ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the highly controlled and well-rehearsed debates as integral processes of discipline-making that succeed in enforcing hierarchies within professional networks without necessarily proving successful in creating new knowledge claims. The process of discipline-making is internalised and reproduced in ritualistic debates identifying, defining and qualifying what it means to be 'critical' within International Political Economy (IPE). One consequence of this focus on the meaning of 'critical' is that it leads to highly structured disagreement between critical approaches. In order to build a methodological platform for collaboration across the critical school of political economy, there must be a wholesale integration of feminist and cultural economy methodologies into the widely accepted pre-disciplinary tradition of political economy, which includes Marxism. Placing critical political economy in permanent opposition to positivism fails to acknowledge the diversity and richness of field of inquiry and forecloses the possibility of methodologically innovative.
