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By analysing UK media narrations surrounding the global financial crisis, this thesis presents a critical engagement with existing constructivist institutionalist literature. Through the application of a ‘dynamic tracing’ methodology to British broadsheet newspaper discourse from 2007-10, the thesis reveals three significant, and interconnected, dynamics. Firstly, it highlights the existence of ‘ideational reversion’, whereby after a short period of flux through late-2008 and early-2009, prominent discourses by and large returned to the pre-crisis status quo ante. By analysing the pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis discourse holistically, a notably higher degree of overall ideational stability is found than the existing literature suggests would be the case. Secondly, it is demonstrated that ideational disjuncture within media commentary was effectively ‘siloed’ in the financial sector, meaning that the perception of crisis did not challenge broader conceptualisations of the neo-liberal economy. Thirdly, the impact of such reversion and siloing was to provide a greater social source of legitimacy, or strategic advantage, to orthodox austerity narratives than to their Keynesian alternative. On the back of these observations, conceptual extensions are put forward that involve developing a greater focus on the ‘stickiness’ of pre-existing discourse through crisis periods.

This thesis is a study of the crisis-ridden social transition of the Thai state (1997-2010) by analysing the interrelations of social forces in the Thai historical bloc. The thesis argues that the recent political conflict in Thailand that reached its peak in 2010 transcended the conflict between the Thaksin government and its social antagonists, or merely the conflict between the Yellow and the Red Shirt forces. Rather, the organic crisis of the Thai state in the recent decade should be seen as social reflections of the unfinished process of social transition. Furthermore, this transition contains features of ‘crises’, ‘restructuring’, ‘transition’ and ‘other crises’ within the transition. The thesis employs a Gramscian account as a major theoretical framework because it stresses the importance of history, provides tools to analyse configurations of social forces, and offers a combined focus of political, social, and ideological matters. This thesis finds that the street fights and violent government repression in May 2010 was only the tip of the iceberg and the incidents of 2010 themselves did not represent a genuine picture of Thailand’s organic crisis. The crisis, this thesis argues, was not caused only by the Thaksin government and its allies. The Thaksin social force should be seen as a part of a broader social transition in which it acted as a ‘social catalyst’ that brought social change to the Thai state in terms of both political economy and socio-ideological elements. Therefore, the crisis of the Thai historical bloc resulted from the clash between the two distinct ‘social relations’―old and new―and the clash is still ongoing. In addition, this thesis has revealed the ‘three’ underlying crisis-ridden characters of the Thai state including social inequality, overwhelming roles of royalism-nationalism, and the harsh application of lèse majesté laws.

This thesis explores the development of the Sino-American imbalance between the mid-1990s and 2007. Addressing this issue, most mainstream economists have mainly concerned themselves with whether it is a natural reflection of cross-country differences in underlying ‘market fundamentals’ or an outcome of ‘misguided’ state policies which require corrective policy actions. On the other hand, international political economists have focused on its implications for inter-state power relations: whether it is a reflection of the US’ lasting hegemonic power based on the unique status of the dollar or a symptom of the rise of China as a new centre of the global political economy. In distinction to these existing views, this thesis focuses on the fundamental social foundation of the Sino-American global imbalance with the help of an Open Marxist account of capitalist social relations, and interprets the phenomenon as a form of the contradictory process of capital accumulation mediated by states’ economic policies. By analysing the social context of the contradictory rise of China as a surplus-running ‘factory of the world’ together with the contradictory rise of the US as a debt-ridden ‘consumption market of the world’ from the mid-1990s, this thesis lays out three arguments on the nature of the Sino-American imbalance. First, it is argued that what is called ‘misguided’ policies were employed by each state as a governing strategy securing reproduction of social relations in the face of an accumulation crisis, and thus the root cause of the imbalance was not the policies themselves but the crisis-tendency inherent in the capitalist mode of production. Second, this thesis argues that the imbalance was managed through de-facto international cooperation between the global centre of production (China) and the global centre of circulation (the US) which are mutually dependent in sustaining accumulation within their respective territories. Third, this thesis maintains that the cooperative relations conducive to sustaining growth in the form of a growing bilateral imbalance were fundamentally contradictory relations, helping productive forces in China maximize themselves without regard for the limited markets, and at the same time allowing credit in the US to expand regardless of the debtors’ ability to service the accumulated debts, thus amplifying the possibility of a crisis on the world market. Consequently, the Sino-American imbalance was a perverted form of international cooperation between China and the US for sustaining accumulation and securing reproduction of capitalist social relations.