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Cultural political economy (CPE) is a field of study that examines how meaning-making, symbolic systems, and everyday practices are intertwined with the production, distribution, and consumption of material resources and power. It is not a single unified theory but a broad intellectual terrain where scholars from cultural studies, political economy, sociology, anthropology, and geography converge. The field’s central premise is that economic life cannot be understood apart from the cultural frameworks that render it intelligible, legitimate, and desirable—and, conversely, that cultural forms are shaped by the material conditions and power relations in which they arise.
Mainstream economics and classical political economy have traditionally treated the economy as a distinct sphere governed by rational calculation, supply and demand, and objective measures like price and productivity. Culture, in this view, is either a residual category—tastes, preferences, or "non-economic" factors—or a superstructure that merely reflects underlying material interests. CPE challenges this separation. Its foundational problem is the question: How do economic orders come to appear natural, necessary, and even moral, and how do cultural meanings and practices both stabilize and destabilize those orders?
This question has become more urgent with the rise of globalized finance, branding, media industries, and digital platforms, where symbolic value (a brand’s reputation, a stock’s narrative, a platform’s user-generated content) is as economically consequential as physical production. CPE scholars argue that the economy is always culturally constituted: markets require shared conventions, trust, narratives, and classifications to function. At the same time, cultural production is always economically embedded: who gets to make meaning, under what conditions, and with what resources is a question of power and distribution.
CPE emerged in the late twentieth century from several intersecting traditions, none of which used the term itself. Its most important precursor is the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, which, from the 1960s onward, analyzed how class, ideology, and popular culture interact. Scholars there drew on Marxist theory, particularly Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony—the idea that ruling groups maintain power not only through coercion but through winning consent via cultural and ideological leadership. This tradition treated culture as a site of struggle, not a mere reflection of the economy.
A second root lies in critical political economy, especially the work of Marx and later theorists of imperialism and dependency. This tradition emphasized how capitalism expands, exploits labor, and concentrates wealth, and it provided CPE with its concern for material inequality and structural power. A third root is poststructuralist theory, particularly the work of Michel Foucault on discourse, governmentality, and the production of knowledge. Foucault’s insight that power operates through the very categories and classifications we use to understand the world—such as "the economy," "the market," or "the consumer"—gave CPE a powerful tool for analyzing how economic realities are constructed through language and expertise.
A fourth, more recent influence is the cultural turn in economic geography and economic sociology, which, from the 1980s onward, showed empirically how networks, trust, conventions, and local knowledge shape economic activity. Scholars like Viviana Zelizer and Mark Granovetter demonstrated that economic transactions are always embedded in social relationships and cultural meanings, challenging the abstract models of neoclassical economics.
CPE as a named field crystallized in the 1990s and 2000s, particularly in British and European scholarship, as researchers sought to combine these strands. The term itself is often associated with the work of Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop, who proposed a research programme focused on the "cultural political economy" of capitalism—examining how economic imaginaries, discourses, and semiotic practices contribute to the reproduction and transformation of capitalist social formations. However, the field is broader than this one school, and many scholars working under other labels—such as cultural economy, critical cultural studies, or political economy of communication—engage in what is recognizably CPE.
Because CPE is an interdisciplinary meeting ground, it is best mapped not as a sequence of schools but as a set of overlapping approaches that differ in emphasis, method, and political orientation. Four major approaches stand out.
This approach, rooted in Gramsci and Foucault, focuses on how language, narratives, and expert knowledge construct economic reality. Its central question is: How do certain economic ideas—such as "free trade," "austerity," or "the knowledge economy"—become hegemonic, and what exclusions do they enact? Scholars in this tradition analyze policy documents, media representations, corporate rhetoric, and international institutions like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. They show how economic policies are not neutral technical fixes but are made persuasive through storytelling, metaphor, and appeals to common sense.
The strength of this approach is its attention to the productive power of discourse: it explains why some economic policies seem inevitable while others are unthinkable. Its limitation is a tendency toward textualism—analyzing representations without sufficient attention to material constraints, institutional power, or the resistance of those who are the objects of policy. Critics have accused it of reducing the economy to language, though most practitioners insist they are analyzing the articulation of discourse with material practices, not replacing one with the other.
This approach stays closer to classical political economy, emphasizing the structural dynamics of capitalism—accumulation, exploitation, commodification, and crisis—while incorporating culture as a constitutive dimension. Its central question is: How do cultural forms and practices facilitate or contest the expansion of capital? Scholars in this tradition study the culture industries (film, music, publishing), intellectual property, advertising, and the "creative economy," asking how cultural labor is organized, how value is extracted from symbolic goods, and how cultural diversity is shaped by corporate concentration.
This approach is strongest in its analysis of power and inequality: it keeps questions of ownership, labor, and profit central. Its limitation is a potential functionalism—explaining cultural phenomena primarily by their role in capital accumulation, which can flatten the specificity, autonomy, and unpredictability of cultural life. The best work in this tradition avoids this by attending to the contradictions and unintended consequences of cultural production.
Drawing on cultural studies, ethnography, and the sociology of consumption, this approach focuses on how ordinary people make meaning and navigate economic life. Its central question is: How do everyday practices—shopping, working, saving, borrowing, gifting—reproduce or challenge economic orders? Scholars in this tradition conduct ethnographic studies of households, workplaces, markets, and digital platforms, attending to the moral economies, kinship obligations, and local knowledges that shape economic behavior.
This approach corrects the top-down bias of the first two: it shows that culture is not only imposed by elites but also produced from below. It is particularly attentive to gender, race, and generation, since these shape who does what kind of economic work and how it is valued. Its limitation is a potential localism—an emphasis on micro-practices that loses sight of larger structural forces. The most sophisticated work connects everyday practice to global chains of production and finance.
This approach, inspired by Foucault’s later work, examines how economic conduct is shaped through techniques of calculation, measurement, and self-management. Its central question is: How do devices—such as credit scores, performance indicators, budgets, and audits—produce governable economic subjects? Scholars in this tradition analyze the "apparatuses" (assemblages of institutions, technologies, and knowledges) through which populations are managed. They study, for example, how the "entrepreneurial self" is cultivated in workplaces and schools, or how financial literacy programmes teach individuals to bear risk that was once socialized.
This approach is valuable for its attention to the mundane technologies of power—the forms, algorithms, and metrics that shape behavior without overt coercion. Its limitation is a tendency toward abstraction: the analysis of "neoliberal governmentality" can become a totalizing narrative that leaves little room for resistance, variation, or historical specificity. Critics also note that it can obscure the brute force and inequality that underpin market orders.
These four approaches are not mutually exclusive, and many scholars combine them. A study of the 2008 financial crisis, for example, might use the discourse approach to analyze how "subprime" borrowers were narrated as risky, the materialist approach to trace the profits made from securitization, the practice approach to examine how households made sense of their mortgages, and the governmentality approach to show how credit scoring technologies distributed risk. The field is characterized by productive tension rather than consensus: discourse analysts argue that materialists underestimate the constitutive power of language; materialists argue that discourse analysts underestimate the coercive power of capital; practice theorists argue that both neglect human agency; and governmentality scholars argue that all three neglect the specific technologies through which power operates.
Contemporary CPE is marked by several durable concerns. Financialization—the growing dominance of financial motives, markets, and actors in everyday life—is a major focus, with scholars examining how households, states, and firms have been reshaped by debt, speculation, and asset ownership. Digital platforms are another central site, as researchers analyze how companies like Google, Amazon, and Uber extract value from user data, gig labor, and algorithmic management, and how platform logics are reshaping culture itself. Environmental crisis has also entered the field, with scholars asking how economic imaginaries of growth and progress are being contested by alternative framings of sustainability, degrowth, and ecological justice.
The field remains methodologically plural, drawing on textual analysis, ethnography, archival research, and political-economic statistics. It is also geographically diverse: while much early work was centered in Europe and North America, scholars in Latin America, Africa, and Asia have developed analyses of colonial legacies, informal economies, and South–South exchange that challenge the field’s implicit assumptions. A notable recent development is the growing attention to race and colonialism as constitutive of capitalism, not incidental to it—a correction to earlier work that treated class as the primary axis of inequality.
CPE’s enduring contribution is its refusal to let either culture or economy be treated as a self-contained sphere. It insists that the most consequential questions of our time—who gets what, why, and how that arrangement is made to seem right—require an analysis that moves fluidly between the symbolic and the material, the everyday and the structural, the local and the global. Its practitioners do not always agree on how to do this, but they share the conviction that the separation of culture and economy is itself a cultural and political achievement, one that must be examined rather than assumed.