Matthew Eagleton-Pierce
Reader in International Political Economy
SOAS University of London
MAIN RESEARCH AREA
All my research has been preoccupied with understanding the forms of power in capitalism, with a particular interest around the nexus between material and symbolic power. My core empirical work is focused on the political economy of the City of London as a major centre of global commerce. Prior research concentrated on two other areas of capitalism: (1) trade (WTO; NGOs and trade policy); and (2) ideology (neoliberalism, the politics of managerialism). My disciplinary location is within international political economy and international political sociology.
Political economy of the City of London
The City is the largest exporter of financial and professional services in the world and thus plays a substantial role in the evolution of contemporary capitalism. However, there remains both scholarly and popular confusion on how the City has evolved over the past half century into its current configuration. How does the City work as a socio-economic ecosystem? This larger question is explored via an historical dissection of three, interrelated dimensions of the City’s power: (1) commodification processes; (2) governance structures; and (3) cultural practices. The research seeks to develop conceptual principles of sociation and individuation in order to explain the City and its players as both structured (by past histories) and structuring (of present actions and an imagined future).
Example publication and works in progress
Article: 'Uncovering the City of London Corporation: Territory and Temporalities in the New State Capitalism',
EPA: Economy and Space, Published online March 8, 2022.
Article: 'The Infrastructural Space of the City of London: Physical, Social, and Symbolic Properties'.
Article: 'Manufacturing Information, Influence, and Images: On the Role of Lobbying for the City of London'.
BOOKS
Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary (Oxford University Press, 2018). [Part of a collective writing project, lead editors Colin MacCabe and Holly Yanacek].
Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).
"Since 2008, and the government bail-outs that followed the financial crisis, there has been a flood of interest in neoliberalism. Eagleton-Pierce has done a sterling job in identifying the core themes and concepts and putting them into an accessible and readable volume. Highly recommended."
– Ray Kiely, Queen Mary University of London, UK.
"In the tradition of Raymond Williams’s Keywords, Eagleton-Pierce provides an indispensable guide to decoding the lexicon of neoliberal political-speak. Scholars will find the etymologies highly suggestive, enabling them to contextualize and nuance their analyses of the evolving dynamics of neoliberalism."
– Nik Theodore, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.
"A breath of fresh air in a notoriously dry, overly orthodox and all-too-often unimaginative field. Critical, innovative and persuasive throughout, this is the book we should all be reading and a standard by which we should judge future works on the WTO."
– Rorden Wilkinson, University of New South Wales.
"A deft adaptation and innovative extension of Bourdieu’s theory of classification struggles to probe the ordinary workings and submerged politics of multilateral negotiations on the global scene. With its intriguing mix of painstaking analytical elaboration and patient empirical parsing, this book sounds a double call for international political economy to add Bourdieu to its conceptual arsenal and to revise its methodologies to grasp how nations battle, rule, or submit beneath and beyond the ambit of material constraint and legal suasion."
– Loïc Wacquant, University of California at Berkeley.
ARTICLES
'Uncovering the City of London Corporation: Territory and Temporalities in the New State Capitalism', EPA: Economy and
Space, Published online March 8, 2022.
'Historicizing the Ideology of "the Market"', Competition & Change, 25 (2021), 5, 517-533.
'Introduction: The Political Economy of Managerialism' (with Samuel Knafo), Review of International Political Economy, 27
(2020), 4, 763-779. (Part of a Co-Edited Special Issue on 'The Political Economy of Managerialism').
'The Rise of Managerialism in International NGOs', Review of International Political Economy, 27 (2020), 4, 970-994.
'Professionalizing Protest: Scientific Capital and Advocacy in Trade Politics', International Political Sociology, 12 (2018), 3,
233-255.
'The Concept of Governance in the Spirit of Capitalism', Critical Policy Studies, 8 (2014), 1, 5-21. (Awarded Best Article by
Early Career Researcher).
'The Competing Kings of Cotton: (Re)framing the WTO African Cotton Initiative', New Political Economy, 17 (2012), 3,
313-337.
'Advancing a Reflexive International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39 (2011), 3, 805-823.
'The Internet and the Seattle WTO Protests', Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 13 (2001), 3, 331-337.
BOOK CHAPTERS
‘Economic Power’, in Goddard, S., Lawson, G., and Sending, O. J. (eds), The Oxford Handbook on International Political
Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022).
'Constructing a Favourable Environment for Capital Accumulation: The Case of the City of London Corporation', in
Benquet, M. and Bourgeron, T. (eds), Accumulating Capital Today: Contemporary Strategies of Profit and Dispossessive
Policies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
'Neoliberalism', in Shaw, T., Mahrenbach, L., Murphy, C., Modi, R., and Yi-Chong, X. (eds), Palgrave Handbook on
Contemporary International Political Economy (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2018).
'Trade', in Dingwerth, K. and Weinhardt, C. (eds), The Language of World Trade Politics: Unpacking the Terms of Trade
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
'All the Trader’s Men: Professionals in International Trade Policymaking', in Seabrooke, L. and Henriksen, L. F. (eds),
Professional Networks in Transnational Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
'Historicising the Neoliberal Spirit of Capitalism', in Springer, S., Birch, K., and MacLeavy., J. (eds.), The Routledge
Handbook of Neoliberalism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).
'Symbolic Power and Social Critique in the Making of Oxfam's Trade Policy Research', in Hannah, E., Scott, J., and
Trommer, S. (eds.), Expert Knowledge in Global Trade (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).
SMALLER PUBLICATIONS
Book review: 'Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski (eds), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism', Œconomia, 11-3
(2021), 539-542.