Socio-Economic Review Advance Access published online on August 21, 2008
Socio-Economic Review, doi:10.1093/ser/mwn014
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Economic objects as cultural objects: discourse on foreign investment in post-socialist Europe
Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Correspondence: nbandelj{at}uci.edu
Bringing together perspectives from economic sociology and cultural sociology, this paper proposes that because economic phenomena are imbued with meaning they can be studied as cultural objects. This approach includes first identifying the content of people's understanding of economic phenomena and then tracing out what is it that structures their interpretations. The paper applies the cultural objects analysis to the public debates surrounding foreign investment in post-socialist Slovenia. Actors interpret economic phenomena so they can provide justifications for the positions they adopt in public debates and assess possible strategies of action. The content analysis of newspaper texts shows that foreign globalization pressures are mostly framed in a binary relation to national interests. But because economic consequences are uncertain, the particular understandings of how foreign investment affects national interests are multiple, even contradictory. They are shaped by the social identities of actors and historical and macro-structural conditions of post-socialism that make salient different, often contradictory, institutional orders.
Key Words: culture • economic sociology • globalization • transitional economies