Cultural Values in Political Economy

268 Pages·2020·3.491 MB·English

by  J. P. Singh

Cultur al Values
in PolitiC al eConomy
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C u lt u r a l Va l u e s i n
P o l i t i C a l e Co n o m y
edited by J. P. singh
Foreword by Arjun Appadurai
stanford university Press
stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights
reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any informa-
tion storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford
University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Singh, J. P., editor.
Title: Cultural values in political economy / edited by J. P. Singh.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019053658 (print) | LCCN 2019053659 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781503612686 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503612693 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781503612709 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Politics and culture. | Economics—Political aspects. | Culture—
Economic aspects.
Classification: LCC JA75.7 .C854 2020 (print) | LCC JA75.7 (ebook) | DDC 306.2—
dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053658
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053659
Cover photos (clockwise from lower left): Container ship Aadrian; San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art; Emanuel African Methodist Church, Charleston, SC; factory
building, Zlin, Czech Republic. All images from Wikimedia Commons.
Typeset by Newgen in 10/14 Minion
Contents
Tables and Figures vii
Foreword: Cultural Mediations and Political Economy ix
Arjun Appadurai
Preface xiii
Contributors xvii
1 introduction: Cultural Values in Political economy 1
J. P. Singh
Part i: Cultural interests and Values
2 Culture and Preference Formation 33
Daniel M. Hausman
3 Value and Values in economics and Culture 48
David Throsby
4 Creating a Culture of environmental responsibility 65
Sharon R. Krause
5 Cosmopolitans and Parochials: economy, Culture, and
Political Conflict 87
Miles Kahler
vi Contents
Part ii: Cultural interactions and Praxis
6 Crossing Borders: Culture, identity, and access to
Higher education 115
Steven Livingston
7 ideology, economic interests, and american exceptionalism:
the Case of export Credit 135
Kristen Hopewell
8 strangest of Bedfellows: Why the religious right embraced
trump and What that means for the movement 156
Mark J. Rozell
9 applying the soft Power rubric: How study abroad Data
reveal international Cultural relations 173
Irene S. Wu
References 201
Index 231
tables and Figures
tables
1.1 Paternalism strength index 25
9.1 Immigrants, foreign students, and foreign visitors in selected
host countries, 2015 (in millions) 192
Figures
1.1 Information networks and power 18
1.2 The logic of cultural change through instrumental and
meta-power 19
1.3 Percentage gain in agriculture concessions received and official
development assistance as percentage of GNP 24
7.1 Percent share of global manufacturing selected years 137
7.2 Official export credit volumes, 2014 (in billions of US dollars) 141
9.1 Wu Soft Power Rubric: Indicators of social integration
across borders 177
9.2 World’s top five countries sending students abroad, 2015 182
9.3 World’s top five destinations for students from the world’s
top five sending countries, 2015 183
viii tables and Figures
9.4 Sub-Saharan Africa: Top five foreign destinations
for students, 2015 184
9.5 France: Top ten countries sending students, 2015 185
9.6 United States, United Kingdom, France, and Australia:
Total foreign students hosted, 1970–2015 185
9.7 France: Foreign students from former colonies and other
countries, 1970–2015 186
9.8 South Africa: Top ten countries sending students, 2015 187
9.9 Foreign visitors to SADC, 1990 188
9.10 Foreign visitors to SADC, 2015 189
9.11 Malaysia: Total foreign students, 2005–2015 189
9.12 Malaysia: Top twelve countries sending students, 2015 191
9.13 Immigrants, foreign students, and foreign visitors in selected
host countries, 2015 (in millions) 192
9.14 World total of university students and university students
abroad, 1970–2015 (in millions) 195
Foreword
Cultural Mediations and Political Economy
tHere is a sHort Way to state tHe message i get From tHis
wonderful set of chapters: culture mediates between economy and politics. But
every term in this short statement could be debated and refined, and the au-
thors do that carefully and thoughtfully. Especially in regard to culture, this
book brings together various traditions of definition and recognizes that cul-
ture is simultaneously a horizon, a map, and a resource for actors seeking to
define their political and economic goals. I appreciate the authors’ opening up
of key terms such as agency, interest, rationality, and collectivity. They have
motivated me to think further about these terms, and rather than gloss over
what the authors say about them, I add here some thoughts on these terms.
Agency has a complex and contested history in the social sciences. There is
wide agreement that it implies the capacity to act on the world or, as Hannah
Arendt (1958) taught us, to make something new in the world, thus making
action different from mere behavior. Action in this Arendtian sense is thus al-
ways political, insofar as it seeks to make a nontrivial change in the way things
appear to be. Arendt was not much concerned with culture in its disciplinary
sense, but it does not take much discernment to see that her idea of action, as
the initiation of something new in the world, has to do with creativity, vision,
and change. It is thus deeply cultural, but it has little to do with habit, routine,
or custom. It is about newness, innovation, and hope. Thus, Arendt’s idea of
action opens up a deep justification for thinking about culture as oriented as
much to the future as to the past. As the authors in this book show in various
ix
x Foreword
contexts, culture is not the inert ballast against which economic or political
action is undertaken. It is also a scheme for action, a map of possibilities, and
a tool for making new arrangements in the world. Culture has everything to
do with agency, since it is the broad cosmological canvas that informs and
underwrites action, both individual and collective, and provides a repertoire
of values to imagine or constrain action. Even if interest can be seen as in-
forming individual action, politics is always a matter of collective action, and
collective action is not possible without the navigational apparatus of culture.
Several of the chapters also take up the matter of interest, a term that is
closely tied to ideas about choice, preference, and utility in neoclassical eco-
nomics. It is no exaggeration to say that rational choice theory, the dominant
paradigm for much recent work in political economy, is grounded in a certain
idea of interest. This approach to interest ties it closely to calculation, choice,
and utility maximization as motives for rational action. This is also the view
that has allowed a certain kind of economic analysis to colonize many aspects
of human behavior in areas as varied as marriage, suicide, segregation, crime,
and more. This is a style of explanation that aims to explain everything worth
explaining. And it eliminates culture by translating it into the language of
preferences. Preferences are in turn seen as essential to market rationality,
and market rationality is seen as the only form of rationality worth discuss-
ing. At best, culture in this view is a mechanism for bounding rationality.
Through a remarkable conceptual sleight of hand, value is treated as reducible
to interest, interest is made the basis of preference, and preference is treated as
the explanatory key to choice. In this view, culture enriches our understand-
ing of interest formation or preferences, but we learn nothing about culture as
a generative factor, and we are not enabled to question the linear transforma-
tion of cultural values into interests. This view of interest more or less trivial-
izes culture as an autonomous and collective system of meanings, values, and
dispositions. It also dilutes the idea of collectivity.
The authors and the editor of this collection are deeply concerned about
collectivity, solidarity, and community. This orientation accounts for their
skepticism toward many brands of rational choice theory and their endorse-
ment of the role of culture in economics and politics. I share their inclina-
tions and have also worried over the years about how to define the social, the
collective, and the solidarity as foundational concerns of the social sciences.
What they have now prompted me to see is that in our world today, the popu-
list right has largely captured the terrain of the social by mobilizing various