‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

The third way: the renewal of social democracy

Este articulo es, a dia de hoy, una de las piezas clasicas y fundamentales para la posibilidad de estudiar las relaciones globales de poder a partir de las herramientas conceptuales desarrolladas por Gramsci a lo largo de su obra. Cox, contribuye de esta forma a las corrientes criticas de las Relaciones Internacionales al discutir varios conceptos gramscianos y cuales serian las implicaciones para estudiar las relaciones internacionales en distintos periodos de hegemonia y contrahegemonia. De igual forma, el autor planteo la cuestion –en su momento novedosa– de la relevancia de tomar en cuenta los procesos internos de construccion de bloques historicos contrahegemonicos como aquellos que podrian tener un efecto revolucionario en las estructuras y organizaciones internacionales, asi como ruptura con la hegemonia plasmada como una clase perteneciente a un orden economico universal transnacional.  This article is a classic and fundamental for approaching global power relations with the conceptual tools developed by Gramsci. Cox contributes to critical thought in International Relations by discussing various gramscian concepts and what their implications are for the study of different historical forms of hegemony and counter-hegemony. Also, the author draws our attention –novel at the time of its publicaction– to the relevance of taking into account the construction of domestic counter-hegemonic historic blocs. He suggests that these could have a revolutionary effect on international structures and organizations, as well as rupture with the hegemony performed by the transnational economic order.

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Gramsci, hegemonía y relaciones internacionales: Un ensayo sobre el método | Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method

Since the early 2000s, scholars from a variety of disciplines have used the concept of financialization to describe a host of structural changes in the advanced political economies. Studies of financialization interrogate how an increasingly autonomous realm of global finance has altered the underlying logics of the industrial economy and the inner workings of democratic society. This paper evaluates the insights of more than a decade of scholarship on financialization. Three approaches will be discussed: the emergence of a new regime of accumulation, the ascendency of the shareholder value orientation and the financialization of everyday life. It is argued that a deeper understanding of financialization will lead to a better understanding of organized interests, the politics of the welfare state, and processes of institutional change.

Making sense of financialization

(2003). Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 130-130.

Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century

This article, first, proposes critical grounded theory (CGT) as a way to develop systematically an array of methods and theoretical propositions into a coherent critical methodology for organization studies (and beyond). Second, it demonstrates CGT’s usefulness through a case study of competing recovery projects from the Icelandic financial crisis. CGT is developed in engagement with the emerging paradigm of cultural political economy (CPE) and its preferred method of critical discourse analysis (CDA). CPE analyses the evolution of ‘economic imaginaries’ in both their structural/material and semiotic/discursive dimensions. This requires a critical realist, multi-dimensional research strategy which emphasizes ethnographic methods and substantial theoretical and historical work. The proposed methodology of CGT enables a retroductive research process that combines deductive theoretical deskwork with inductive fieldwork enabled by grounded theory tools to analyse organizational process, stability and change.

The Gentle Art of Retroduction: Critical Realism, Cultural Political Economy and Critical Grounded Theory:

Steering a middle course between the strong neoliberalization thesis and arguments that deny that neoliberalization has occurred, this article accounts for the complex and hybridic shift in Sweden ...

Renegotiating the Swedish Social Democratic Settlement: From Pension Fund Socialism to Neoliberalization

The reform of Swedish pensions serves as a case study to explore resistant institutions and logics shaping processes of financialisation in Europe. EU membership cemented the path towards neoliberal restructuring, yet Sweden remained an unlikely case for financialisation by the mid-nineties. Social Democratic principles and practices of de-commodification and redistribution remained dominant with pensions at the core. Reform aimed at changing this by subjecting pensions to financial market performance. The outcome of the project to, in a characteristically Swedish way, ‘universalise’ financialisation is however uncertain. If successful, those challenging the legitimacy of financialisation elsewhere in Europe lose a ‘social democratic’ reference point in their struggle.

Towards ‘universal financialisation’ in Sweden?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to take conceptual and methodological steps towards the elaboration of the critical grounded theory (CGT) method. Design/methodology/approach – Starting from conceptual issues with mapping everyday discourses and practices in their broader societal context in organisational ethnography, cultural political economy (CPE) is proposed as a suitable theoretical framework for integrating the cultural dimension of discourses and imaginaries into political-economic analyses of organisation and management. The CGT method is introduced for empirical operationalisation. Findings – Grounded theory tools for working with ethnographic data can be employed within critical approaches such as CPE although they originate from positivist social science. The need to combine ethnographic fieldwork with substantial theoretical work and/or critical discourse analysis may be met by CGT, which affords the ethnographic strengths of grounded theory without, however, bracketing the critical-the...

Operationalizing cultural political economy: towards critical grounded theory

Unsurprisingly, a great deal has been written about the role of interest groups in contemporary societies. Here, we focus on two sets of concepts that have had influence in the UK literature: the distinction between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ groups originally developed by Grant (1978, 2000); and the classification of policy networks developed by Marsh and Rhodes (1992; see also Marsh and Smith 2000). We have two aims in this article. First, we use these concepts to consider the role of the Countryside Alliance (CA) in the UK, which, at least in terms of membership numbers and media exposure, is one of the most interesting phenomena on the contemporary interest group scene. Second, we use the case study of the CA to cast light on the utility of these two sets of concepts and consider how they might be integrated. As such, this article is divided into two substantive sections. First, we identify the issues raised in the literature on, first, insider and outsider groups and, then, policy networks. In the second section we examine the role of the CA.

Claes Belfrage

Papers

The Gentle Art of Retroduction: Critical Realism, Cultural Political Economy and Critical Grounded Theory:

Renegotiating the Swedish Social Democratic Settlement: From Pension Fund Socialism to Neoliberalization

Towards ‘universal financialisation’ in Sweden?

Operationalizing cultural political economy: towards critical grounded theory

Policy networks and the distinction between insider and outsider groups: the case of the countryside alliance