Recovering a sense of political economy

Political economy remains a pressing agenda for political geography and human geography more generally. This is evident from recent exchanges between (variously defined) Marxists and post-structuralists on the nature of society and space, via themes such as scale, space, region, public policy, being political, etc. The paper explores imaginative spaces for discussing differences and considers the potential of cultural political economy (CPE)—being advocated by amongst others Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum—to deliver on this. I highlight some of CPEs strengths and weaknesses, identify missing links, and then make recommendations on how to develop the geographical dimensions of cultural political economy, and, finally, urge serious engagement with the sited complexities and contradictions of re-presentations and material practices. This is done via a study of the ‘skills society’ in the UK.