ABSTRACT
The author have engaged in research using a variety of methods, including documentary analysis, discourse analysis of advertising and media articles, direct observation of various types of event (UN climate change conferences and carbon market business fairs) and social network analysis (SNA). His view would be that good research in any tradition should be capable of deploying different methods and bringing them to bear on different aspects of the tradition's focal problems. This seems to him particularly important for critical political economy. He started pursuing SNA in a project on the politics of carbon markets, in collaboration with Steven Bernstein, Michele Betsill and Matthew Hoffmann. He have been attempting to emphasise the usefulness of SNA in interrogating critically the sorts of assumption that scholars in critical political economy routinely make about the main features of contemporary capitalism.
