Political Creativity

Political Creativity intervenes in the lively debate currently underway in the social sciences on institutional change. Editors Gerald Berk, Dennis C. Galvan, and Victoria Hattam, along with the contributors to the volume, show how institutions inevitably combine order and change, because formal rules and roles are always available for reconfiguration. Creative action is not the exception but the very process through which all political formations are built, promulgated and changed.
Drawing on the rich cache of antidualist theoretical traditions, from poststructuralism and ecological theory to constructivism and pragmatism, a diverse group of scholars probes acts of social innovation in many locations: land boards in Botswana, Russian labor relations, international statistics, global supply chains, Islamic economics in Algeria, Islamic sects and state authority in Senegal, and civil rights reform, colonization, industrial policy, and political consulting in the United States. These political scientists reconceptualize agency as a relational process that continually reorders the nature and meaning of people and things, order as an assemblage that necessitates creative tinkering and interpretation, and change as the unruly politics of time that confounds the conventional ordering of past, present, and future. Political Creativity offers analytical tools for reimagining order and change as entangled processes.
Contributors: Stephen Amberg, Chris Ansell, Gerald Berk, Kevin Bruyneel, Dennis C. Galvan, Deborah Harrold, Victoria Hattam, Yoshiko M. Herrera, Gary Herrigel, Joseph Lowndes, Ato Kwamena Onoma, Adam Sheingate, Rudra Sil, Ulrich Voskamp, Volker Wittke.

Introduction: Beyond Dualist Social Science: The Mangle of Order and Change
PART I. RELATIONALITY
Chapter 1. Processes of Creative Syncretism: Experiential Origins of Institutional Order and Change
—Gerald Berk and Dennis C. Galvan
Chapter 2. Ecological Explanation
—Chris Ansell
Chapter 3. Governance Architectures for Learning and Self-Recomposition in Chinese Industrial Upgrading
—Gary Herrigel, Volker Wittke, and Ulrich Voskamp
Chapter 4. Reconfiguring Industry Structure: Obama and the Rescue of the Auto Companies
—Steven Amberg
PART II. ASSEMBLAGE
Chapter 5. Animating Institutional Skeletons: The Contributions of Subaltern Resistance to the Reinforcement of Land Boards in Botswana
—Ato Kwamena Onoma
Chapter 6. Creating Political Strategy, Controlling Political Work: Edward Bernays and the Emergence of the Political Consultant
—Adam Sheingate
Chapter 7. Accidental Hegemony: How the System of National Accounts Became a Global Institution
—Yoshiko M. Herrera
Chapter 8. The Fluidity of Labor Politics in Postcommunist Transitions: Rethinking the Narrative of Russian Labor Quiescence
—Rudra Sil
PART III. TIME
Chapter 9. From Birmingham to Baghdad: The Micropolitics of Partisan Identification
—Victoria Hattam and Joseph Lowndes
Chapter 10. The Trouble with Amnesia: Collective Memory and Colonial Injustice in the United States
—Kevin Bruyneel
Chapter 11. Interest in the Absence of Articulation: Small Business and Islamist Parties in Algeria
—Deborah Harrold
Conclusion: An Invitation to Political Creativity
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments