A Cultural Political Economy Approach to the Governance of Global Social Policy

Jessop, Bob (2015) A Cultural Political Economy Approach to the Governance of Global Social Policy. In: Actors and Agency in Global Social Governance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9780198743996

Abstract

This chapter approaches global social policy and governance in terms of a strategically-selective and strategically-reflexive dialectic of structure and agency. It links this to the notion of dispositives. These develop in response to a discursively-constituted ‘urgent’ problem (with a ‘real world’ referent) and are consolidated through strategies and apparatuses intended to resolve the problem as this gets (re-)interpreted over time. Global social policy is then disambiguated as an analytical and policy object along several dimensions. Its global nature is explored through the contradictions and dilemmas involved in the co-existence of capitalism and welfare in a single world market with a plurality of territorial states. This generates efforts at metagovernance (or collibration) across territories, places, scales and networks but, given the complexity of global social problems, these efforts are failure-prone.