Study title

Economic crisis management has concerned governments and other responsible authorities from 2008. Yet crises are complex and subject to many attempts to interpret and explain them, to identify causes, attribute responsibility, assess their scale, scope, and significance, the need for minor changes or major reforms, and translate proposed solutions into feasible policies. This trans-disciplinary research project focuses on the complex and multi-faceted economic crisis that became evident in 2007 and will explore these issues through to 2011. Its key research questions are: have accounts of the 'crisis' changed from 2007 and which interpretations have become dominant; do the main varieties of capitalism have different forms of crisis within this context and/or do they favour different interpretations and solutions; what new approaches to crisis-management have been proposed and how are they evaluated; have crisis dynamics prompted new forms of multi-level governance and meta-governance. Different literatures and methodologies are used to answer these questions, respectively: corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis; actor-centred institutional analysis of varieties of capitalism and their place in the world market; studies of governance and governmentality; and studies on the EU's open method of coordination as sources of insight into global crisis-management. Further information CPECM contact: Prof Robert Jessop Email: r.jessop@lancaster.ac.uk ESRC contact: Rachael Tyrrell Email:rachael.tyrrell@esrc.ac.uk Telephone: 01793 444518 Cultural Political Economy Research Centre website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/cperc/index.htm