Jessop, Bob (1946-)

Bob Jessop is a British social theorist, state theorist, and political economist. He addresses five problems with major implications for power:

(1) the agency-structure problem, which he interprets through his strategic-relational approach;

(2) the relative autonomy of the capitalist type of state and its transformation in the postwar world;

(3) complexity and complexity reduction and their implications for the coordination of complex relations of interdependence—reflected in problems of governance, governance failure, meta-governance, and its failure; (4) spatiotemporal dynamics in general and their implications for the temporal sovereignty of the state and democratic politics; and (5) the semiotic dimensions of social life and their centrality to hegemonic struggles.

Jessop read sociology at Exeter University (1964–1967) and then held a PhD studentship in economics and politics and a postdoctoral fellowship in social and political sciences at the University of Cambridge (1967–1975). His interest in Marxism developed from the May 1968 student unrest in France and other European countries, becoming a key part of his identity as a theorist following his move to Essex University, where he taught government, sociology, and history (1975–1990). State theory soon became a passion, leading to major studies of Marxist approaches to the state, an intellectual biography of Nicos Poulantzas, debates about Thatcherism, and a major survey of non-Marxist and Marxist approaches to the state. He also elaborated his more general strategic-relational account of structure and agency through criticism of alternative philosophies of social science as well as of different approaches to state power. Moreover, responding to charges of “politicism”—that is, excessive concern with the political moments of political economy—he developed a distinctive approach to its economic moments. This synthesizes the French neo-Marxist regulation approach in economics, West German state theory, and the analyses of Antonio Gramsci within the overall framework of Marxist political economy and aims to establish the connections and mediations among capital's basic contradictions, middle-range institutional dynamics, and specific strategies and conflicts in particular conjunctures.

Jessop moved to Lancaster University in 1990. His research on responses to the crisis of Fordism prompted his controversial claim that the transition to post-Fordism involves a tendential shift from the Keynesian welfare national state to a Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime. This claim connects changes in economic and social policy, territoriality and scale, forms of governance, and the role of spatiotemporal fixes in displacing or deferring the inherent contradictions of capitalism. He also reinterpreted post-Fordism in terms of the “globalizing knowledge-based economy” and identified new (or newly important) economic and political contradictions. This work is informed by his collaboration with Ngai-Ling Sum on a distinctive, post-disciplinary cultural political economy approach that integrates [Page 358]critical semiotic analysis into the heart of political economy. A major statement of the strategic-relational approach, State Power (2007), has been followed by further work on cultural political economy and its implications for contemporary economic and political transformation.