Aesthetic international political economy

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The neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state : pension system reform in Sweden, a critical case study

This thesis draws on the 'critical case' of Sweden and focuses on the provision of pensions to assess the extent to which the post-war social democratic regime and adherent meanings and practices in daily life have been transformed in a neoliberal direction. The Swedish economy of the late 1990s, still distinctly social democratic, although retrenched and increasingly 'financialised', was not stable. The 1999 pension reform has further privatised financial risk and hence potentially advanced neoliberalism. By subjecting the ability to consume, in working-life as well as m retirement, to financial market performance, the rate of growth of inequity 1s accelerated. The systemic infrastructure and the knowledge-formation required for this pension system to function as intended as well as be accepted as legitimate seem however to be lacking. The system engineers, following neoliberal ideas, sought to fulfil the objective of institutionalising a mass investment culture in the everyday by promoting the notion of risk as potentially profitable if managed well. Yet, as argued in the thesis, due to their politico-ideological preferences, they underestimated the resilience of existing demographic and geographical cleavages formed by the traumas and desires provoked by economic restructuring and financialisation in the post-war period. By analysing subject-formation in the everyday, the thesis shows that for a finance-led accumulation regime to be stable in Sweden, these cleavages and inadequacies have to be regulated. The new pension system in Sweden thus points to the tendential microfoundational limits of the projects of neoliberalism and financialisation

The unintended consequences of financialisation: Social democracy hamstrung? The pensions dilemma

At the end of the Third Way and no sense of its future, social democrats look to Sweden for inspiration. However, Swedish social democracy is in no better condition. Scholarship is starting to grasp the broad outlines of the movement’s difficulties. Providing greater depth, this article employs the Social Systems of Innovation and Production approach to analyse Swedish social democracy’s current condition by historicising its current policy dilemmas in relation to the public pension system, once the jewel in the crown of the Rehn–Meidner model and the push for economic and industrial democracy, now the constraining legacy of financialisation. </jats:p

Operationalizing cultural political economy: towards critical grounded theory

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-theoretical insights of CPE.Research limitations/implications– The usefulness of CGT has been tentatively tested, but requires thorough meta-theoretical and methodological development, which is what is undertaken here.Social implications– CGT expects and takes account of the social implications of its employment in the field.Originality/value– First steps towards a new critical method for organisation and management studies are taken. Although originating from concern with CPE, the CGT method may appeal to a wider audience of critical scholars across the social sciences.</jats:sec

Policy Networks and the distinction between insider and outsider groups:The case of the Countryside Alliance

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