Apologies for reposting, we're still looking for papers from across the discipline for these sessions. Feel free to get in touch to express interest or with any questions.
AAG 2016
March 29- April 2, 2016
San Francisco, CA
State, Market, and Shifting Bureaucratic Capacities
Patrick Bigger, University of Manchester
Kelly Kay, London School of Economics
Over the past 25 years, neoliberal logics have become increasingly entrenched in the day-to-day practices of, and approaches to, governance across broad swathes of the globe. The overlap of state and market is seemingly ubiquitous across jurisdictional scales from competitive urbanism to global climate change policy and in matters of social concern from health care provision to policing. We take inspiration from the recent work of David Graeber, who argues that, “in the big picture it hardly matters, then, whether one seeks to reorganize the world around bureaucratic efficiency or market rationality: all the fundamental assumptions remain the same,” (2015, 41) as the market increasingly comes to be structured like the state, and the state begins to restructure itself to resemble the market. This begs the question: have state and market really become so deeply entwined through their logics and practices that they are effectively indistinguishable? And if not, what fundamental differences remain between markets and bureaucracies, perhaps the two most important institutions in late capitalist societies? Furthermore, based on the answers to those questions, what can we learn about the work of bureaucrats and bureaucracies in more closely aligning state and market, or alternatively the ways that this alignment is pushed back against?
Drawing on the extended and evolving legacy of the apparent neoliberalization of everything, we are interested in bringing together work which that theorizes the new and emerging roles that bureaucrats play in governing the ever-blurred distinctions between state and market. Our list of suggested topics is intentionally broad in order to stimulate a conversation across geographic subdisciplines about the role of bureaucracies across diverse registers of concern and modalities of governance. As such, we are open to a diversity of approaches to changing bureaucratic capabilities through the state/market nexus across a wide variety of empirical cases.
While we are open to any relevant work, some potential topics for papers could include, but are not limited to:
New constellations of power and regulatory authority in environmental governance
The impacts of devolution and local control
The “revolving door” between the state, market, and NGO sector (both actors and logics)
New or altered regulatory capacities from existing regulatory authorities
Infrastructure bidding, contracting, and financing
Jurisdictional “turf wars” in the construction and regulation of markets
Structural changes to health care provision
The changing (enhanced or diminished) role of militaries in state-market assemblages
Growth of state-centric or state-financed markets
State/market interfaces under austerity
Networks in the planning and implementation of international free trade deals
The spectacular growth of consultancies in the implementation of state/market policy
Versions of economic theory brought into state organizations
Versions of state rationality brought into market organizations
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to both Kelly Kay ([log in to unmask]) and Patrick Bigger ([log in to unmask]) no later than October 20, 2015. We will determine the composition of the session(s) shortly thereafter.
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