1 Introduction to Globalisering og interaktiv Styring (Globalization and Interactive Governance) Bob Jessop This version is the preprint, pre-copyedited version. The published version can be found here: ‘Indledning’ (Introduction), in B. Jessop, Globalisering og interaktiv Styring (Globalization and Interactive Governance), Frederiksberg: Samfunds-litteratur, 13-23, 1999. * * * * * The present volume comprises six essays. They have been written during the last four years and represent some significant developments in, and departures from, my previous work. The latter has been concerned for some years with the relation between the economic and the political in capitalist social formations. I would now describe this relation in terms of the dialectic between the path-dependent structural coupling and the path-shaping strategic coordination of the economic and political moments of the capital relation in and across different spatial and temporal horizons of action. This is certainly not how my intellectual project was initially conceived more than two decades ago. But it is how I understand it now. For my various studies into this complex set of issues have themselves evolved dialectically. At first I focused on issues in state theory; then I turned to the radical critique of political economy; the next step was to analyze the changing articulation between the state and capital as forms of social relation and to understand attempts to re-design the ways in which the extra-economic conditions for profitable capitalist accumulation are secured; and, most recently, I have become interested in questions of scale and, especially, the dialectic of globalization- regionalization and the consequent re-scaling of economic and political relations. This introduction aims to sketch the genealogy of this project, to note some of its further developments as reflected in the current essays, and to suggest how these ideas can be elaborated in research on the multi-scalar, multi-temporal political economies of the economic and the political.