Economics, Culture and Development

Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317562818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book examines the treatment of culture and development in the discipline of economics, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in current literature. Economics has come a long way to join the 'cultural turn' that has swept the humanities and social sciences in the last half century. This volume identifies some of the issues that major philosophies of economics must address to better grasp the cultural complexity of contemporary economies.

This book is an extensive survey of the place of culture and development in four theoretical economic perspectives—Neoclassical, Marxian, Institutionalist, and Feminist. Organized in nine chapters with three appendices and a compendium of over 50 interpretations of culture by economists, this book covers vast grounds from classical political economy to contemporary economic thought. The literatures reviewed include original and new institutionalism, cultural economics, postmodern Marxism, economic feminism, and the current culture and development discourse on subjects such as economic growth in East Asia, businesswomen entrepreneurs in West Africa, and comparative development in different parts of Europe.

Zein-Elabdin carries the project further by borrowing some of the insights from postcolonial theory to call for a more profound rethinking of the place of culture and of currently devalued cultures in economic theory. This book is of great interest for those who study Economic development, International relations, feminist economics, and Economic geography

1
Economics, culture, and development

Culture – Like ‘democracy,’ this is a term which needs to be, not only defined, but illustrated, almost every time we use it.

(T.S. Eliot 1949 [1940]: 197)

Introduction

‘Culture’ is currently enjoying tremendous vogue in Economics across different schools of thought. Many books examine the intersection of culture and economics, particularly in ‘the arts,’ as demonstrated by the publication of the Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture (Ginsburgh and Throsby 2006). Many others are preoccupied with the relationship between culture and ‘development.’ A symposium on “cultural economics” (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2006) and an entry on “Culture and Economics” in the New Palgrave Dictionary (Fernández 2008) mark the arrival of culture in the general discourse of Economics. Today it is fashionable for economists to invoke Anthropology and to cite Gramsci, Weber, and Durkheim.¹

The factors behind the heightened profile of culture in Economics are many, but all form part of the general current that produced ‘the cultural turn’ in the humanities and social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. In broad terms, this includes the rise of multiculturalism in European-majority countries, increasing globalization, the disintegration of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and corresponding debates over the role of the state. Alan Peacock and Ilde Rizzo (1994) suggest that, at least in part, economic concern with ‘the culture industry’—arts and other works of creativity—was motivated by the need to maintain state support for the arts in the face of budgetary cuts in the USA and Europe since the 1980s. These various influences have joined with theoretical and methodological exigencies within the discipline of Economics to produce the current interest in culture.²

In this book, I trace the presence and absence of culture in economic literature, particularly in relation to the process of development. What I am trying to identify is culture in its meaning as the broad, but contested, shared everyday sensibilities and practices—including economic ones—of a society or a group, which sanction and censor its participants in multiple ways that may not always be fully coherent. Though a shaper of action and knowledge, culture—the concept-phenomenon—is shaped by and changes in accord with individual idiosyncrasies, social gaps, and fissures, and encounters with ‘other’ cultural horizons; I do not see it as a single force that predates and explains all (see Appendix II for a sample of economists’ ideas of culture). As the coming chapters show, many different things are associated with culture—some include practice, others confine it to the generation of meaning. Often, the word merely signifies a difference of some sort. In many discussions of economic development, culture is synonymous with backwardness, and sometimes may appear to be a metaphor for ‘race.’ My interpretation is more encompassing than most (i.e., it includes both the capacity to generate meaning and produce practices that differentiate some groups from others), but does not imply completeness, permanence, or full coherence.

My aim in this project is to outline the extent to which economists have noted the ways in which culture shapes economic action and knowledge, and how they have approached the cultures of those countries discursively marked as ‘under’ or ‘less’ developed. Homi Bhabha (1994) suggests that culture is (more consciously) invoked—as it were—only at the point of confrontation with difference, the moment of encounter with an Other. With this in mind, I look at how economists have experienced, negotiated, and/or endured such encounters. My intent is not to aggregate all economic thought into a ‘Western worldview’ devoid of heterogeneity and muted subjectivities.³ However, the major philosophies of Economics share a specific apprehension of being, knowledge, and history that takes European modernity as intrinsically superior, all knowing, and uniquely historical (Zein-Elabdin 2004).⁴ The twentieth-century discourse of international development has served to universalize this apprehension.

Taking a broad look at the treatment of culture in Economics reveals that the majority of economic thought is rooted in a dualistic ontology, that is, an apprehension of ‘reality’ in a binary framework that leaves no conceptual space for in-betweenness and alterity. This is most foundationally manifested in the theoretical separation of ‘culture’ from ‘economy’ as two fundamentally different realms, which ultimately rests on the archaic dualism of ideal/material. In this conception, culture has to do with the mental and symbolic, while economy signifies tangible subsistence, provisioning, resource management, and accumulation. This pervasive dichotomy—and dualistic modes of thought in general—have been the subject of extensive debates, and the basis for much of the philosophical revolt against modernism.⁵ In Economics, this revolt appears most commonly among heterodox thinkers, who have long rejected dichotomies such as object/subject, positive/normative, and fact/value (Dow 1990; Nelson 1992; Waller 1994; Jackson 1999). Feminists, in addition, have challenged the cultural dualisms of public/private, market/household, and market/non-market (Waller and Jennings 1990; Jennings 1993, 1999). Indeed, many colleagues have questioned the separation of culture from economy (Ruttan 1988; Nelson 1993; Kabeer 1991, 1994; Harcourt 1995; Jackson 1996, 2009; Fine 2002). These interventions have been sporadic and, for the most part, have targeted methodological concerns, often detached from substantive content.

In this book, I take all these contributions on board, and go further to argue that, in general, dualistic ontology forms a common thread in the treatment of culture among major economic philosophies, albeit differently and to various degrees. This pattern is amplified in the field of development with the addition of more dichotomies, and an overwhelming tendency to reductively theorize culture as either an obstacle to or a driving force behind economic growth. Dualism is often defined by the assumption that “phenomena are separable into two mutually exclusive categories or principles” (Jennings 1999: 142). Here, I do not necessarily associate it with antagonistic pairs, but with all binary, all-or-nothing, analytical perspectives that in effect preclude adequate understanding of economic hybridity—economies and socialities that do not comply with and exceed the dualisms. To be sure, some binary distinctions are necessary for analytical purposes. The problem arises when these exist at a deep axiomatic level that obscures their epistemological consequences. To the extent that dualistic philosophy has been critiqued in social science and humanities discourses since the late twentieth century, this book adds little.⁶ My primary concern in this volume is to reveal its pervasiveness and depth in Economics, and its manifestations in approaches to culture.

The aim of this volume is to draw a map of culture in Economics that will hopefully facilitate more systematic, in-depth study of individual contributions. There are many questions and problematics in and about the idea-phenomenon of culture to wrestle with. In this book I only highlight the problem of dualism in economic treatments of it. This first chapter begins with a schematic review of culture’s discursive journey from Anthropology to the field of Cultural Studies, with an eye toward their relationship to Economics. This is a mere sketch that has to gloss over the richness of both fields.⁷ The next section outlines the landscape of culture in the three most established economic traditions—Neoclassical, Marxian, and Veblenian Institutionalist—and the more recent field of Feminist Economics since culture is at the heart of its case against the economics profession. In the fourth section I turn to the treatment of culture in the field of development. The chapter ends with an overview of the book and a note on method.

Although general social science and humanities discourse is vital to any survey of culture, for practicality my survey is limited to economics publications and only the most pertinent literature in other fields. Because of these limitations at least three relevant subjects are not pursued except tangentially: ‘race,’ globalization, and ecological sustainability.⁸ Similarly, I have not included any discussion of development policy and record (growth trends, structural adjustment, inequality, and so on) since my immediate interest is directed at theoretical explorations of culture in development thought rather than the development process itself.

From Anthropology to Cultural Studies

The word ‘culture’ has meant many things, from cultivation of a plant or organism, growth of human intellect and spiritual faculties (distance from ‘nature’), art and other products and occupations of creativity (the ‘culture industry’), to honoring with worship (cult), and inhabiting a foreign place (colonizing). All these meanings may be encompassed within the familiar phrase “a whole way of life.” It is this versatility, which prompted Raymond Williams to offer his often-cited remark that culture “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (1983 [1976]: 87). T.S. Eliot (1949 [1940]) had earlier suggested that the word must be defined every time it is uttered, and, long before him, J.G. Herder warned, “nothing is more indeterminate than this word” (Williams 1983 [1976]: 89). This elusiveness of meaning has long shielded culture from the modeling, quantifying impulse that dominates Economics—until recently. In the following paragraphs I take a quick look at the fields of Anthropology and Cultural Studies as they have influenced thinking about culture in Economics.

Anthropology has undergone a seismic transformation from ideas of primitivism, to questioning its own complicity in Europe’s imperial projects.⁹ Still, E. B. Tylor’s founding concept of culture—the “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1883 [1871]: 1)—remains a relevant point of departure for current discussions. The scope and crux of meaning he provided have been less of an issue than the theoretical framework within which the concept of culture was to be placed, and the weight assigned to different aspects of it (material, symbolic, regulative, and so on). Tylor’s evolutionist concept was problematized and revised by scores of anthropologists and sociologists—Weber, Boas, Malinowski, Parsons, among many others—with the evolutionary interpretation giving way to a more relativist orientation (see Stocking 1968; Geertz 1973; Friedman 1994; Wilk 1996).¹⁰

By the mid-twentieth century the project of international development had given rise to debates about the content and political implications of anthropological research. As Arturo Escobar (1995) has shown, the debate over Karl Polanyi’s (1957) classification of economies into formal and substantive revealed that Economic Anthropology was either “inside” this project, with formalists advocating for development, or “outside,” with substantivist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Economics, culture, and development
• 2 Classical political economy and the rise of Neoclassicism
• 3 Neoclassical economics and culture
• 4 Institutional economics: Veblen’s tradition
• 5 The New Institutional Economics
• 6 Marxian economics: from modern to postmodern
• 7 Development economics: three stances on culture
• 8 Feminist Economics: women, culture, and development
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix I Culture in Economics: a chronology
• Appendix II Some interpretations of culture in Economics
• Appendix III Development in Economics: a select chronology
• Index