#MeToo,white feminism and taking everyday politics seriously in the global political economy

ABSTRACT

This paper examines social media movements, specifically #MeToo, in relation to the politics of feminism and white privilege in the contemporary global political economy. Analysis of social media movements is located as a key part of the intricate web of practices that enable certain types of gendered identity and socioeconomic privilege to intersect, in powerful ways and to potent effect. The paper argues that, while scholarship on the global political economy has not often taken seriously popular culture sources in and across world politics, and needs to do better in this regard, investigating the politics of popular culture, race and socioeconomic privilege in contemporary world politics is important. This is because such analysis foregrounds everyday, cultural practices of knowledge formation, building space for emphasising relations of power but also highlighting the possibilities of and for resistance, agency and avenues for creative thinking and doing in world politics.     

‘The Official Feast’: cultural tensions in U.K. carnival

Abstract

This paper reveals how U.K. street carnival is located within policy discourses that facilitate notions of creative economy, inter-place competition and the representation of institutionally-preferred versions of local, regional and national place-identity. The paper draws on ethnographic research within two community town carnivals and the professional Battle for the Winds carnival performances that launched the 2012 Olympic sailing at Weymouth. It considers the evolution of policy-driven carnival vocabularies that were designed to articulate preferred ‘Jurassic Coast’ and Olympic place identities for the south-west U.K. during 2012, and their effect on two vernacular, community street carnivals in East Devon and Dorset. The paper exposes the cultural tension between these vernacular events and the ‘official feast’ of Jurassic Coast and Olympic carnival, in terms of their performance of contradictory place-identities and contested notions of artistic community. It describes the popular challenge to aesthetic hegemony that these community carnivals presented during 2012. Finally, the author argues for a reassessment of the artistic value of vernacular carnivals, and affirms their status as a culture of resistance that creates alternative, sometimes inconvenient, symbolic constructions of community and place to those preferred by institutional actors operating within a neo-liberal discourse of inter-place competition.     

Agglomeration,foreign firms and firm exit in regions under transition: the increasing importance of related variety in Hungary

ABSTRACT

Related variety of economic activities is widely recognized to induce regional development; however, it is not clear how this mechanism takes place in regions that go through major structural and institutional transformation. Furthermore, foreign direct investment (FDI) is typically a major source of structural change in these areas; and we still need a better understanding on how foreign-owned (foreign) firms affect the dynamics of domestic-owned (domestic) companies. For these reasons we analyse firm-level exit in Hungarian city regions between 1996 and 2011, over the late post-socialist transition in manufacturing industries, focusing on the difference between foreign and domestic firms. Introducing ownership into the related variety calculation, we estimate the probability of firm exit with the region-level related variety calculated separately for foreign and domestic firms. Our results suggest that related variety of foreign firms decreases the probability of domestic firm exit earlier during the economic transition compared to the related variety of domestic firms. This finding supports the idea that FDI plays a formative role in regions under transition, and shows that domestic firms benefit from being in agglomerations where foreign firms are technologically related to each other.     

CULTURAL ECONOMY AND THE CREATIVE FIELD OF THE CITY

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be understood in terms of a series of localized field effects. The creative field of the city is broken down (relative to the cultural economy) into four major components, namely, (a) intra‐urban webs of specialized and complementary producers, (b) the local labour market and the social networks that bind workers together in urban space, (c) the wider urban environment, including various sites of memory, leisure, and social reproduction, and (d) institutions of governance and collective action. I also briefly describe some of the path‐dependent dynamics of the creative field. The article ends with a reference to some issues of geographic scale. Here, I argue that the urban is but one (albeit important) spatial articulation of an overall creative field whose extent is ultimately nothing less than global.     

Making creative industries policy in the real world: differing configurations of the culture-market-state nexus in the UK and South Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper compares creative (content) industries policies in the UK and South Korea, highlighting the coevality in their development. Seeing them as ‘industrial policies’, it focuses on how state intervention is justified and why a certain set of policy options have been chosen. The UK policy-makers prefer passive and decentralised roles of the state that addresses market failures via generic and horizontal policies. Meanwhile, Koreans have consistently believed in the strong, resourceful and ambitious state in developing centralised, sector-specific policies for cultural industries. While demonstrating two contrasting approaches to the nation state’s management of cultural turn in the economy, both cases seem to present a ‘paradox’. Despite its neoliberal undertone, the horizontal and fused approach taken by the UK’s creative industries policy engenders some space for ‘cultural’ policy. On the contrary, the non-liberal and state-driven content industries policy in Korea has shown a stronger tendency of cultural commodification.     

Transforming the (tourism) world for good and (re)generating the potential ‘new normal’

Abstract

With or without the global COVID-19 pandemic to promote and envision a meaningful and positive transformation of the planet in general, and tourism specifically, a wake-up call is long overdue. The 300-years old industrial and modern paradigm of ruthless and selfish exploitation of natural resources has separated us from nature and ultimately ourselves to such an extent that the crises of our economic, political, environmental, social and healthcare systems do not come at any surprise. Yet, in juxtaposition to (post)modern pessimistic views, the positive transmodern paradigm shift with its holistic perspectives and practices can be observed. Led by ‘the silent revolution’ of cultural creatives, new worlds are emerging, although still kept at the margins. ‘Transformative travel and tourism’ as an ever-growing trend, appears to be an important medium through which these cultural creatives reinvent themselves and the world they live in. Inner transformation is reflected in the outer world. New ways of being, knowing and doing in the world are emerging as conscious citizens, consumers, producers, travellers, entrepreneurs, and community leaders are calling and acting upon the necessary transformation towards the regenerative paradigm and regenerative economic systems. Based on the natural cycles of renewal and regeneration, this circular approach is underpinned by regenerative land practices. The vision of connecting regenerative agriculture and transformative tourism is offered to reset the global tourism system for good.     

地方志书记述非公有制经济刍议

非公有制经济是我国社会主义市场经济的重要组成部分,是我国国民经济中一支重要的力量,因而非公有制经济是地方志书编修的一个不可或缺的重要内容。改革开放后,我国非公有制经济类型曾于1980年、1992年、1998年、2005年多次变动制定(修订)经济类型(所有制)分类的规定,所以地方志书记述非公有制经济应全面掌握非公有制经济的发展、演变的整个过程,使非公有制经济分类及统计数据的选择使用,符合国家法律、法规的规定,做到记述事物归属得当,各类非公有制经济之间的统计数据准确、不重复。地方志书在记述非公有制经济时,还要注意"民营"不能与"私有"混为一谈,"民营"与"私有"两者不是同一概念,存在法律地位和定义范围的不同,地方志书不能将"民营"作为私有经济类型记述。记述非公有制经济应按照国家制定的法律、法规的规定进行分类,全面系统记述非公有制经济,可采用集中与分散相结合的方法记述非公有制经济。     

中国行政区划改革的内卷化风险及其生成机制

透过对行政区划调整现象与文献的梳理，发现中国部分政区有“改而不变”的倾向，本文借用“内卷化”的概念对这种现象及其效应进行探讨，指出政区改革在行政层级、运行逻辑、空间关系、职能配置等方面都存在着“内卷化”隐忧。在此基础上，通过对国家结构、行政区划的资源属性和行政区经济之间关联的分析，阐释了政区改革内卷化的生成机制，认为行政区划配置资源的功能可能是政区改革陷入内卷化的一个重要前提。最后以常州武进和海南政区改革为例，探讨了本研究的分析框架与逻辑，并建议构建面向市场经济的行政区划调整框架，为继续深化行政体制改革提供空间支撑。