Clive Barnett

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption presents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes. Provides empirical research on everyday consumers, social networks, and campaigns. Fills a gap in research on the topic with its distinctive focus on fair trade consumption. Locates ethical consumption within a range of social theoretical debates –on neoliberalism, governmentality, and globalisation. Challenges the moralism of much of the analysis of ethical consumption, which sees it as a retreat from proper citizenly politics and an expression of individualised consumerism.

The cultural turn: fashion or progress in human geography?

The cultural turn marks a reorientation of human geographys interdisciplinary concerns toward the wide field of cultural studies. It is argued that this reorientation has been mediated by distinctive forms of commercial academic book publishing. These have been the medium for the internationalisation of cultural studies upon which human geographys serious engagement with the field has depended. It is argued that the combination of a greater reliance upon work drawn from the humanities and the imperatives of publishing have led to the contemporary proliferation of cultural theory being associated with new forms of academic celebrity. The critical questioning of the cultural turn is therefore located in relation to the formsof authority and evaluation that it has the potential to promote.

THE ELUSIVE SUBJECTS OF NEO-LIBERALISM

This paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn from Foucault. We explore the degree to which aspects of Foucaults discussions of government and ethics can be put to work methodologically without necessarily buying into fully systematized theories of governmentality that have been built around them. The idea that organizations and networks might share rationalities through which they problematize and seek to intervene in specified areas of social life seems worth pursuing. So too does the notion of various modes of ethical problematization through which people come to take their own activities as requiring moral reflection. In neither case, however, can the analytics of governmentality provide a coherent theoretical account of how political processes of rule and administration work, or indeed of how they connect up with cultural processes of self-formation and subjectivity.

The Political Rationalities of Fair-Trade Consumption in the United Kingdom

This article situates the analysis of fair-trade consumption in the context of debates about civic activism and political participation. It argues that fair-trade consumption should be understood as a political phenomenon, which, through the mediating action of organizations and campaigns, makes claims on states, corporations, and institutions. This argument is made by way of a case study of Traidcraft, a key player in the fair-trade movement in the United Kingdom. The study focuses on how Traidcraft approaches and enrolls its supporters.

Culture, policy and subsidiarity in the European Union: From symbolic identity to the governmentalisation of culture

Abstract This paper critically assesses the discourse of cultural policy initiatives of the European Union (EU) during the 1990s. It focuses upon the formulation of so-called ‘cultural action’ following the recognition of culture in the Treaty on European Union in 1992. It explores the multiple instrumentalities ascribed to culture as a medium for the management of European integration, and suggests that the evolution of policies to promote cultural co-operation is indicative of a progressive ‘governmentalisation’ of culture at the EU level. The paper argues that the focus of critical evaluation of EU cultural policy should be upon practices of citizenship participation in emergent network polities.

Geography and ethics: Justice unbound

Debates in geography often centre on whether it is possible or preferable to develop robust normative foundations for critique. But the relationship of academic analysis to normative concepts does not need to be thought of in foundational terms, one way or the other. It is better understood in terms of elaboration, elucidation and amplification. Theorizing justice from the bottom up in this way is consistent with certain strands in recent moral and political philosophy, exemplified by Amartya Sen’s recent account of comparative justice. Recent work by feminist philosophers including Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Iris Marion Young explicitly engages with the question of how to theorize the geographies of democratic justice in non-foundational, modest ways. The proliferation of geographical concerns in moral and political philosophy is indicative of the various ways in which concepts of justice are ‘unbound’ from forms of containment to which they have often been subjected. Philosophizing about justice is no longer automatically restricted to a national frame; and neither are questions of justice contained within prescriptive styles of reasoning, opening up instead to insights from empirical social sciences. Freeing concepts of justice from imaginary geographical constraints and from restrictive rationalistic conventions presents a challenge to spatial disciplines to suspend their chauvinism about the use of spatial vocabularies in other fields.

Culture, geography, and the arts of government

In this paper I endeavor to prise open the theoretical closure of the conceptualization of culture in contemporary human geography. Foucaults later work on government provides the basis for a useable definition of culture as an object of analysis which avoids problems inherent in abstract, generalizing, and expansive notions of culture. The emergence of this Foucauldian approach in cultural studies is discussed, and the distinctive conceptualization of the relations between culture and power that it implies are elaborated. This reconceptualization informs a critical project of tracking the institutional formation of the cultural and the deployment of distinctively cultural forms of regulation into the fabric of modern social life. It is argued that the culture-and-government approach needs to be supplemented by a more sustained consideration of the spatiality and scale of power-relations. It is also suggested that this approach might throw into new perspective the dynamic behind geographys own cultural turn.

Culture, government and spatiality: Reassessing the ‘Foucault effect’ in cultural-policy studies

This article critically discusses the reconceptualization of culture and governmentality in recent Australian ‘cultural-policy studies’. It argues that the further development of this conceptualization requires a more careful consideration of the complex relations between culture, power and the different spatialities of social practices. The assumptions of this literature regarding social-democratic public institutions and the nation-state are critically addressed in the light of contemporary processes of globalization. It is argued that the use made of Foucault in this paradigm privileges a model of disciplinary power which is dependent on a particular spatialization of social subjects and technologies of the self. As a result, an uncritical application of this model to all cultural practices supports a far too coherent image of practices of ‘government’ in producing sought-after subject-effects. It is suggested that the different articulations of spatio-temporal presence and absence in cultural technologies require a less totalizing understanding of the forms of power exercised through governmental practices.

Spaces of opposition: activism and deliberation in post-apartheid environmental politics

Drawing on recent political theory that examines the relationship between inclusive deliberation and oppositional activism in processes of democratisation, we develop a case study of environmental justice mobilisation in post-apartheid South Africa. We focus on the emergence of a network of social movement organisations embedded in particular localities in the city of Durban, connected into national and transnational campaigns, and centred on grievances around industrial air pollution. We analyse how the geographies of uneven industrial and urban development in Durban combine with sedimented place-based histories of activism to make particular locations spaces of democratic contention, in which the scope and operation of formal democratic procedures are challenged and transformed. We examine the range of strategic engagements adopted by social movement organisations in pursuing their objectives, looking in particular at the dynamic interaction between inclusion in deliberative forums and more adversarial, activist strategies of legal challenge and dramaturgical protest. We identify the key organisational features of groups involved in this environmental justice network, which both enable and constrain particular patterns of democratic engagement with the state and capital. We also identify a disjuncture between the interpretative frames of different actors involved in participatory policy making. These factors help to explain the difficulties faced by social movement organisations in opening up the space for legitimate nonparliamentary opposition in a political culture shaped by norms of conciliation and consensus.

Problematizing Choice: Responsible consumers and sceptical citizens

‘Choice’ has become a keyword in public policy debate in the United Kingdom, perhaps even ‘the mantra of health, education and pension provision’.2This coincides with the emergence of ‘the consumer’ as the privileged figure of policy discourse. The assumption underlying this proliferation of choice in policy discourse is that consumerism has transformed people’s expectations, so that public services must now be restructured in line with the demands of citizen-consumers who demand efficiency, responsiveness, choice and flexibility. The ubiquity of the choice paradigm can be interpreted as the outcome of a determined effort to recast the balance of responsibility between the state and citizens. What has been dubbed the ‘personalisation agenda’ now ‘stretches right across government’, encompassing health initiatives and pensions policy.3The stated aim of this agenda is to reframe the role of state-led initiatives in terms of empowering individuals to make informed choices, based on information provided by government. Choice is in turn presented as a means of making service-providers more responsive to the variegated needs of citizens. One can see this individualization of responsibility in a number of fields, extending beyond the realm of the state as such. For example, the individualization of health risks has also