Ontology, Epistemology and Global Political Economy: Work, Labour and Social Reproduction.

In Power, Production and Social Reproduction, we began to explore a socialontology that would enable us to re-think basic categories and concepts of(global) political economy. In this paper we will try to take things a littlefurther by engaging in the debates between positivist, conventionalist (e.g.humanist and hermeneutic) and critical realist perspectives on ontology andepistemology. The aim is to be able to better make sense of ontologyunderstood broadly as an historical and human process involving human agency inthe creation of the institutions and structures of social life in a givenperiod, or more broadly, in shaping social reproduction. This approach willtherefore build on our earlier sketch of an approach to explanation in globalpolitical economy that incorporates the dialectic of structure and agency aswell as power/knowledge as a means to identify the moments not only of powerand production but also of social reproduction in the emerging world order. One way to do this is to further explore the distinction between work - whichin the sphere of production broadly mediates relations between social andnatural orders - and labour. The latter is a particular aspect of work whichin capitalism is appropriated and controlled in the capital-labour relation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]