Entrepreneurial state and profitable culture: Nexus of culture, capital and development in Saudi Arabia

Alowfi, Ahmed Saad G

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115726 Copy

Description

Title

Entrepreneurial state and profitable culture: Nexus of culture, capital and development in Saudi Arabia

Author(s)

Alowfi, Ahmed Saad G

Issue Date

2022-04-20

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Bayat, Asef

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Bayat, Asef

Committee Member(s)

• Dill, Brian
• Gille, Zsuzsa
• Moussawi, Ghassan

Department of Study

Sociology

Discipline

Sociology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Culture
• developmental sociology
• capitalism
• developmental state
• cultural transformation

Abstract

Since the mid-2010s, Saudi Arabia has experienced an extraordinary cultural transformation as part of a developmental project to diversify the country’s economy. This state-led transformation has remade cultural life and urban spaces, with measures ranging from expensive infrastructure for arts and music to relaxing strict moral codes for public conduct and promoting entertainment. Why does the state’s pro-market development subsidize leisure activities? Why does its top-down nation-building project center the promotion of open cultural expressions and cosmopolitan attitudes? This dissertation examines these transformations in terms of the changing relationships among culture, capitalism, and the developmental state in the twenty-first century. I argue that the shift in global value chains from the tangible to the intangible has informed a corresponding transformation in the way the developmental state approaches culture as a means of economic growth. Addressing such seemingly incoherent provisions in the post-2015 developmental project, I show that such cultural policies, often dismissed as image manipulation strategies, are in fact devised to perform a fundamental function in the overall developmental plan. Operating on discourses emerging from the intensifying nexus between culture and capitalism, the post-2015 state project’s logic seeks to derive economic value from maximizing exposure to global flow by making its spaces culturally open and turning its subjects into creative, flexible, open-minded and cosmopolitan individuals, contrasting with the industrious and rational man or the Weberian spirit of capitalism. While high modernist state projects in the previous century were characterized by uniformity and rationalistic aesthetics in ordering people and spaces, the post-2015 top-down state project seeks to exploit difference and organize society in the image of diversity and enchanted aesthetics. Based on ethnographic observations, interviews, policy documents, and archival materials, I trace historical shifts in which culture is conceptualized within developmental discourse in Saudi Arabia. I also detail how the culture-capitalism nexus is taken to the extreme by an entrepreneurial state, turning various areas of cultural life into sites for capital accumulation and significantly redrawing state-society relations. The dissertation encourages the rethinking of the developmental state and the type of humanistic high modernism that implies a new kind of developmental politics that brings the state closer to people’s lives and blurs the boundaries between cultural, economic, and political domains.

Graduation Semester

2022-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Ahmed Alowfi

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