Fragile Empowerment: The Dynamic Cultural Economy of British Drum and Bass Music

This paper discusses the dynamic cultural economy of British drum and bass (D&B) music, which emerged out of Britain’s rave culture in the early 1990s. We suggest that D&B offers insight into more general issues regarding the relation between alternative cultural economies and capitalism. We examine relations between D&B and the mainstream capitalist economy and argue that D&B calls attention to the possibility for alternatives to conventional capitalist relations to survive and possibly thrive without pursuing separation from capitalism. We also theorize D&B as a vehicle towards empowerment regarding the industry segment vis-à-vis the mainstream music industry and also regarding D&B’s practitioners, many of whom can be understood as marginalized discursively and/or materially. However, D&B empowerment is fragile, due in part to technological changes that threaten practices which have helped cultivate innovativeness as well as communal relations. The empowerment of alternative practices is fragile not only for D&B as an industry segment, but also from the vantage point of internal power relations – notably with respect to differences along axes of gender and generation/age. Our conclusions indicate the broader significance of the paper for critical social theory and propose how new research might build on our dynamic view of D&B’s cultural economy

Towards a clarification of regional economic change :

The underlying contention of this study is that identifications of regional economic change are, to date, unclear. Various research strategies exist that are based on assumptions consistent with different paradigms, resulting in dramatically different interpretations of empirical realities. The various approaches to regional economic change may be classified fundamentally into the "growth" and "development" orientations. The former is highly quantitative, and conclusions about change are reached on the basis of quantitatively assessable indicators; the latter is qualitative, and conclusions about change are based on qualitative observations of system-wide parameters, often considered within a historical context. Each of these orientations offers valuable insights, but qualitative and quantitative observations typically are treated as being analytically mutually exclusive.This study considers that regional economic change includes a broad set of phenomena and that the types of observations common to the growth and development orientations both represent pertinent ramifications of regional economic change. An alternative conceptualization of change is proposed that integrates qualitative and quantitative considerations. For example, employment numbers--a conventional growth indicator--are considered together with types of labor with respect to skill and technological levels. Also, labor is qualified by sectors, so that long-term sectoral changes (e.g. changes in a region from an industrial to a post-industrial economy) are accounted for. A regional index is then developed, whereby a region is defined in terms of a set of independent variables that represent an integration of qualitative and quantitative observations. Regions are assigned values that can be examined over time in terms of both absolute and relative change. The distinction and identification of these two types of change are critical because much of the disagreement about empirical realities stems from a confusion of these types of change. The concepts, methodology, and classification of regional economic changes are then given empirical content with respect to the United States' four Census Regions and nine Census Divisions, 1962-1980. Finally, a discriminant analysis is performed to assess the different contributions of the independent variables to regional differentiation in the United States in the last two decades

A Relational Approach to an Analytics of Resistance: Towards a Humanity of Care for the Infirm Elderly – A Foucauldian Examination of Possibilities

This paper develops a Foucauldian analytics of resistance in relation to components of a system of governance – a governmentality. Techniques of resistance that can transform a governmentality towards the development of a new politics of truth require the design of techniques of resistance to counter directly oppressive techniques of biopower and disciplinary power, in turn to produce new regimes of practices or counter-conduct that can engender a new mentality and set of discourses to convey it. Strategies of resistance towards transformative change in the governance of a population as well as of the self therefore require development following, and in relation to, an analytics of governance. I thread these points through a particular case, the problem of care for the infirm elderly in the United States, focusing specifically on nursing homes by critically synthesizing issues from inter-disciplinary literatures and casting them in terms of governmentalities. I frame the problems of eldercare broadly in terms of interrelated neoliberal and (western) scientific mentalities and associated discourses, and then examine the associated techniques of biopower, disciplinary power, and regimes of practices to identify roots of problems, explain failures of policies, and crucially, to frame the design of techniques of resistance to produce new regimes of counter-conduct.  I suggest avenues of resistance in relation to existing governmentalities on the terrain of inter-firm relations and everyday life in nursing-home care, all currently entangled with government policies, economies of documentation, and dehumanizing scientific practice

The global subject of precarity

Peer reviewedPostprin

Bringing the Everyday into the Culture/ Creativity Discourse

This article critiques and offers an alternative conceptualization of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ using an actor-based and relational epistemology. ‘Culture’ and ‘creativity’ have been socially constructed in scale-specific terms that overlook everyday practices that can diverge from dominant patterns and suggest hopeful possibilities, which ironically are lost in many Left-leaning narratives. Hopeful possibilities are traceable analytically to circuits of material and discursive value, which are inextricably related but can entail different trajectories across scales. Tracing these trajectories requires analytical attention to microscale activity, that is, to individual actors’ material practices, which produce mutable, discursive and material value at multiple scales. </jats:p

The governance of crowdsourcing: Rationalities of the new exploitation

Drawing from literatures in business, the burgeoning field of human computation, and media studies together with economic geography and social theory, this paper contextualizes corporate crowdsourcing in regimes of work and specifies and examines the rationalities governing this early 21st century round of exploitation. I refer to “rationalities” in the Foucauldian sense as the calculated ways by which mentalities become inscribed in a regime of practices, in this case, new practices of work. I present crowdsourcing as the means by which the regime of labor is governed in novel systems of production regarding open innovation as well as non-innovative yet skilled microtasks. I engage firm rationalities of decentralization, which have developed differently for innovative and non-innovative activity; wageless work; JIT labor (distinct from JIT production); precarization; informalization; fungibility; and invisibility. In the penultimate section, I draw from Foucault’s conceptualization of human capital to address rationalities of self-governance among workers, a crucial issue because it is the crowd’s willingness to accept as little as nothing that fuels the new exploitation, an insidiously efficient governmentality. I question an assumed homogenized subjectivity among the “cybertariat,” and conclude with thoughts about critical ingredients for a new, virtual frontier of resistance strategies. </jats:p

Precarity Unbound

Departing from tendencies to bound precarity in particular time periods and world regions, this article develops an expansive view of precarity over time and across space. Beyond effects of specific global events and macroscale structures, precarity inhabits the microspaces of everyday life. However, people attempt to disengage the stress of precarious life by constructing the illusion of certainty. Reflexive denial of precarious life entails essentialist strategies that implicitly or explicitly classify and homogenize people and phenomena, legitimize the constructed boundaries, and in the process aim at eliminating difference and possibilities for negotiation; the tension between these goals and material realities helps explain misrepresentations that can be catastrophic at multiple scales, re-creating precarity. Reactions to 9/11 by the Bush administration represent a case in point of reflexive denial of precarity through strategies that created illusions of certainty with deleterious results. Normatively, the paradox of precarious life and reflexive denials prompts questions as to how urges for certainty in the context of precarity might be constructively channeled. the author approaches this challenge in the final section by drawing from a nexus of concerns about post-Habermasian radical democracy, individual thought and feeling, and network dynamics. Whereas Hardt and Negri reverse the direction of the Foucauldian concept of biopower from top-down to bottom-up, the author draws from Foucault's concept of governmentality in relation to resistance to imagine a cooperative politics operating within as well as across scales. </jats:p