Blog

Created
Thu, 04/05/2023 - 06:00

Political economists often place the state at the centre of explanations of change in capitalism. The emergence of a ‘welfare’ or ‘nation building’ state during the twentieth century reflects the advance of democratic movements and Keynesian inspired macroeconomic management. More recently neoliberalism is associated with fiscal austerity enforced through the rise of corporate and financial power. Shifts in state finances, and how states finances are accounted for, were central to these broader political-economic shifts.

In a recent open access article published in the journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting, as part of a forthcoming special issue on ‘the future of the state’, we bring state theory into conversation with critical accounting literature to explore the relationship between fiscal accounting and capitalist change. Drawing on Joseph Schumpeter’s fiscal sociology and his concept of the ‘tax state’, we connect changes in fiscal practice to turning points in the reorganisation of the state’s role within capitalism [...]

Created
Tue, 02/05/2023 - 06:00

Having written about the city’s austerity policies and their relation to insecurity and walking it as a researcher (and tourist), I was increasingly asking myself how people living in the city were actually dealing with the day-to-day effects of the insecurity-competitiveness nexus. I wanted to add a micro-level to the practices of authoritarian neoliberalism that I was observing, where different institutional scales converged in making a competitive, austere city. How do inhabitants (trans)form their everyday practices to navigate this attractive yet insecure city? In a recent article in Urban Geography, I draw on interview data collected in Oaxaca between 2017 and 2019 and argue that they adapt their day-to-day rhythms through varied practices of care and what I call ‘adapted mobilities’.

The post Dealing with everyday insecurity in the competitive city appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).