922 research outputs found
Globalizacao, Regionalizacao, Mercado e o Estado:entrevista com Bob Jessop.
No full textIn this interview, Bob Jessop, not only talks about the theoretical and political factors that motivated him as an intellectual and made him focus particularly on the State, but also refers his new concerns related with the new social, economic and political transformations that are brought about by economic globalisation. Showing an outstanding relational capacity and in a quite coherent [and notably] way Jessop, digs over intricate dichotomies such as state vs. society, the economic vs. the political, agency vs. structure, and the logic of capital vs. class struggle. Expressing explicitly some of his major influences � Gramsci, Althusser Bourdieu, Polanyi, � Jessop, among many issues, explains, not only the tensions between the market and society, deals with the possibility of having a social market or a free market within a socialist system, challenges distinctions such as �First World- Third World�, identifies the complicities between Thatcherism, Majorism and Blairism, the transformations on the European Left and the need for a new posture, denounces that there is no single logic to globalisation [�it is the complex resultant of many different processes on many different scales�], but also deals with the concept of governance as an ensemble of spatio-temporal practices and forms, and understands socio political movements like the Zapatistas as important and original contributions to the overall development of the struggle against the dominant neo-liberal forms of globalisation
Crossing boundaries : towards cultural political economy : interview with Bob Jessop
No full textBob Jessop is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, United Kingdom. He has worked for many years on theories of the state and state power, critical political economy (including the régulation theory), critical realism, critical discourse analysis, and questions of governance and governance failure. He currently holds a 3-year professorial research fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) to study the crisis of crisis-management in relation to the North Atlantic Financial Crisis and its broad-ranging repercussions. Recent books include: The Future of the Capitalist State (2002), Beyond the Regulation Approach (co-authored with Ngai-Ling Sum, 2006), and State Power (2007). Two new books are scheduled for 2013: Towards Cultural Political Economy (co-authored with Ngai-Ling Sum) and The State: Past, Present, Future
From Localities via the spatial turn to spatial-temporal fixes: a strategic relational odyssey.
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Multi-level Governance and Multi-level Metagovernance Changes in the European Union as Integral Moments in the Transformation and Reorientation of Contemporary Statehood.
No full textBob Jessop seeks to criticize the �principal theoretical approaches to EU government and/or governance from the viewpoint of a strategic-relational approach to the state�. In particular, Jessop considers the rival approaches for understanding multi-level governance in the EU that can be conceptualized as �state-centric� and �simple governance� perspectives. The failure of these approaches leads him to propose an alternative account �in terms of the strategic selectivity of the state as a social relation, issues of governance failure, meta governance, and meta governance failure�. From this critique, Jessop suggests that what we are perhaps witnessing is the �re-scaling of the sovereign state or the emergence of just one more arena in which national states pursue national interests�
Economic and ecological crises : Green New Deals and no-growth economies
No full textBob Jessop applies cultural political economy to the global economic and ecological crisis. He presents theoretical preliminaries concerning economic and ecological imaginaries, and then goes on to highlight the multidimensional nature of the current crisis and struggles over its interpretation
Economic and Ecological Crises: Green new deals and no-growth economies
No full textBob Jessop applies cultural political economy to the global economic and ecological crisis. He presents theoretical preliminaries concerning economic and ecological imaginaries, and then goes on to highlight the multidimensional nature of the current crisis and struggles over its interpretation.
Valid construals and/or correct readings? : On the symptomatology of crises
No full textThe Chinese ideogram for crisis combines two characters: danger and opportunity. This indicates the duality of crisis and suggests several important issues for current and future analyses of crisis, crisis construals, and crisis lessons. First, the ideogram signifies that crises have both objective and subjective aspects corresponding to danger and opportunity respectively. Building on Régis Debray, we can say that, objectively, crises occur when a set of social relations (including their ties to the natural world) cannot be reproduced (cannot “go on”) in the old way. Subjectively, crises tend to disrupt (even “shock”) accepted views of the world and create uncertainty on how to “go on” within it. For they threaten established views, practices, institutions, and social relations, calling into question theoretical and policy paradigms as well as everyday personal and organizational routines. Second, in this sense, crises do not have predetermined outcomes: how they are resolved, if at all, depends on the actions taken in response to them. They are potentially path-shaping moments with performative effects that are mediated through the shifting balance of forces competing to influence crisis construal, crisis management, crisis outcomes, and possible lessons to be drawn from crisis. Third, without the objective moment, we have, at worst, deliberately exaggerated or even manufactured “crises,” at best, unwarranted panic based on mis-perception or mis-recognition of real world events and processes.1 Sometimes, crises may be manufactured or, at least exaggerated, for strategic or tactical purposes not directly related to immediate events or processes. Agents may, for “political” motives, broadly interpreted, conjure crises from nowhere or exaggerate the breadth, depth, and threat of an actual crisis (Mirowksi, 2013). After all, “you never want to let a serious crisis go to waste” (cf. Rahm Emanuel’s comment, made on the Bloomberg television channel in November 2008 in his capacity as transition manager for President-elect Barack Obama).2 A rigorous analysis of crises, crisis construals, and crisis management must be able to distinguish these alternatives or it could fall into a simplistic form of constructivism. Fourth, without the subjective moment, while disinterested observers may perceive a crisis developing either in real time or after the “event,” the crisis will have insuflcient resonance for relevant participants to spur them into efforts to take decisive action. Yet the notion of critical moment and turning point is a key feature of crises as conventionally understood. Fifth, from this perspective, then, crises are complex, objectively overdetermined moments of subjective indeterminacy, where decisive action can make a major difference to the future (Debray, 1973, p. 113; see also pp. 99-100, 104-105). However, cautioning against too-easy an adoption of this kind of perspective, Janet Roitman (2014, p. 41) notes that, while positing a given situation as a crisis makes certain questions possible, it also forecloses other kinds of question and lines of investigation. In other words, an over-reliance by participants or observers on interpreting specific symptoms as evidence of a continuing crisis or yet another crisis can create a blind spot that sidelines alternative descriptions, diagnoses, prognoses, and potential courses of action. Taking crisis for granted as a starting point means that the nature of crisis as an explanandum is left unexamined and therefore directs attention to the search for the best explanation (or, at least, some explanation). So, rather than asking whether X (an event or process) does or does not constitute a crisis, treating it in an unquestioned, unreflective manner as a crisis, of whatever kind, short-circuits its analysis and, hence, decision-making about suitable responses. Although Roitman directs her criticism against historical narratives shaped by the interpretive couplet of crisis critique that is allegedly characteristic of modernity since the eighteenth century (cf. Koselleck, 1988; Festl, Grosser, and Thomä, 2018), her arguments are also very apt for the inflation of crisis diagnoses and discourses in recent decades as mentioned in Chapter 1. Indeed, the more crisis discourse expands, the greater the risk that crisis becomes an empty concept. This is especially true where crisis is employed counter-intuitively, as is often the case nowadays, to describe an enduring condition rather than, as implied in its original meaning, to identify a moment for decisive action that might restore the status quo ante or lead to more or less radical social transformation. This risk can be remedied on condition that the durability of crises is related to contingent conditions that block a resolution that might otherwise occur. This is compatible with the general principles of critical realism and is analysed by Gramsci, for example, in terms of a “catastrophic equilibrium of forces” (1971: 219-23, 300; cf. 1975: Q13, 23; Q22, $10;3 for a discussion in relation to the crisis in Europe, see Keucheyan and Durand, 2015). These contingencies are illustrated in Chapter 4, where Andrew Gamble refers to the impasse of the British state or economy, which he regards as structural and deep-seated, leading to inertia, deadlocks or catastrophic equilibria. Likewise, Will Hout notes the permanent crisis in development assistance and explains this in terms of a failure to look beyond symptoms to deeper causes of poverty, inequality, and unsustainable development. In a different context, more related to crisis construals than the objective overdetermination of crisis, enduring crises are especially likely where repeated critiques serve as substitutes for transformative action, which is an obvious temptation of intellectuals, and can lead to fatalism, cynicism, or stoicism (cf. Thomä, Festl, and Grosser, 2015, p. 17; Hindrichs, 2015)
Introduction : Organizational perspectives on crisiology and learning
No full textCrises have been studied in academia in many disciplines and from diverse perspectives for at least 150 years. However, recent decades have seen a marked increase in the crisis literature, primarily due to the pervasiveness of crises throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and onwards, and an associated inflation in crisis discourses. The 1970s witnessed a range of political and economic crises - the Nixon Shock, the 1973 oil crisis, stagnation, and intensified class struggles as well as the emergence of new social movements - which contributed to the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the US and the UK, respectively. The 1980s in turn witnessed high-profile commercial, industrial, and technological disasters (e.g., the Bhopal disaster, Chernobyl, the Challenger explosion, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill) that reignited interest in disasters as well as crises and how to prevent, manage, or resolve them. A further major boost came with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Indeed, this led to greatly increased funding and efforts to enhance coordinated research and planning. Thus, as Boin, McConnell and ‘t Hart point out, this has triggered efforts to unify “a disjointed, segmented set of niches within the social sciences” concerned with crises (2008, p. 6). The newly rediscovered terror threat in the “homeland”, the eruption of the 2008 global financial crisis in the “heartland” of finance-dominated neoliberal accumulation, and the rise of new forms of instability and popular resistance accentuated by the economic and political turmoil consequent upon the 2008 financial crisis, have all contributed to a diversification of the study of crises. One current is preoccupied with the cause and nature of crises, another focuses on crisis management, and a third on learning and lesson-drawing processes post-crisis. These currents may overlap. As Shrivastava notes, the “expansion of crisis research and practice is undeniably impressive”; however, “there is no single paradigm guiding research” and there are “many different disciplinary voices, talking in different languages to different issues and audiences” (1993, p. 33). This is reflected in crisis research in the fields of organizational studies, economics, political science, public policy, and sociology, as well as international relations. A plurality of perspectives and approaches is appropriate to complex phenomena because each may reveal what others cannot see. However, without serious efforts at synthesis and at rendering commensurable different paradigms and perspectives, the result can be a mosaic with contrasting impulsions and problematiques, creating a ‘tower of Babel’ effect, leading to “difficulties in communication of research results within the research community” (ibid.). It can also lead to serious questioning about what gets lost or overlooked if crisis narratives and an inflationary use of the concept of crisis marginalize other ways of examining recent events and social processes that challenge established inherited routines and experiences (cf. Roitman, 2015; see also Chapter 3). In this sense, while crisis and critique have been closely coupled in the modern era (cf. Koselleck, 1988), it may be time to critique a one-sided concern with crisis at the expense of other ways of construing and explaining significant and/or disruptive events in the modern world. To offer some guidance through this literature, we distinguish crisis from other forms of disruption, identify a key distinction between two broad kinds of crisis, highlight the challenge of symptomatology when it comes to interpreting the nature and significance of crises, and, as the special contribution of this collection, explore different aspects of what we call the pedagogy of crisis. 1. We distinguish disasters from crises in terms of the more accidental nature of disasters, which have the character of one-off events even if they occur regularly or frequently, and the more systemic and recurrent nature of crises, rooted in systemic processes of individual systems and/or the patterned interaction among a plurality of systems. This is reflected in two different, if overlapping, kinds of literature, concerned respectively with the prevention and management of disasters and the regulation of crisis tendencies and challenges of crisis management (see Chapter 3)
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