Journal of Cultural Economy is part of the Culture, Economy and the Social publishing programme of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio Cultural Change (CRESC). Its concern is with the role played by various forms of material cultural practice in the organisation of the economy and the social, and of the relations between them. As such it will provide a unique interdisciplinary forum for work on these questions from across the social sciences and humanities. These include the contributions of actor network theory and science studies to debates about the ‘performativity' of the economy and the social and the parallel discussions about the distributive nature of economic and social agency across networks of things and persons that is evident in social anthropology, and material culture studies.

In cultural studies, feminism and sociology, a range of perspectives have been deployed to explore the making up of social and organizational identities, and this has been complemented by approaches to the governance of economies and of the social stimulated by Foucault's work on ‘governmentality'. This has been paralleled by important historical work on the relations between culture, economy and the social. A renewed focus on material cultures of production and consumption has also been animated by the work of Gilles Deleuze and of Pierre Bourdieu. While all of these approaches to the relations between culture, economy and the social have interacted with and influenced each other, there has been a relative shortage of debate across and between them. Journal of Cultural Economy seeks to remedy this deficiency by providing the premiere forum for debating the relations between culture, economy and the social in all their various manifestations.