Political geography II: Institutions

Abstract

Modern power is bureaucratized power, institutionalized formally through governmental and non-governmental structures and informally through unwritten social conventions. This report reviews recent political geographic work on the institutional arrangements that enable and constrain all political practice. Institutions here refer to organizations as well as looser semi-institutionalized patterns in public and private life. The report will first examine the scholarship on formal organizations and it will then review the research on professional fields and popular culture. The conclusion highlights the transnationalization and neoliberalization of institutions as a theme that runs through much of contemporary political geography.

Knowing like a global expert organization: Comparative insights from the IPCC and IPBES

“…The term 'institution' has a dual meaning. It can be understood to mean both a formal organizational structure, but also a more dispersed structure of habitual practice and unwritten rules (Kuus 2018). This speaks to a fundamental theoretical tension between structure and agency in understanding how institutions shape action, and vice-versa.…”

Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war”: Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot‐print of the US military

“…As Weber discusses, bureaucracy is a “rational‐legal form of domination and control” (, p. 300) that systematically organises human activity and complex processes for purposes of efficiency and order. Kuus has noted that modern‐day institutions are too often “dismissed as lumbering iron‐cage bureaucracies” (, p. 1). The US military and DLA‐E are not lumbering at all, as they “lock‐in” a future of highly mobile fossil‐fuelled warfare, in spite of, and likely because of, widespread environment change (Gilbert, ).…”

Professions and their expertise: Charting the spaces of ‘elite’ occupations

“…They emphasize volatile transnational networks that flatten formal hierarchies and hybridize forms of expertise (Peck, 2017: 5–6). They stress the co-production of ways of knowing and ways of governing, the imperative to closely examine the institutions that produce policy ideas, and the need to study organizations as processes of organizing (Kuus, 2020; Pallett and Chilvers, 2015). They also indicate that professionals have some room for maneuver – some autonomy – within organizations.…”