Since the publication of Nikolas Rose's 'The Politics of Life Itself' (2001) there has been vivid discussion about how biopolitical governance has changed over the last decades. This article uses what Rose terms 'molecular politics', a new socio-technical grip on the human body, as a contrasting background to ask anew his question 'What, then, of biopolitics today?' - albeit focusing not on advances in genetics, microbiology, and pharmaceutics, as he does, but on the rapid proliferation of wearables and other sensor-software gadgets. In both cases, new technologies providing information about the individual body are the common ground for governance and optimization, yet for the latter, the target is habits of moving, eating and drinking, sleeping, working and relaxing. The resulting profound differences are carved out along four lines: 'somatic identities' and a modified understanding of the body; the role of 'expert knowledge' compared to that of networks of peers and self-experimentation; the 'types of intervention' by which new technologies become effective in our everyday life; and the 'post-discipline character' of molecular biopolitics. It is argued that, taken together, these differences indicate a remarkable shift which could be termed aretaic: its focus is not 'life itself' but 'life as it is lived', and its modality are new everyday socio-technical entanglements and their more-than-human rationalities of (self-)governance.

More than ten years of intensive academic discussion about the creative-industries script have brought about several dominant lines of critique, among which the neoliberal character of creativity policy and its related modes of governance are probably the most prominent. This article embarks on a critique of critique, whose aim is not to question this argument in general, but first, to reflect on its prerogatives, and second, to acknowledge that the relationship between a political-economic script and the techniques of governance into which it is translated are often more polymorphous than is assumed in much critical economic geographic work. I use the establishment of an agency for the procurement of studios and offices in Frankfurt, Germany, as an empirical example, and the four heuristic dimensions of articulation, representation, practices, and effects/projects as perspectives from which to grasp and map the heterogeneous effects of technologies of governance in the field of creativity policy. Reflecting on this example, I argue that market assemblages that aim to incorporate neoliberalism's Other can paradoxically conserve it and create grounds for new forms and positions of critique from the inside. This surely holds particularly true for the creative industries, with their peculiar forms of work organization, but it is also a general and often neglected implication of assemblage thinking that is becoming increasingly important in economic geography more broadly.

"The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century: The Piketty Opportunity." Economic Geography, 94(1), pp. 92–93

Reset Modernity! is the latest of three exhibitions organized by Bruno Latour and his team that make use of the expressive potential of artwork to translate his thinking and present it to audiences far beyond academia. It is an extraordinarily ambitious endeavor, permanently oscillating among the three domains of science, arts, and politics, but always firmly rooted in a problematization of any form of representation. No wonder the work of geography, a discipline that has long paid homage to what Latour calls the “devil of Double-Click” (the naive belief in one-to-one representation) by surveying, mapping, and measuring the world, figures prominently here. This review essay elaborates on how Reset Modernity! relates to Latour’s latest project, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) and uses three pieces of the artwork shown at the exhibition for illustration. Yet in its very form (a text, a scientific journal) it inevitably runs counter to one of the central claims of AIME: that of abandoning the privileged position of scientific texts for the production of truth, breaking science’s monopoly on truth speaking, and paving the way for a plurality of veridictions.

Dzudzek I. and Lindner P. Performing the creative-economy script: contradicting urban rationalities at work, Regional Studies. The 'creative economy' as a guideline for development strategies has long become performative and generated its own urban realities. The paper first critically engages with policy mobility approaches as an explanatory framework for this guideline's global reach. It then puts forward the concepts of 'script', 'articulation' and 'performance' as an alternative perspective to understand better how this new paradigm inscribes itself into existing and well-established fields of urban politics. The case study on the city of Frankfurt/Main investigates the articulations of the creative-economy script with specific rationalities of urban governance. It traces the way by which a hegemonic understanding has been established that nevertheless is characterized by friction and ruptures that offer opportunities for a counter-hegemonic politics of differentiation.

In most parts of the post-socialist world high expectations regarding privatisation were quickly disappointed when it became obvious that property practices did not follow the ideal type predicted by market models. The article addresses this divergence and emphasises the necessity of overcoming the dualism of an ideal type of property rights on the one hand and the way property is handled in everyday life on the other. It argues that concrete situations as well as the necessary justifications of practices have hitherto both been widely neglected as empirical foci in studies on property relations. Five brief episodes from the privatisation of collective farms in rural Russia serve as examples to illustrate how situations and justifications are reflexively linked by drawing on and negotiating about differing orders of worth'.

Private-sector interest in agricultural land in Russia has increased rapidly over the past five years. Investors at home and abroad are acquiring land on a grand scale. These purchases bring with them a profound reorganisation of local political economies. Despite privatisation and reform of local self-government, informal arrangements from the Soviet era remain in force to this day. Agricultural enterprises have assumed the tasks of municipal services. Profit-oriented investors are breaking with this practice. This is highly problematic for the residents of the villages and towns. Two case studies show different strategies for dealing with investors.

This paper demonstrates how the global commodity chain approach has mutated from a critical tool for studying the production of inequality in the global economy to an instrument of development policy that extends the frontiers of marketization to so-called “peripheries” in the Global South. Taking an outgrower scheme for the global production of organic mangoes in northern Ghana as point of departure, and situating this case study within the broader context of market experiments in the Ghanaian agricultural sector, it develops an account of global capitalism as a diverse, heterogeneous and messy arrangement of local borderlands. As a zone of inclusive exclusion these borderlands are brought into being by an economic discourse which separates the inside of the capitalist world from its supposed outside. The so-called integration of smallholders into global markets relies on exclusionary representations and the forging of new associations. First, economic practices in northern Ghana are portrayed by economists as defective and in doing so determine what lies outside the market. Second, within this “outside” – on which the “inside” actually depends – global capitalism mediated through the market models and rhetoric of international development organizations now literally touches the ground in specific geographical settings. Hence Frontier regions as represented by our case study bear the paradoxical character of the work of economics and are an instructive example for the performative power of economic theories. Marketization is revealed as a complex and socio-technically entangled process full of hidden prerequisites and unforeseen consequences that open up new social spaces of multiple ontological reconfigurations.

Background Economic Geography sponsored a workshop to brainstorm collectively the emerging research themes in economic geography. We gathered a small group of midcareer scholars from 19 institutions in 7 countries on April 12–13, 2010, in Washington, D.C., to address what we considered a collective concern: that our discipline could use a significant boost in theoretical and thematic developments at this particular juncture. The workshop was intended to be one of the journal’s many contributions to disciplinary activities and ongoing efforts to keep the discipline vibrant for the next generation.The workshop aimed to achieve multiple goals. First, this was an attempt to develop a sense of collective responsibility for the discipline’s future. Economic geography is no longer monological and singularly centered, as Peck and Olds (2007) observed in their assessment of the Summer Institute of Economic Geography. Indeed, prior to the workshop, quite a few participants reported that they did not have a particular identity affiliation to the discipline but instead enjoyed multiple disciplinary affiliations through joint appointments or appointments in multidisciplinary departments. The increasingly specialized and fragmented nature of the discipline and the resulting “disappearing of the middle” translate into fewer scholars who are dedicated to the discipline, which, in turn, endangers the survival of the discipline. As Johnston (2002, 425) stated, “eternal vigilance is necessary to survival” of a discipline, and mobilization, as in the language of Latour, is a first step in disciplinary change (Johnston 2006).Thus, as editors with a disciplinary name that crowns the journal, we thought that the time was ripe for a deliberate intellectual mobilization.ecge_1114 111..126

Die Reorganisation der Kollektivbetriebe im ländlichen Raum Russlands stellt das größte jemals durchgeführte Privatisierungsprojekt überhaupt dar. Einbezogen waren über 10 Mio. Beschäftigte und eine Fläche, die dem fünffachen Staatsgebiet der Bundesrepublik Deutschland entsprach. Sie musste meist gegen den Willen der Betroffenen durchgesetzt werden und erreichte ihr ursprüngliches Ziel, die Etablierung kleinbäuerlicher Strukturen, nicht einmal in Ansätzen. Die Studie geht den Ursachen dieses Scheiterns nach und setzt sich dabei insbesondere kritisch mit der verbreiteten These auseinander, kulturell verankerter Kollektivismus und Egalitarismus determinierten die Entwicklungen im ländlichen Raum. Stattdessen wird gezeigt, dass der Schlüssel zum Verständnis des Verlaufs der Transformation in der symbiotischen Beziehung zwischen Hofwirtschaften und Großbetrieben zu sehen ist, deren Auflösung durch die Einführung marktwirtschaftlicher Strukturen erzwungen wird.

Soviet collectives in general and especially the kolkhozes in rural areas were much more than merely production units. They regulated a significant part of everyday life in the villages and thus have to be seen as all-embracing social institutions, constituting the bedrock for rural communities. Relying on the homogenising effect of the kolkhoz-mechanism most authors who analyse the process of transformation in the Post-Soviet Russian countryside highlight the failures of privatisation and consequently presume continuity and not change. This paper argues, first, that in view of the weakness of the central state in the 90s a considerable leeway existed at the local level for different ways and degrees to implement the reform legislation and, second, that the concrete outcomes of the restructuring can only be adequately understood focusing on interests and power relations on the micro level rather than dealing with farms as such as the 'acting units'.The common vantage point for most of the kolkhozes was an "alliance for the locale" between management and workers. It had its roots in the fear to become "slaves on one's own land" if non-local investors would be allowed to buy agricultural land, to remain without infrastructure like streets, water supply and kindergartens if the kolkhoz would be divided up and to lack the machinery to work the private plots without the support of the farms. But beyond this consensus the chairmen of the collective farms could rely on a bulk of different allocative and authoritative resources to stage-manage privatisation. This introduced a highly 'individual' moment in the process and led to rising disparities and an increasing disintegration of rural Russia in the 1990s. Using a farm in southern Russia as an example the closer look at these resources and the "failed privatisation" unveils, that not continuity, but hybrid amalgamations of old and new characterise the Post-Soviet Russian countryside. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.