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

Cautious hope: Prospects and perils of communitarian governance in a Web3 environment11 This article draws from chapter 5 ‘Scaling Communitarian Practice’ in my book Algorithms and the Assault on Critical Thought: Digitalized Dilemmas of Automated Governance and Communitarian Practice (Ettlinger, 2023).

In the context of extreme societal polarization, activists have mobilized to protest injustices and claim their rights, yet such efforts often fall short of goals because demands normally are directed to government or firms that offer superficial responses. Communitarianism, which broadly strives for autonomy from established institutions, promises the development of self-provisioning communities based on cooperative networks and participatory, democratic governance that prioritizes use over exchange value and redistribution over profitable activity for individuals. The emergence of Web3 and blockchain technology has ushered in new affordances such as scaling a communitarian enterprise and exchange of value independent of banks or other institutions. Whereas market-based organizations use Web 3 affordances for accounting purposes for profit, communitarian organizations aim to link accounting with designs to inject capital into a commons to support self-governing communities in community-based peer production (CBPP). To exemplify the broad range of approaches to the multifaceted goals of CBPP, I focus on FairCoop and Sensorica. Despite considerable differences, these organizations nonetheless share problems and generally are illustrative of longstanding challenges to communitarian enterprises – digitalized and non-digitalized alike. Perennial problems such as the fraught capitalist/postcapitalist relation, self-interest, uneven power relations, lack of diversity, and the challenge of responding adequately to societal needs combine with effects of automated governance and associated effects of technocracy that can dissolve founding values to threaten the integrity of a communitarian collective. CBPP as well as its non-digitalized counterparts are important contributions to humanity, but goals and actual practices can diverge. CBPP requires vigilant designs that complement rather than replace human decision making with algorithmic governance and pay attention to reflexivity and positionality, continual re-design to engage unanticipated problems, and distancing actually existing projects from discourses that reify patterns such as decentralization with the consequence of missing crucial contextual knowledges

On the Spatiality of Segregation and the Governance of Change

This article presents segregation as a fundamental, longstanding, and widespread problem that impedes democratic urban life, and further, a problem that is intelligible from a critical geographic perspective. Ignorance is spatially produced by segregation at multiple scales, in places and across space, thereby legitimizing and perpetuating silence about problems among marginalized groups. This spatialized understanding explains inequality along any of many axes of difference (not just class, as in conventional political economy perspectives). Understanding segregation in terms of the spatial production of ignorance prompts an agenda that forefronts the creation of new social knowledges. The focus here is on the everyday economy as a crucial but commonly overlooked context for developing such knowledges. I re-present a theory of knowledge creation developed for the pursuit of firm competitiveness and reconfigure it to mesh socio-political with economic goals, thereby dissolving an implicit binary that pervades academic scholarship.A central challenge is to change prevailing discourses that produce and reproduce ignorance by cultivating new practices that entail meaningful interaction among people otherwise segregated, namely the development of overlapping business networks constituted by diverse actors (by class, race/ethnicity). Efficiency becomes a means to social as well as economic ends, as respect and trust via collaborative experience (among people who might otherwise not interact) generate new social understandings. The possibilist framework developed here rests on the difficult coordination of processes operating at multiple scales

The difference that difference makes in the mobilization of workers

Drawing conceptually from feminist, post-development, cultural politics and radical political science literatures, this essay integrally relates differences among contexts (relationally defined) and people. I suggest that prospects for the mobilization of workers across space requires critical thinking about difference, entailing recognition of different work experiences associated with different industrial processes and avenues of exploitation, as well as possible friction among different groups of people across axes of difference. Although frictions of difference related both to economic and non-economic logics may pose complex problems for connecting workers within and across space, I argue that inclusive organizing strategies are critical to achieving pervasive and long-run social change. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

Problematizing the presentation of poststructural case-study research, or working out the crisis of representation in the presentation of empirics

There is no abstract for this paper.

Dependency and urban growth: a critical review and reformulation of the concepts of primacy and rank-size

Concepts of city-size distributions are critically reviewed and reformulated. City-size distributions are conceptualized in terms of a continuum that is not necessarily unidirectional. Processes of urban growth and decline are explained with reference to interurban linkages and dominance - dependence relationships within and across national boundaries.

Comment on George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton: Contexts of Identity Formation

George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton recently argued that economists and policymakers have missed the social codes that form peoples identities and guide their actions. Identity economics is sorely needed, but it must also account for context, which helps explain variation in behavior, according to Nancy Ettlinger of Ohio State University.