Ngai-Ling Sum

Pre-disciplinary and Post-disciplinary Perspectives

Contributors to this forum are invited to write from their own disciplinary perspective on exciting intellectual developments in their field and to assess their implications for contemporary political economy. They should also address how far political economy is (or should become) an interdisciplinary venture. We find it hard to answer these questions, however, because neither co-author identifies with a single discipline. Indeed, we reject the discursive and organisational construction (and, worse, the fetishisation) of disciplinary boundaries. This means in turn that we cannot describe our approach as inter- or multi-disciplinary in its aspiration�even though, faute de mieux, we draw on concepts,theoretical arguments and empirical studies written from existing disciplinary perspectives. Instead, we describe our shared approach as pre-disciplinary in its historical inspiration and as post-disciplinar y in its current intellectual implications. We are not alone in refusing disciplinary boundaries and decrying some of their effects. Indeed, among the most exciting recent intellectual developments in the social sciences is the increasing commitment to transcending these boundaries to understand better the complex interconnections within and across the natural and social worlds. Thus our own contribution to this forum seeks to bring out some implications of pre- and post-disciplinary analyses of political economy. We advocate the idea of a �cultural political economy� and suggest how it might transform understandings of recent developments in political economy.

The production of hegemonic policy discourses: ‘competitiveness’ as a knowledge brand and its (re-)contextualizations

‘Competitiveness’ has become a transnational policy buzzword in a globalized world and this invites us to examine critically ‘competitiveness’ discourses and their manifestations in the policy-consultancy circuit. This article adopts a ‘cultural political economy’ approach to the rise to hegemonic ‘knowledge brand’ status since the mid-1990s of the influential account of Michael E. Porter and his Harvard Business School associates. This account of competitiveness has since been recontextualized from the national to the urban, regional and global scales. The article interweaves theoretical and empirical arguments in five steps. Firstly, it outlines the bases of cultural political economy as a discursive as well as material account of the remaking and reproduction of social relations. Secondly, it presents three stages in the development of ‘competitiveness’ discourses from theoretical paradigm to knowledge brand. Thirdly, it explores how this knowledge brand has been recontextualized through knowledge apparatuses, such as indices and metaphors, as well as through related technologies of power at the global level and the regional-national scale of East Asia. Fourthly, and conversely, it shows how this hegemonic logic of competitiveness is being challenged and negotiated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Fifthly, it offers some concluding comments on knowledge brands and on how cultural political economy can contribute to a critical understanding of policy-making.

Globalization, regionalization, and cross-border regions: scales, discourses and governance

The concept of the cross-border region (hereafter CBR) has gained increasing prominence in policy and academic discourses, A CBR is a territorial unit that comprises contiguous subnational units from two or more nation-states. Since borders were hermetic barriers oniy on rare occasions in the history of national territorial states, the existence of integrated, cross-border spaces is no novelty as such. What is new in recent developments is that the construction of cross-border regions has become a more or less explicit strategic objective pursued by various social forces within and beyond border regions.

Towards a Cultural International Political Economy: Poststructuralism and the Italian School

This chapter seeks to overcome the one-sided emphasis on materiality at the expense of discursivity that plagues much work in critical international political economy (IPE). It does so by introducing the concept of cultural political economy (hereafter CPE) in an effort to avoid both the tendency towards soft economic and/or political sociology, in which the material specificity of economic and political categories is dissolved into a generic concern with the social or cultural, and the tendency towards hard political economy, in which economic and political categories are reified and their social construction and contingency are ignored (cf. Sayer 1998). Insofar as it emerged in part through critical engagement with structuralism, our approach can certainly be described as poststructuralist. However, because it is inspired by classical political economy and Gramsci’s work on hegemony, it could also be described as prestructuralist. Thus, while we affirm the importance of neo-Gramscian contributions to IPE, we also criticize them for failing to exploit fully Gramsci’s account of the coconstitution and coevolution of the material and the discursive. We also argue that this is best achieved through a combination of critical semiotic analysis and the critique of political economy in an approach that insists that both time and institutions matter to the overall dynamic of hegemonic struggles.

Globalization, Regionalization and Cross-Border Modes of Growth in East Asia: the (Re-)Constitution of ‘Time-Space Governance’

Globalization has attracted increasing academic interest. Among the many competing conceptions that exist, some scholars examine it in uniscalar terms as a globalized ‘space of flows’ involving production, finance, trade and culture. Others are more sensitive to the multiscalar nature of globalization. In this regard, some adopt state-centred accounts that focus on the role of the national state in globalization and others have privileged supranational regional blocs as their starting points (for example, the EU., NAFTA and APEC; see section 3.2). These contrasting scalar accounts are interesting and important contributions to the discussions; but they still run the risk of neglecting the intertwining of activities on different scales and their spatio-temporal interlinkages/rearticulations. Building on Jessop’s arguments in the previous chapter about the growing ‘relativization of scale’ and the creation of new spatio-temporal fixes in the globalization and regionalization processes, this chapter illustrates these arguments by examining the relationship between globalization, regionalization and the emergence of cross-border modes of growth in East Asia since the early 1980s. This requires the bridging of the abstract-concrete — simple-complex gap in this analysis.

More than a ‘war of words’: identity, politics and the struggle for dominance during the recent ‘political reform’ period in Hong Kong

Pattens arrival as Governor in 1992 Marked a new stage inthe Sino-British struggle over ‘decolonization’ in Hong Kong. This struggle ishighly rhetorical and the local mass media call it a ‘war of words’.However, by adopting a strategic-relational approach, this article reveals a dual struggle over the politics of identity and the social basis for a new economic and political regime in the approach to 1997. The key protagonists (Patten and Chinese officials) have deploye various discursive strategies as economic and political circumstances in Hong Knog have changed. Global, regional and local factors and forces are shaping the emergence of two new, but still unstable, power blocs with different social bases. Whether these actions have an effect upon transforming the structural forms depends on the balanceof forces which is increasingly mediated by changes in discourses and discursive practices over time.

Cultural Political Economy: Logics of Discovery, Epistemic Fallacies, the Complexity of Emergence, and the Potential of the Cultural Turn

We read with baffled interest van Heur’s views in this issue on the foundational arguments, theoretical placement, and supposed flaws of our approach to cultural political economy (hereafter CPE). We respond below to key criticisms, identify the epistemic fallacies that inform them, and highlight developments he deems impossible. First, however, we summarise the key features of the approach that he criticises. CPE makes a cultural turn, broadly conceived as an interest in semiosis, to interpret and, in part, explain events, processes, tendencies, and emergent structures in the field of political economy. Semiosis involves the social production of inter-subjective meaning and, as such, is a foundational moment of all social practices and relations. Combining semiosis and political economy, CPE eschews reduction of economic or political phenomena to their semiotic dimensions (losing sight of their extra-semiotic specificities and dynamic) and the reification of sedimented economic and political relations (ignoring their semiotically and socially constructed contingency). As a cultural urban geographer, van Heur tends to see the cultural turn as ‘thematic’, i.e., as concerned with new research themes such as media technologies, creative cities, or the role of culture and knowledge in contemporary societies. Our version of CPE makes a methodological and, more importantly, ontological turn. We do not regard culture (i.e., semiosis) as a distinct sphere of society separate from economics and politics and, although we do advocate a cultural turn in political economy, we also argue that critical semiotic analysis has universal significance. New Political Economy, Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

INFORMATIONAL CAPITALISM AND U.S. ECONOMIC HEGEMONY: Resistance and Adaptations in East Asia

This article promotes a “cultural international political economy” approach to globalization in East Asia in the so-called information age. It emphasizes the inherently discursive as well as material character of economic relations and their embedding in a complex web of different scales of action from local to global. Thus it introduces the policy discourses related to two major components in recent efforts to renew U.S. hegemony: promotion of the Global Information Infrastructure and the global expansion of intellectual property rights through the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement. This initiative has enabled the emergence of a hegemonic GII-IPR-TRIPs complex supported by transnational informational capital, trade-related committees, and state agencies. This complex has triggered several forms of resistance and adaptation in East Asia. Targets of this resistance have been the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the GII-IPR-TRIPs complex itself. Modes of counterhegemonic resistance have included state strategic support for the Linux movement as well as everyday tactics of software piracy. In addition, subhegemonic forces (e.g., APEC and national governments) have been acting as translating centers that help shape responses to efforts to consolidate the hegemony of the GII-IPR-TRIPs complex at regional levels.

An Integral Approach to the Asian ‘Crisis’: The (Dis)Articulation of the Production and Financial (Dis-)Orders

This paper critiques Los work on the Asian Crisis (see Spring 1999 issue of Capital & Class) and offers a regulationist alternative. This suggests there was a certain structural coherence between the production and financial forms in the post-Plaza period and that this productive-financial configuration was prone to crises of overproduction-underconsumption, overborrowing, and exchange weaknesses. This vulnerability was exacerbated by specific conjunctural developments that disrupted the previous coherence. The resulting disarticulation has had differential effects on economies in the region.

Rearticulation of Spatial Scales and Temporal Horizons of a Cross-Border Mode of Growth: the (Re-) Making of ‘Greater China’

This chapter examines the (re)making of ‘Greater China’ (Hong Kong, Southern China, Taiwan) as a cross-border mode of growth as part of the global-regionalization processes (see Chapter 3). It first explores the emergence of this mode of growth in the context of the end of the cold war and deterritorializing processes related to economic globalization and the opening of China. In response to these changes and drawing upon their linguistic affinities and kinship ties, actors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and southern China formed translocal strategic networks that serve to coordinate compressed time production and fast time finance across borders. Between the early 1980s and 1997, these networks formed, the social bases of support for a cross-border division of labour/knowledge grounded in cheap labour and land from southern China, financial and management skills from Hong Kong, and capital and applied technology from Taiwan (see section 7.2). This cross-border mode of growth faced various crisis tendencies and coordination difficulties. In 1997, these were actualized by various regional developments that sparked off the Asian Crisis. During the early phase of the crisis, the economies in ‘Greater China’ escaped the worst and most direct impact of the crisis. As the crisis continued, however, they began to experience secondary effects.