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In the policy discourses of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Commission (EC), modern biotechnology and the life sciences are represented as an emerging „bioe-conomy“ in which the latent value underpinning biological materials and products offers the opportunity for sustainable economic growth. This articulation of modem biotechnology and economic development is an emerging scholarly field producing numerous „bio-concepts!' Over the last decade or so, there have been a number of attempts to theorize this relationship between biotechnologies and their capitalization. This article highlights some of the underlying ambiguities in these conceptualizations, especially the fetishism about any,,bio“-item We offer an alternative view of the bio-economy by rethinking the theoretical importance of several key economic and financial processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mobility low-carbon transition is a key issue both socially and for mobilities research. The multi-level perspective (MLP) is justifiably a leading approach in such research, with important connections to high-profile socio-technical systemic analyses within the mobilities paradigm. The paper explores the key contributions that a Foucauldian-inspired cultural political economy offers, going beyond central problems with the MLP, specifically regarding: a productive concept of power that affords analysis of the qualitatively novel and dynamic process of transition; and the incorporation of the exogenous ‘landscape’ into the analysis. This move thus resonates with growing calls for attention to power dynamics in mobilities research and a ‘structural’ turn. In making this case, we deploy the key case study of contemporary efforts towards mobility transition in China. This not only sets out more starkly the importance of MLP’s gaps but also provides an empirical case to illustrate, albeit in the form of informed speculation, possible routes to low-carbon urban mobility transitionandthe inseparability from broader qualitative power transitions at multiple scales, including the global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present is a moment of crisis and transition, both generally and specifically in "knowledge" and its institutions. Acknowledging this elicits the key questions: where are we? Where are we headed? What, if anything, can be done about this? And what can the "economics of science" contribute to this? This paper assumes a "cultural political economy of research & innovation" (CPERI) perspective to explore the current upheaval and transition in the system of academic knowledge production, at the confluence of accelerating commercialisation and the seemingly opposing movement of "open science." This perspective affords a characterisation of the core of the current crises as a crisis of moral economy; an issue to which a political economy of epistemic authority is in turn crucial. A "remoralizing" of knowledge production is thus a matter of key systemic importance, though it is important to understand such developments in power-strategic, and not explicitly moral, terms. Much of the current moves towards "open science" and "massively open online courses" (MOOCs) can also then be seen as self-defeating developments that simply exacerbate the crisis of a viable "economy of science" and in no sense its solution. Their lasting significance, however, is more likely to lie precisely in their effects on the construction of a new moral economy of knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]