forms of social contestation, alliance
building, and forms of domination. Likewise, given a crisis in/of a given social order, the
emergence and consolidation of a new economic regime does not occur purely through
technological innovation and changes in the labour process, enterprise forms, and forms
of competition. Wider ideational and institutional innovation going beyond the economy
narrowly conceived is needed, promoted and supported by political, intellectual, and
moral leadership. This includes a new economic imaginary that is articulated to new
state projects and hegemonic visions that can be translated into material, social, and
spatio-temporal fixes that would jointly underpin a relative structured coherence to
support continued accumulation. If this proves impossible, the new project will, to quote
Gramsci again, prove arbitrary, rationalistic, and willed rather than organic (1971:

376-7). Such arguments are exemplified in his analyses of Americanism and Fordism in
the USA and the problems of translating this crisis solution to Europe (1971: 277-318).
Let us now consider the multifaceted global financial crisis that began to emerge well
before it attracted general attention in 2007-2008. This complex set of events has already
led to countless interpretations, explanations, strategic plans, and specific policy
recommendations. These range from claims about the terminal crisis of capitalism
through to the equally fanciful belief that it was a temporary blip in an otherwise wellfunctioning, self-correcting free market system. Such variation in interpretations is
unsurprising given the complexity of the crisis and the wide spectrum of entry points and
standpoints that could be taken towards it. Even mainstream interpretations,
explanations, blame, and proposed solutions reflect different regional, national, and
macro-regional economies experiences of the global financial crisis and its broader
repercussions. What matters from a CPE viewpoint is which of these many and diverse
interpretations get selected as the basis for private and public attempts to resolve the
crisis. This is not reducible to narrative resonance, argumentative force, or scientific merit
alone (although each has its role in certain contexts) but also depends on structural,
agential, and technological[15] selectivities. Critical in this regard is that most accounts
lack the support of economic and political actors with enough economic, administrative,
fiscal, or legislative resources to offer necessary institutional and policy solutions on the
most relevant scales of action.
In the advanced capitalist economies, especially in the leading neo-liberal regimes, the
ways in which the crisis has been interpreted and measures identified and pursued are
typical of liberal-democratic political regimes in the face of crisis. In short, generous (and
often ill-defined) discretionary powers have been given to the executive, or its nominees,
to solve the crisis (Scheuerman 2002). In the present case, exceptional measures with
limited consultation were declared essential to ensure timely, targeted, and temporary
action to return the economy to health. While this has facilitated a rapid return to
business as usual, the concentration and centralization of political power in the hands of
economic and political elites and the extent of agreement among the leading political
parties has largely closed the space for democratic debate and accountability at the same
time as it opened one for populist appeals and diversions. One effect of this has been that
the effective scope of debate over policy was quickly narrowed down to a limited set of
alternatives. This was useful for financial elites and the political class in the leading
capitalist economies because, by confining serious debate to policy choices, however
wide-ranging, it suggested that correct policy choices can solve the crisis, curing its
symptoms and removing its deeper causes. This diverted attention from more basic
questions of institutional design and, more radically, of the basic social relations that
reproduce crisis-tendencies and shape the forms that they take (cf. Wolff 2008).
Challenging this implication is an important part of Ideologiekritik in this period and also
relates to the structural selectivities of economic and political orders.
My current research[16] suggests that the dominant interpretation in liberal market
economies that has been selected after an intense private and public debate is that, with
some differentiation reflecting specific economic, political, and institutional locations and

interests, this is a crisis in finance-led accumulation or, at most, in neo-liberalism. As

such it could be resolved through a massive, but strictly temporary, financial stimulus,
recapitalization of the biggest (but not all) vulnerable banks, tighter regulation, and a
reformed (but still neo-liberal) international economic regime. This will permit a return to
neo-liberal business as usual at some unfortunate but necessary cost to the public purse
and some re-balancing of the financial and real economies.[17] In other capitalist
regimes, the crisis is more often read by leading forces as a crisis of finance-led
accumulation, prompting efforts to roll this policy approach back, especially in the
financial sector, through more radical re-regulation, and through greater investment in the
real economy. In other capitalist regimes, however, the crisis is more often interpreted
as a crisis of neo-liberalism and this has led to a divergence in domestic and international
economic policies: rolling back neo-liberalism at home and seeking stricter regulations
on neo-liberalism in various supranational and international contexts. Even in more neostatist or neo-corporatist advanced capitalist economies, however, where the legitimacy of
earlier neo-liberal policy adjustments has been questioned and calls are being made for
stricter regulation of financial markets in various supranational and international
contexts, this has yet not prompted leading forces to question the broader commitment to
world market integration. The feasibility of these alternative responses will depend on the
integration of different economic spaces into the world market, the respective strengths of
the political regimes promoting them domestically and in international arenas, and the
substantive rationality of the proposals in the light of the more general global economic
crisis, the worsening crises affecting food, fuel, water, climate change, and the
environment more generally. Such crisis-tendencies indicate that, although a neo-liberal
restoration of business as usual may displace and/or defer the costs of financial crisismanagement, it cannot resolve more fundamental impending crises. Much will also
depend on how problems that have been merely postponed or displaced will be addressed
when the crisis re-emerges and how those committed to alternatives can prepare the
ground for the next set of encounters in key economic spaces and states.
More generally, the crisis was quickly thematized at elite levels in the advanced capitalist
economies in terms of variable combinations of: (1) a return to Keynesian demand
management nationally, regionally, and globally; (2) restructuring and recapitalization of
banks and isolating toxic assets in state-owned or supported bad banks; (3) building a
new international financial architecture; (4) remoralization of capitalism in tune with
corporate responsibility and responsible competitiveness; (5) a Green New Deal; and (6)
the turn to rapidly growing market economies like Brazil, Russia, India and China (the
discursively construed BRIC quartet) as offering good prospects for investment. The
first theme is evident in the turn from a period of private Keynesianism when consumer
debt sustained demand despite declining real wages to pursuit of state-sponsored
Keynesianism with massive expansion of demand through quantitative easing (releasing
money also for investment bubbles in raw materials, emerging economies, and so on) and
short-term stimulus to some of the hardest hit industrial sectors. The second response is a
central plank of crisis-management in neo-liberal and other economies and has been
pursued through emergency legislation, executive discretion, and behind a veil of secrecy.
It resulted in the nationalization and/or recapitalization of impaired banks (notably in
Iceland, Ireland, the USA, and the UK plus those Baltic States and Eastern and Central

European economies that took a radical neo-liberal turn and, inter alia, experienced realestate booms on the back of cheap loans). The third response is proving much harder to
realize in a concerted and coherent way, even with the expansion of the G8 to the G20
economies and key international bodies, and the key players seem to have agreed that
more free trade, de-regulation, and so on, are required. The opportunity for tighter
regulation seems already to have been lost as the semblance of business as usual has
been restored although few experts claim the crisis is fully resolved. At least the muchfeared return to protectionism is absent. The fourth response is largely rhetorical and
reflected in demands for responsible and green competitiveness (Sum 2009). The Green
New Deal remains a floating signifier, which is being narrated as capitalisms best hope
to create jobs, restore growth, and limit climate change but which is also being recontextualized primarily on neo-liberal lines. There is also little agreement on how to
proceed, let alone how to translate promised action into binding multilateral
commitments, as can be seen from the outcome of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit on
climate change. Finally, on the BRIC economies as the next economic frontier and efforts
to translate them into an inter-regional bloc, see Jessop and Sum 2010.
To illustrate some of these points, let me first refer to the disorienting impact of the
financial crisis. An expert witness is Alan Greenspan, Chair of the Federal Reserve
(1987-2006). This is an extract from a Congressional Hearing on 23 October 2008:
Greenspan: Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to
protect shareholders equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief
Questioner: Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish
you had not made?
Greenspan: Yes, Ive found a flaw. I dont know how significant or permanent it is. But
Ive been very distressed by that fact
One quotation proves nothing but it is emblematic of a more general shock to the neoliberal mindset, especially during the panic of late 2008. Nor does it follow that the
advocates of neo-liberalism will abandon the field of ideological contestation or resign
from further involvement in decision-making. The emblematic case here is, of course,
Ben Bernanke, Greenspans successor as Chair of the Federal Reserve, who despite his
major role as an architect of crisis, has been confirmed by Senate for a second term as an
architect of crisis-management. On the contrary, whatever the scope for discursive
variation among those affected by the crisis and its resonance in populist measures
against bankers bonuses, other forms of selectivity structural, agential, and
technological in the current conjuncture have tended to concentrate power in the hands
of the same economic and political interests that contributed to the global financial crisis.
In short, following the panic of late 2008, the dominant forces in the leading capitalist
economies have managed to normalize the situation, individuals have accepted the crisis
as a fact of life and turned to coping strategies, populist anger against banksters and
politicians has been defused, and there is a return to capitalist normality. Given a return to

business as usual in the short- to medium-term in the advanced capitalist economies, the
more interesting question is what sort of economic imaginary is likely to shape a
meaningful a post-finance-led or post-neo-liberal macro-economic order in an
increasingly integrated world market.
Such an imaginary would need to satisfy two requirements. First, it should be able to
inform and shape economic strategies for all scales from the firm to the wider economy,
for all territorial scales from the local through regional to the national or supra-national
scale, and for most market forces and their non-market supports. And, second, it should
inform and shape state projects and hegemonic visions on different scales, providing
guidance in the face of political and social uncertainty and providing a means to integrate
private, institutional, and wider public narratives about past experiences, present
difficulties, and future prospects. The more of these fields a new economic imaginary can
address, the more resonant and influential it will be. This explains the appeal of Fordism
and the knowledge-based economy in the last and current long waves of growth
respectively and indicates the potential of the Green New Deal (or GND) as a post-neoliberal economic imaginary.
Drawing on the mythology of Roosevelts New Deal in the last great global depression
and social contract rhetoric, the GND has been proposed from many different
perspectives. It also has the power to frame broader struggles over political, intellectual
and moral leadership on various scales as well as over more concrete fields of technical
and economic reform. The basic idea is being articulated on many scales from the local
(even under the anti-environmental Bush Administration, climate change and ecological
modernization was already on some local and state-level political agendas) to the national
(notably in Norway, Germany, and China) and supranational (with strong engagement
from the European Union) and up to the global (its sponsors include the United Nations
Environmental Programme). It also has attractions to diverse organizational and
institutional sites from firms to states, in many systems besides the economy in its narrow
sense, such as science and technology, law and politics, education and religion, and in the
public sphere and the lifeworld. Thus it is being articulated across fields as different as
technology (eco-technologies, energy efficiency), the productive economy (green collar
jobs, sustainable development, ecological modernization, low carbon economy), the
financial system (cap and trade, carbon trading, green bonds, sustainable investing), law
(environmental rights, new legal regimes), politics (the green movement, climate
change), religion (environmental stewardship), and self-identities (homo virens, green
lifestyle). The Green New Deal has also been translated into many different visions and
strategies and can be inflected in neo-liberal, neo-corporatist, neo-statist, and neocommunitarian ways by prioritizing, respectively, market incentives, social partnership,
societal steering, and solidarity respectively. Indeed, the very fuzziness of the Green
New Deal has helped to build alliances and compromises and it is currently being
heralded in many quarters as a magic bullet (Brand 2009) that can somehow resolve the
economic crisis, the problem of peak oil, and climate change.
The Green New Deal can be seen in some ways as an imaginative extension of the
paradigm of the knowledge-based economy that was consolidated in the mid-1980s to

mid-1990s a paradigm that was sidelined but not negated by the rise of a finance-led
accumulation that reflected the interests of financial rather than industrial capital. The
Green New Deal (initially without this particular label) has been proposed on many
occasions as a global (in the triple sense of comprehensive, planetary, and world-wide)
solution to diverse problems from the mid-1990s (see Brggen 2001). It has acquired
serious traction only in the current crisis (indicating again the key analytical distinction
among variation, selection, and retention) as a floating signifier that can be articulated in
different ways to resolve a crisis (or complex of crises) also read in different ways. Its
appeal from early 2008 onwards lies in its mobilization of the opposition between the
interests of those engaged with the natural or real economy and the interests of
footloose finance (for an exemplary presentation, see New Economics Foundation
2008). In this sense, the GND has moved from one economic (and political) imaginary
among many in the mid-1990s to one that has been strongly selected as the basis for
concerted action in the late 2000s. At stake now are the form, manner, and likelihood of
its retention as a powerful imaginary that can be translated into accumulation strategies,
state projects, and hegemonic visions. The role of structural, agential, and technological
selectivities will be even more important in this stage than in the period of selection
and, whilst motivated by the principle of pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the
will, the present author expects that the GND will acquire a strong neo-liberal inflection
in the leading national economies whatever its form beyond them and/or at local level.
Time and struggle will tell.
Conclusions
Unlike many currents in evolutionary and institutional political economy but like other
variants of cultural materialism, the above approach to CPE takes the cultural turn
seriously, highlighting the relations between meanings and practices. For, insofar as
semiosis is studied apart from its extra-semiotic context, resulting accounts of social
causation will be incomplete, leading to semiotic reductionism and/or imperialism.
Conversely, insofar as material transformation is studied apart from its semiotic
dimensions and mediations, explanations of stability and change risk oscillating between
objective necessity and sheer contingency. On this basis, I outlined five interrelated
features of CPE, introduced the notion of economic imaginary as a useful general
concept for analysing the co-evolution of semiosis and structuration, provided a
simplified (of course!) account of some of the implications of CPE for the analysis of
crisis and crisis-management, and offered a very preliminary account of how this
approach might be applied to the financial crisis and Green New Deal.
The evolutionary and institutional approach to semiosis advocated here enables us to
recognize the semiotic dimensions of political economy at the same time as indicating
how and why only some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate actually
come to be selected and institutionalized. And the semiotic and evolutionary approach to
political economy enables us to identify the contradictions and conflicts that make capital
accumulation inherently improbable and crisis-prone, creating the space for economic
imaginaries to play a role in stabilizing accumulation in specific spatio-temporal fixes
and/or pointing the way forward from recurrent crises. Finally, although I have presented
one variant of CPE, cultural political economy is actually a broad movement. It should

not be reduced to an intellectual current exclusively linked to just one theorist, school, or
tradition. Such a move would contradict my own arguments about complexity reduction
(there are different ways to reduce complexity) and with more general reflections on the
contribution of pluralism and debate to advances in theoretical and policy paradigms,
including in the fields of critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy.
Endnotes
[1] This article draws on discussions over several years with Norman Fairclough, Andrew
Sayer, Ngai-Ling Sum, and Ruth Wodak. Its specific form and content benefitted from
sound advice from Ngai-Ling Sum, timely recommendations from Frank Fischer,
pertinent comments from Andrew Sayer, and remarks by two anonymous reviewers.
[2] An example of this culturalist approach is the use of group-grid cultural theory as a
tool for taking account of cultural differences in policy analysis (cf. Hoppe 2007).
[3] While semiosis initially refers to the inter-subjective production of meaning, it is also
an important element/moment of the social more generally. Semiosis involves more
than (verbal) language, including, for example, different forms of visual language.
[4] These meaning systems are shaped by neural, cognitive, and semiotic frames (Lakoff
and Johnson 1980) as well as, of course, social interaction, meaning-making
technologies, and strategically-selective opportunities for reflection and learning.
[5] On other policy decision techniques, see the contributions on cost-benefit analysis,
environmental impact assessments, technology assessments, and policy mediation in Part
IX of Fischer, Miller, and Sidney 2007 (465-534). Many other examples exist. On public
policy instruments, see also Peters and van Nispen (1998) and Salaman (2002).
[6] For a narrative account of the meaning of buildings, see Yanow (1995).
[7] Horizontal denotes sites on a similar scale (e.g., personal, organizational, institutional,
functional systems); vertical denotes different scales (e.g., micro-macro, local-regionalnational-supranational-global).
[8] On spatio-temporal fixes, see Jessop (2002).
[9] Adorno notes that the critique of ideology, as the confrontation of ideology with its
own truth, is only possible insofar as the ideology contains a rational element with which
the critique can deal (1973: 190).
[10] Polanyi (1982) distinguished substantive economic activities involved in material
provisioning from formal (profit-oriented, market-mediated) economic activities. The
leading economic imaginaries in capitalist societies ignore the full range of substantive
economic activities in favour of a focus on formal economic activities.

[11] Although all practices are semiotic and material, the relative causal efficacy of these
elements will vary.
[12] I am not suggesting that mass media can be disentangled from wider networks of
social relations but seeking to highlight the decline of an autonomous public sphere.
[13] A web of interlocution comprises metanarratives that reveal linkages between a wide
range of interactions, organizations, and institutions and/or help to make sense of whole
epochs (Somers 1994: 614).
[14] On discursive selectivity, see Hay 1996 and Somers 1994; on structural selectivity,
see Jessop 2001, 2007.
[15] Besides policy decision techniques, technologies refer here to diverse presentational
devices that render some discourses more persuasive in some contexts than others:
economic models, powerpoint presentations, video clips, vox pop interviews, etc. Other
technologies, including policy instruments (e.g., quantitative easing), may also be
involved in retention, i.e., the translation of selected accounts into the policy field.
[16] A three-year professorial fellowship begins in 2010, funded by the UKs Economic
and Social Research Council on the Cultural Political Economy of Crisis-Management
(Grant number: RES-051-27-0303).
[17] Iceland is an extreme case due to excessive financialization.
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