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Where is the study of work in critical IPE?

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Abstract

The British school of International Political Economy (IPE) has been highly innovative in encouraging inter-disciplinary work, revealing – while allowing for – an eclecticism of research and investigation that stands in clear contrast to its American counterpart. Critical theorists in the British school of IPE in particular have been highly prolific in recent years and have introduced research on a wide range of contemporary issues in the global political economy. However, this school tends to overlook two very important areas of analysis: work and employment. More thus needs to be done. This article argues that researchers from seemingly autonomous fields can teach critical IPE a lesson: inter-disciplinarity is not a fantasy. The analysis suggested here is of how governmental policy idealises a particular subjectivity wherein workers are not employed, but are employable. Not only would a focus on this problem enhance existing research in critical IPE: it is also essential if we are to address the needs of humanity in the increasingly unstable and flexibilised world of work. The British school of critical IPE is the forum within which this conversation could and should be continued.

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Notes

  1. Paul C. Lewis (2009), Louise Amoore (2002), Robert O’Brien (2000a, 2000b), Matt Davies and Magnus Ryner (2006), Phil Cerny (1999), Andreas Bieler (2008), Nicola Phillips (2009) and Jeffrey Harrod (1987) have carried out research that is committed to critical analyses within IPE, looking at flexible labour markets, work, unions, migration, production and poverty.

  2. Gramsci succeeded in developing an idea (in the dark cells of prison during Mussolini's fascist Italy) that managed to overcome some of the weaknesses of Marx's thesis on the labour process. Marx's observations of the exploitation of surplus value inherent to capitalism accurately represented industrial production. Gramsci reshaped the originally Greek idea of hegemony to devise a hypothesis for the reasons resistance appears futile, by viewing it as an elite project that requires not just coercion of the masses, but in fact gains a level of consent. Hegemony is absent within the context of passive revolution, which must be a globally perceived construct in the contemporary age.

  3. Hegemonic struggle within the contemporary neoliberal bloc of history involves consent as well as some amount of coercion at the international level. As ideological leadership and consolidation is the cohesion that maintains hegemonies, ideological impotency must be a condition for passive revolution at a global hiatus. A class becomes hegemonic when it effectively transcends its corporate phase of solely representing its own interests but succeeds in representing universally, at least in rhetoric, the main social forces that form a nation. Organic intellectuals or the missionaries of dominant ideas work very hard to keep these ideas at the forefront of people's lives, meaning that ideas become a kind of tool for leadership and the control of potentially dissenting populations. Gramsci notes that ideas are ‘real historical facts which must be combated and their nature as instruments of domination exposed … precisely for reasons of political struggle’ (Gramsci, 1995, p. 395).

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  1. School of English, Sociology, Politics & Contemporary History, University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT, Greater Manchester, UK

    Phoebe V Moore

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V Moore, P. Where is the study of work in critical IPE?. Int Polit 49, 215–237 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2011.40

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