Lecturer in Politics and International Studies

Email: I.J.Pirie@warwick.ac.uk
Tel: (024 765) 72557
Room: B0.13
Office Hours: Monday 4-5,Tuesday 6-7

Profile

Iain Pirie received his PhD from the University of Manchester in April 2004. After completing his thesis he was employed as an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Manchester until September 2004. He spent the 2004-2005 academic session as a Teaching Fellow at Lancaster before joining Warwick in July 2005. Iain is currently convenor of the 3rd year module ‘Politics of Globalisation’. He also teaches on the MA module ‘Globalisation, Governance and Development’. His research is driven by an interest in how structural changes in the global economy (the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism) have impacted on national state forms and social life more generally. This interest is reflected in the four articles and the monograph on the Korean political economy he published between 2005 and 2007. This was also the subject of the presentation he gave to the Chatham House’s Korean Discussion Group in 2006.

Research interests

Iain’s present work is less concerned with the impact of structural changes on particular national social formations than on particular aspects of social life in the core capitalist world as a whole. He has recently finished and will soon submit journal articles on the academic publishing industry and the viability of high skill competitiveness strategies in the contemporary global economy. The central objective of both these articles is to demonstrate how the social pathologies of contemporary capitalism are a result not of regulatory failings but the inherent laws of motion of capitalism itself. As such they advance the superiority of a classical Marxist approach to the understanding of political economy. In the immediate future Iain intends to write a critique of Neo-Listian development theory and to develop a Marxist political economy of Bulimia Nervosa.

Iain has acted as a referee for the American Journal of Sociology, Third World Quarterly, New Political Economy, Globalizations and Pacific Review.