This is the first book to examine global political economy from a psychoanalytic perspective. It claims that the libidinal—the site of unconscious desire—plays not a supplementary or trivial, but a constitutive role in global political economy. Consumption, for example, is not simply a way of satisfying a material or biological need but a doomed attempt at soothing our deeply held sense of loss; and capital is not just a means to material growth and prosperity but is invested with "drive" that seduces, beguiles, and manipulates in the service of unending accumulation. Thus, in contrast to political economy, which assumes a rational subject, libidinal economy is founded on the notion of a desiring subject, who obeys a logic not of good sense or self-interest but profligacy and irrationality. By applying a psychoanalytic lens, Global Libidinal Economy thereby seeks to uncover the unconscious excesses and antagonisms emergent in such key political economy categories as "production," "trade," and "ecology," while also bringing out significant contemporary themes relating to "gender" and "race."

Is regarded as the most important response to the philosophies of desire, as expounded by thinkers such as de Sade, Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari. It is a major work not only of philosophy, but of sexual politics, semiotics and literary theory, that signals the passage to postmodern philosophy.

How have global markets and global manufacturing changed the balance of social, economic and political power? With this volume Ross and Trachte challenge existing political-economic theory. In concise terms they show how traditional theories of monopoly capitalism and world systems are not well-suited to analyze the emergence of global capitalism. This book, in a series of case studies of U.S. metropolitan areas, examines the dramatic transformation of the world economy in the last two decades. The book's last section examines political strategy and the political theory implied by the heightened power of capital.

This book focuses on the role of translation in a globalising world. It presents a series of case studies that explore the ways in which translation is subject to ideology and power play across diverging domains and genres. Broadly based on a discussion of 'translation and the economies of power', the chapters examine an array of contextual and textual factors, ranging from global, regional and institutional power relations to the linguistic, stylistic and rhetorical implications of translation decisions. The book maps the multiple ways in which power relations and ideological positions affect cross-cultural communication, with special reference to repressive practices in history, translation policies, media power and commercial hegemonies. It concludes that future translation research will benefit from a more sustained emphasis on the power of technology and economic capital.

This edited volume brings together leading scholars to debate the promises of poststructural politics within the study of the International Political Economy (IPE). The volume offers a sustained theoretical dialogue on the meaning of discourse, identity, and representation for practices of political economy.

The text aims to provide succinct summaries of topical, wide-ranging issues and controversies, presenting a compact guide which should be of use to students and lecturers in IPE and international relations.

This volume considers the ways in which educational research is being shaped by policy across the globe. Policy effects on research are increasingly influential, as policies in and beyond education drive the formation of a knowledge-based economy by supporting increased international competitiveness through more effective, evidence-based interventions in schooling, education and training systems. What consequences does this increased steering have for research in education? How do transnational agencies make their influence felt on educational research? How do national systems and traditions of educational research - and relations with policy - respond to these new pressures? What effects does it have on the quality of research and on the freedom of researchers to pursue their own agendas? The 2006 volume of the World Yearbook of Education explores these issues, focusing on three key themes: globalising policy and research in education steering education research in national contexts global-local politics of education research. The 2006 volume has a truly global reach, incorporating transnational policy perspectives from the OECD and the European Commission, alongside national cases from across the world in contrasting contexts that include North and South America, Canada, France, Singapore, China, Russia and New Zealand. The range of contributions reflect how pervasive these developments are, how much is new in this situation and to what extent evidence-based policy pressures on research in education build on past relationships between education and policy. This book considers the impact of the steering processes on the work and identities of individual researchers and considers how research can be organised to play a more active role in the politics of the knowledge economy and learning society.

This study of postsocialist China explores the development of a Chinese consumer culture in the 1990s with a special focus on advertising and shifting ideals on female beauty. On an analytical level it is an investigation into Chinese nationalism that demonstrates how the desire for recognition as a powerful nation is linked to anxieties about Chinese femininity. The book is also, on a theoretical level, about the libidinal economy of an imaginary “China.” In other words it attempts to unravel the sexuality of geopolitics by describing the association between femininity and China in popular culture and nationalist discourse. In addition to advertisements, political writings, plays, and films, the archive for this inquiry consists of fieldwork observations and interviews. The Libidinal Economy of China engages a range of post-colonial and psychoanalytically informed thinkers in a truly cross disciplinary study. Lacanian theories on hysteria, femininity, and narcissism are applied in the international domain of geopolitics to formulate a general theory on China’s relationship to the West. David Eng and Homi Bhabha are employed for discussing racial fetishism in contemporary China, while Slavoj Žižek’s ideas on violence and the Other are engaged in explaining the emotional dimension of national identification. The study concludes that China and the New Chinese Nationalism is firmly under the gaze of a Western Other analogous to a male gaze. That Other rules the libidinal economy of consumer culture, which explains China’s recurring history of wanting to emulate and catch up with the West while simultaneously reacting to such an attained intimacy with castration anxiety and aggressive hysteria.

Global Political Economy (GPE) is a broad and varied field of study and draws insight from a great number of fields and approaches. One of the serious problems confronting academics and students is the sheer mass of theories and debates in the field. This textbook provides up-to-date summaries of the debates and approaches that are currently at the forefront of both European and American GPE. This new revised and expanded second edition contains updated versions of most of the original chapters. In addition, there is a new section entitled ‘Emerging issues in contemporary Global Political Economy (GPE)’ and six new chapters. The second edition is structured around three themes: Part I focuses on the six central concepts of GPE: state, firm, power, labour, finance and globalization. Each one of them has been increasingly subjected to a rigorous and critical evaluation in recent scholarship. Part II covers a select number of theories and debates currently at the forefront of GPE: game theory; behavioural economics; neo-, sociological and evolutionary institutionalism; neo-Marxism; development and post-development; libidinal economies; and economic constructivism. Part III, which is new to this edition, is entitled ‘Emerging issues in contemporary Global Political Economy (GPE)’ and focuses on war, state and International Political Economy (IPE); race, gender and culture; environmental politics; and the rise of China. This is essential reading for all serious scholars and advanced students of IPE.

This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level. Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term "postsocialism" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.