ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the insights generated in Cultural Political Economy (CPE) and Discursive Political Studies (DPE) to then develop a discourse-theoretical entry point to the CPE agenda. CPE interprets culture as sense- and meaning-making, which is a universal feature of social interaction rather than a distinct field or sub-system of the social world. CPE posits a greater variety of potential economic imaginaries and accumulation strategies than could co-exist in practice within a given spatio-temporal envelope. Likewise, in political economy, the history of economic ideas and economic sociology are mobilized to explain weaknesses in accumulation strategies and economic policy. Robust, theoretically substantiated, discourse approaches are distinguished by an epistemological linguistic turn. Adopting 'discourse' as the primary analytical entry point to a CPE agenda while avoiding, at the same time, the pitfalls of thin interpretation, implies taking the knowledge-theoretical assumptions of discourse approaches seriously and putting them into dialogue with the overall assumptions of CPE.
