ABSTRACT
How do we explain the World Bank’s increasing emphasis on the social underpinnings of economic development? Or the ways that the social consequences of the tourism industry have recently been contested and ‘ethical tourism’ has emerged in response? Or the shift in the meaning of home ownership from a dwelling to an investment with consequent effects on consumer debt, home improvement spending, and asset prices? Or the way the pursuit of the ‘war on terror’ relies on a set of profiling technologies that have been borrowed from techniques developed in consumer marketing? Or the limited effects huge oil price increases have on demand for high-consumption cars, despite rhetoric of rational consumer behaviour? The list of such questions could go on. All of these are political-economic questions. Yet, traditional modes of political-economic analysis seem tomiss one essential aspect of these different practices: their cultural dimension.
