Thompson, Grahame F.
Thompson, Grahame F.
Bio Sketch
Grahame F. Thompson is a British political economist and institutional analyst, affiliated with the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the Open University and the Department of Business and Politics at Copenhagen Business School (DBP/CBS). His work spans the political economy of globalization, the constitutionalization of corporate governance, and the theorization of everyday life. In his 2013 CRESC working paper "What is 'Everyday Life'?" he develops a distinctive account of everyday life centered on the imaginary rather than social relations alone — arguing that EDL is constituted through language, desire, psychic/symbolic relationships, and the administrative-performance culture of contemporary governance. His approach breaks with the sociological tradition (Goffman, Lefebvre) to emphasize language's resistance to commodification and the "Real Citizenship" produced through micro-constitutional orders in daily institutional life.
Key Works
- The Constitutionalization of the Global Corporate Sphere (2012) — analysis of constitutional orders beyond the state in global corporate governance.
- "What is 'Everyday Life'?" (2013) — CRESC Working Paper No. 130; EDL theorized through the imaginary, language, desire, and administrative governance.
- "Approaches to 'Performance'" (1985, Screen) — early work on performance as an analytical category.
- "Are we all neoliberals now? 'Responsibility' and corporations" (2008, Soundings) — neoliberal subjectivity and corporate governance.
Key Concepts
- Everyday Life — Thompson's account emphasizes the imaginary over social relations, language as non-commodifiable, and EDL as organized desire.
- Modernity — EDL and modernity coexist; modernity produces an explosion of non-commodifiable talk and communication.
- Henri Lefebvre — Thompson engages Lefebvre's "critique of everyday life" as one of three historical understandings of EDL but argues against the Marxist-recuperative framing as "misguided."
- Michel de Certeau — EDL as resistance through tactics; Thompson treats this as one variant of EDL-as-critique while offering an alternative administrative-governance reading.
- Maurice Blanchot — Thompson draws on Blanchot's distinction between everyday language and poetic/literary language.
Relevance to Geoffrey's Research
Thompson's paper is the most philosophically ambitious of the EDL-survey articles in the wiki. His emphasis on the imaginary provides a bridge between the political-economic tradition (Lefebvre, de Certeau) and the phenomenological/psychoanalytic register (Bachelard's "poetics of space," Blanchot's literary language, Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life). His concept of "Real Citizenship" — citizenship constituted not by sovereignty but by the micro-constitutional orders of administered daily life — offers a productive link to Foucault's governmentality and Spencer's "architecture as neoliberal truth game." The claim that language resists commodification is particularly relevant to questions about whether architectural image-circulation (Instagram, spectacle) can ever be fully captured by capital, or whether the everyday talk, chat, and "stuff" that modernity produces escapes commodification in ways that matter for the critique of iconic architecture.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work: