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Professor Bob Jessop

Distinguished Professor & Founding Director, IAS

Degree: BA (Social Sciences), Exeter University MA Cambridge University Ph.D. Cambridge University Ph.D. Honoris Causa, Roskilde University

Associated research centres and groups: Centre for Law and Society, Cultural Political Economy, Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster Professions Network

Personal website

Current Teaching

I am not currently teaching at undergraduate or master's level.

Together with Dr Ngai-Ling SUM (Politics), I organize a reading and discussion group on cultural political economy.

Research Interests

I studied sociology at Exeter University and then moved to the University of Cambridge to undertake doctoral research in political sociology. After completing a study of British political culture and writing a book on the sociological theory of reform and revolution, I became a Research Fellow in Social and Political Sciences at Downing College, Cambridge. It was during my five years as a Research Fellow that I first became interested in state theory. In 1975 I moved again to the Department of Government at the University of Essex and began teaching in the areas of political sociology, historical sociology, state theory, and political economy. After fifteen years of exile in a political science department I came to Lancaster University allegedly to profess sociology once again. In fact I'm still doing much the same as I did in political science, namely, attempting to be a theoretical jack-of-all-trades in the social sciences. In addition I have become more involved in funded empirical research intended to test my theoretical arguments.

I think my best work before coming to Lancaster was concerned with state theory and am particularly proud of my book on the Greek Marxist theorist, Nicos Poulantzas, from whose work I still draw fresh inspiration both as an old intellectual debt and through regular re-reading of his work. This forms one of five large books that I have devoted to state theory over the last 25 years, starting with The Capitalist State (1982), passing through Nicos Poulantzas (1985), State Theory (1990), and The Future of the Capitalist State (2002), and culminating (for now) in State Power (2007) (see the publication list below). But I have also developed a serious interest in political economy (initially in issues such as Fordism and post-Fordism and now in the question of what a neo-Gramscian analysis of economies might tell us about contemporary changes in capitalism) and have, together with Dr Ngai-Ling Sum (Politics and International Relations, Lancaster University), been working since 2000 on 'cultural political economy' (see below). I have also continued my more empirical research into the political economies of postwar Britain (especially in relation to changes in the state and welfare regimes under the Thatcher, Major, and Blair governments) and have been testing ideas about cultural political economy in relation to the knowledge-based economy and in the framework of an EU-funded Framework 6 research project.

My recent research falls into five areas: (1) changes in contemporary capitalism and the dynamics of 'variegated capitalism' - a notion that I prefer to 'varieties of capitalism', including the illogics of globalization and the contradictions of knowledge-based economies; (2) changes in the state's form, scale, and functions in the broad fields of economic and social policy -- initially in relation to the welfare states of advanced capitalist economies and more recently also in some East Asian cases; (3) governance, governance failure, and meta-governance - and its failure -- and the implications of different forms of governance and meta-governance failure for 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'; (4) cultural political economy, i.e., advancing the cultural turn in political economy by analysing the variation, selection, and retention of economic and political imaginaries and their implications for economic, political, and social transformation -- this involves work on the knowledge-based economy as well as more general theoretical issues; (5) the strategic-relational approach to issues of structure and agency -- framed within a more general concern with issues of complexity, complexity reduction, and critical r ealism. An emerging interest is the integration of the critique of political economy with a critical approach to political ecology.

The results of much of this work have been presented in three recent books: The Future of the Capitalist State (2002), Beyond the Regulation Approach (2006, co-authored with Dr Ngai-Ling Sum), and State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach (2007). I am currently working on a second volume to accompany Beyond the Regulation Approach, which will be called Towards Cultural Political Economy and is scheduled for publication in due course with Edward Elgar.

I am completing (as of December 2007) the writing up of my contributions to a European Union Framework 6 Project, DEMOLOGOS, on alternative models of socio-economic development. My role in this project was part theoretical (writing papers on the regulation approach; reproduction, regulation, and governance; class-, capital- and form-analytical approaches to political economy; agency, structures, institutions, and discourse; Gramsci as a regulation theorist; and periodization) and part-empirical, being partly responsible for research on the Pearl River Delta as a cross-border region (with Dr Ngai-Ling Sum). In the next two to three years, I will be continuing my work on cultural political economy, knowledge-based economies, and state theory. A recent expression of the interest in cultural political economy is an ESRC Seminar Series on Changing Cultures of Competitiveness; another is an ambitious (even hubristic) attempt to develop a post-disciplinary analysis of contemporary capitalism by consolidating the cultural turn in political economy and using recent developments across a range of institutional orders and scales of organization to assess what is at stake in the widespread adoption of the knowledge-based economy as an accumulation strategy and state project. I aim to write an accessible undergraduate textbook on state theory - a daunting challenge. Finally, as an inveterate social and political theorist I am also maintaining a watching brief on developments in other areas of, especially, structure, agency and identity, autopoietic systems theory, time and space, and the analysis of the complex spatio-temporal dimensions of social relations. Some sense of how the different interests I have developed over the last four decades come together can be discerned from a diagrammatic periodization of my intellectual concerns - diagram

I enjoy teaching as well as research and try to convey some of my enthusiasm for critical and contrarian scholarship to my students. I see postgraduate studies as a partnership between research student and supervisor and expect the same commitment from my students that I try to give to them. Indeed much of my past and present work has been strongly influenced by the many happy hours spent in discussion with research students - more than a few of whom have become colleagues, co-authors, co-directors of research, and continuing sources of provocation and inspiration. I would welcome further such opportunities to engage in joint research in any of the five areas noted above.

My principal published original work in English comprises the following books (sole-authored unless otherwise indicated):

• Social Order, Reform, and Revolution, London: Macmillan 1972
• Traditionalism, Conservatism, and British Political Culture, London: Allen and Unwin 1974
• The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods, Oxford: Blackwell 1982
• Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy, London: Macmillan 1985
• Thatcherism: a Tale of Two Nations, Cambridge: Polity (co-authors -- Kevin Bonnett, Simon Bromley, & Tom Ling) 1988
• State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place, Cambridge: Polity 1990
• Strategic Choice and Path-Dependency in Post-Socialism: Institutional Dynamics in the Transformation Process, Aldershot: Edward Elgar (co-edited with J. Hausner and K. Nielsen), 1995
• Die Zukunft des Staates: Denationalisierung, Internationalisierung, und Renationalisierung, (The Future of the State: Denationalization, Internationalization, and Renationalization) Muenster: Westfaelisches Dampfboot 2001 (co-authors - Alex Demirovic & Joachim Hirsch).
• The Future of the Capitalist State, Cambridge: Polity 2002
• Beyond the Regulation Approach Putting Capitalist Economies in their Place (co-authored with Ngai-Ling Sum) Cheltenham: Edward Elgar 2006. Winner of the Gunnar Myrdal Prize awarded given by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy for the best book published in 2006 broadly in line with its aims and objectives.
• State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach, Cambridge: Polity 2007

• Crisis del Estado de Bienestar. Hacia una nueva teoria del Estado y sus consecuencias sociales (Crisis of the Welfare State. Towards a New Theory of the State and its Social Consequences, Bogat`: Siglo del Hombre, 1999 (special essay collection)
• Globalisering og interaktiv Styring (Globalization and Interactive Governance) Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur, 1999
• Post-Fordism and the Future of Neo-Conservatism, Seoul: Han-Ul (in Korean) 1999 (special essay collection).
• Hegemonya, Post-Fordizm vs Kuresellesme Ekseninde Kapitalist Devlet (Hegemony, Post-Fordism, and Actually Existing Capitalist Development, Istanbul: Iletsim Publishing, 2005
• Kapitalismus, Regulation, Staat (Capitalism, Regulation, State), Hamburg: Argument Verlag 2007
• Capitalismo(s): Discurso y materialidad en las formaciones sociales capitalistas contemporaneas (Capitalism[s]: Discourse and Materiality in Contemporary Capitalist Social Formations), Cordoba (Argentina): Universidad Catolica de Cordoba Press 2007

Major edited collections with substantial introductions include:

• Karl Marx: Social and Political Thought, Volumes I-IV, London: Routledge 1990.
• Karl Marx, Social and Political Thought, Volumes V-VIII, London: Routledge, 2000
• Regulation Theory and the Crisis of Capitalism, 5 volumes, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2001.
• STATE/SPACE: a Reader, Oxford: Blackwell (co-edited with Neil Brenner, Martin Jones and Gordon MacLeod) Oxford: Blackwell 2003

In addition, I have published around 140 book chapters and 80 journal articles on state theory, corporatism, the regulation approach, Fordism and post-Fordism, knowledge-based economies, intellectual property, British political economy, West German political economy, East Asian developmental states, social theory, critical realism, complexity theory, the strategic-relational approach, and the welfare state. Many of my recent articles are available on-line from the Lancaster University e-prints service, which is regularly updated with new material. A complete list of my publications, including reprints and translations, will be posted here in January 2007, so watch this space!

View on-line papers by author

View on-line papers by topic

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I am particularly interested in receiving applications to work in the following fields:

• materialist state theory,
• governance and governance failure,
• cultural political economy,
• contemporary capitalism

Applicants should be aware that I will be retiring from a full-time academic position in 2011 and, while I will be able to supervise existing students to completion after that date, applicants for 2009-2010 onwards will need a co-supervisor from within the Faculty to ensure continuity of supervision. I am willing to assist applicants in the search for suitable co-supervisors.

Eprints Publications Repository and Bibliographic Database

Bob Jessop has 59 selected publication records listed on this webpage. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title. For all ePrints records go to http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk

Jessop, RD (2007) State Power. Polity. ISBN 9780745633206

Sum, Ngai-Ling and Jessop, Bob (2006) Beyond the Regulationist Approach. Edward Elgar. ISBN 1847203191

Jessop, Bob and Fairclough, Norman and Wodak, Ruth (2008) The Knowledge-based Economy and Higher Education in Europe. Sense, London. ISBN 978-9087906221

Jessop, Bob (2006) From micro-powers to governmentality: Foucault's work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power. Political Geography, 26 (1). pp. 34-40. ISSN 0962-6298

Jessop, Bob (2004) Critical Semiotic Analysis and Cultural Political Economy. Critical Discourse Studies, 1 (2). pp. 159-174. ISSN 1740-5904

Jessop, Bob (2007) Knowledge as a Fictitious Commodity: Insights and Limits of a Polanyian Perspective. In: Bugra, Ayse and Mendell, Marguerite, (eds.) Market Economy as a Political Project. Reading Karl Polanyi for The 21st Century. Palgrave, Basingstoke. ISBN 9781403983930 (In Press)

Jessop, Bob (2006) Spatial Fixes, Temporal Fixes and Spatio- Temporal Fixes. In: Castree, Noel and Gregory, Derek, (eds.) David Harvey : A Critical Reader. Antipode Book Series . Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp. 142-166. ISBN 0631235108

Jessop, Bob (2009) Avoiding Traps, Rescaling States, Governing Europe. In: Keil, Roger and Mahon, Rianne, (eds.) Leviathan Undone? Towards a Political Economy of Scale. University of British Columbia Press (UBC Press), Vancouver. ISBN 9780774816304 (In Press)

Jessop, Bob and Oosterlynck, Stijn (2008) Cultural Political Economy: on Making the Cultural Turn without Falling into Soft Economic Sociology. Geoforum, 39 (3). pp. 1155-1169. ISSN 0016-7185

Jessop, Bob and Brenner, Neil and Jones, Martin (2008) Theorizing Socio-Spatial Relations. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26 (3). pp. 389-401. ISSN 0263-7758 (print) 1472-3433 (electronic)

Other Interests and Hobbies

My principal interest is my scholarship and I enjoy keeping up as far as possible with old interests as well as developing new ones. My principal hobby, if that is the correct word for something so strenuous, is cycling. Until recently I was an active competitor in time-trialling - I still hold the men's 100-mile club record for Lancaster Cycling Club, a record that I broke twice, most recently aged 54. To celebrate my 60th birthday, I repeated a ride with club-mates first undertaken to celebrate my 50th birthday, namely the 900-mile plus journey from Lands End to John O'Groats, which takes riders from the southwestern tip of England to the northwestern edge of Scotland. This time I did it to raise money for cancer charities and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.

Associated Keywords: Autopoiesis, Biotechnology, Capitalism, Cities, Citizenship, Civil society, Class and gender relations, Class politics, Competitiveness, Complexity, Conjunctural analysis, Consumption, Contradiction, Creative industries, Critical discourse analysis, Critical realism, Cultural economy, Cultural Political Economy, Democracy, Developmental state, Dilemma, Discourse analysis, Engels, Enterprise, Epistemology, Europeanisation, European Union, Exportism, Fordism, Form Analysis, Foucault, Global governance, Globalisation, Governance, Gramsci, Historiography, Imperialism, Information society, Innovation, Intellectual property rights, Interdisciplinary collaboration, International political economy, Intersectionality, Knowledge, Labour market policy, Marxian analysis, Materiality, Meta-governance, Methodology, Nation, Neo-Marxism, Ontics, Ontology, Periodisation, Philosophy of social science, Political culture , Political economy, Political ontology, Political theory, Post-Fordism, Post-structuralism, Poulantzas, Power, Regulation Approach, Science and technology, Semiotics, Shadow state, Social policy, Social theory, Societalisation, Spatiality, State failure, State theory, Strategic-relational approach , Strategy, Structural Coupling, Structure and agency, Supranational governance, Systems theory, Technology, Terrorism, Transnationalisation, Urban studies, Vergesellschaftung, Welfare

View all research activities, ePrints, news and events associated with Bob Jessop.

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