Neoliberal Era Research Articles

Labour Policies of the Centre Right in the Neoliberal Era: The True Path Party

Labour Policies of the Centre Right in the Neoliberal Era: The True Path Party

Inspiring Contributions: Fan Leaders’ Directives and Encouragement in the Chinese Online Celebrity Fan Community

Abstract In the neoliberal era, there is a new phenomenon where numerous fans follow fan leaders’ instructions to make tangible or intangible contributions to support celebrities, which has exacerbated economic polarization. Although past studies have explored fan empowerment in the Internet era, fan leaders’ promotion effect has remained unstudied. This study aimed to discover fan leaders’ role in guiding fans’ contributions in the Chinese fan community. By integrating a two-step flow model and participatory culture theory, it used qualitative content analysis to analyze 410 posts and 972 comments in the Chinese singer Song Yaxuan’s fan community from February 3 to 10, 2023. Through an inductive approach, four main themes were derived from results: (1) task delegation and empowerment; (2) user-friendly instructions and seamless communication; (3) highlighting a sense of crisis and putting pressure on fans; and (4) fostering a collective mindset. The findings revealed fan leaders use different techniques and the top-down structure in the community to encourage fans to give voluntary contributions of money or time to the celebrity’s development. Theoretically, this study showed internal operation logic in Chinese fan community. Practically, the study shed light on how to lessen the harmful consequences of neoliberalism’s features within the Chinese entertainment industry and realize healthy development.

Neoliberalism, left behind Middlesbrough and levelling up: an intractable policy task?

ABSTRACT Proposing to narrow spatial inequalities in one of the most unbalanced economies in the developed world, the Levelling Up agenda was a key driving force behind the Conservative Party obtaining their largest majority since 1987 at the 2019 general election. The agenda, though, has been beset by various problems and has all but fallen by the political wayside. One key problem was that it lacked a political economic understanding of left behind places, especially Northern post-industrial locales that were lagging particularly due to deindustrialisation under neoliberalism. Many of these post-industrial places have endured persistent deprivation and entrenched social problems for around four decades. This paper is structured as follows. It begins by exploring UK neoliberalism, before briefly discussing the emergence of left behind places and the Levelling Up agenda. Focussing on the experiences of left behind Middlesbrough, in Teesside, UK, the article explores the area’s rise in light of the iron, steel and petrochemicals industries and its decline particularly in the neoliberal era. As the town’s demise is intimately connected to neoliberalism, the paper closes by discussing why it is highly unlikely left behind places such as Middlesbrough will be revived under the UK’s current form of capitalism.

Family Farmers as Agents in the Struggle for Survival: A Case Study from Turkey☆

AbstractThis paper discusses the survival strategies of small family farms in a western Anatolian village in the context of ongoing debates in the current literature concerning the future of small or peasant family farms under the conditions of the neoliberal era. The main argument of the paper is that even though the neoliberal agrarian policies in Turkey put into effect since the early 1980s have divested farmers of much of the protective policies in force in earlier periods—thereby putting them under much severe market pressures—other pressure mechanisms in this case under investigation have a more central impact on their survival. These pressures are the patterns of social and cultural change that occur due to modernization, alongside regulations concerning access to land which the farmers seem to be able to counter by organizing and mobilizing their internal, material, and social resources, within cultural norms. The arguments presented are based on the analysis of empirical data collected through field work carried out in a village of farmers specializing and engaged in the production of dried figs. The study emphasizes the multi‐causal, multi‐layered, contingent, and hybrid nature of the question of survival for these villagers and argues that it should be evaluated as a process, rather than an outcome, with the villagers themselves as agents in this process.

Managing the Discontent of the Losers Redux: A Future of Authoritarian Neoliberalism or Social Capitalism?

ABSTRACT: Neoliberalism eviscerated the value-sharing ethos of the postwar golden age (1945–1973), seeking to maintain social cohesion in civil society by "managing the discontent of the losers": reconciling working households to the realities of the neoliberal labor market by means of coercion, distraction, and debt accumulation (the last serving to limit the growth of consumption inequality in the face of burgeoning income inequality). The global financial crisis undermined the process of household debt accumulation, creating a crisis of neoliberal accumulation. Key to the institutional renewal required to address this crisis is managing the discontent of the losers inherited from the neoliberal era. One possibility is authoritarian neoliberalism, which involves amplification of the "coerce and distract" elements inherited from the previous regime. The alternative is social capitalism: a renewal of social democracy that eliminates the discontent of the losers and so reduces both the need and desire for illiberalism.

Post-Internet Music: Negotiating Queer Identity in the Digital Era

My paper investigates an electronic music genre that emerged in the 2010s, in conjunction with the rise of attention to identity politics on mainstream platforms. The genre does not have a definite name; however, attempts have been made by critics (see, for example, Waugh 2017) to categorise it under the umbrella term "post-internet music". Such a label encompasses different and often competing sub-genres, all of which nonetheless share an imbrication in internet discourse: these range from Hyperpop, to ‘Deconstructed Club, to ‘Conceptronica’ (Reynolds 2019). As such, the post-internet genre has three distinguishing features: a) many artists operating within it identify both themselves and their music as queer; b) on the sonic side, the genre often comprises complex sound design, loud mixes, a wide stereo field, organic drum samples, pitched-up vocals, and beats that elude conventional time-signatures, so as to sound "deconstructed"; c) the music often makes overt or subtle reference to internet culture, and the digital domain. I seek to place particular attention to the conjuncture between the genre's sonic properties and its ‘queerness’, arguing that the genre is both enabled by, but also enables, internet-mediated identity categories. In this sense, I question what it means to be queer in the contemporary neoliberal era, how this might historically differ from previous elaborations of queerness, and to what extent electronic music - a genre so entrenched in masculinist narratives of technology - can act as a vehicle for counter-normative expression. 

Breaking path dependency? Factors to enhance capacity for rural local governments in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

ABSTRACT Path dependency, often coinciding with the downloading of various responsibilities with reduced funding from higher levels of governments during the neoliberal era, has led to capacity challenges for rural local governments to pursue sector diversification activities. Despite these challenges, research has indicated that, through entrepreneurial efforts, breaking path dependency is possible. Drawing from Staples Theory, Evolutionary Economic Geography, New Public Management, and New Localism as well as primary data from key informant interviews, this paper identifies five factors that influence the capacity of rural local governments to break path dependency. In doing so, it identifies a relationship between New Localism and local governments, and its potential as a bridge for rural economic development. These findings are important, as they contribute to the limited but growing literature related to New Localism and its potential applications for rural local governments in Canada to facilitate economic development.

Liminalities: Social Vulnerabilities Between Participatory Processes and Digital Space in the Neoliberal Era

This article explores the development directions of liminal spaces and cities as a whole within the broader framework of neoliberalism in the Italian metropolitan context. First, neoliberalism was defined and considered in the context of liminal spaces and urban development, according to the international literature perspective. Then, with specific reference to the Italian case, through semi-structured interviews, it was found that liminal spaces, despite facing marginalisation, translocalisation and defamiliarisation, acted as antagonists and nuclei of resistance to the encroaching framework of neoliberalism. The article also explores the role of digital ecosystems as tools for empowerment; it also emphasizes the role of liminal spaces in fostering communitarianism while resisting the change experienced and brought about by the surrounding urban spaces.

The Imagination of Women’s Solidarity Against Normal Family Ideology in the Neoliberal Era: An Analysis of the Movie Good-bye Single

The Imagination of Women’s Solidarity Against Normal Family Ideology in the Neoliberal Era: An Analysis of the Movie Good-bye Single

Access to Labour and “Differential Inclusion” for Young Venezuelan Migrants in Ecuador

Young migrants and refugees provide important inputs concerning production and social reproduction mechanisms (care work) that reproduce unequal but highly profitable patterns of accumulation around the world. The expansion of globalisation and neoliberalism has deepened such social dynamics, leading to a “multiplication of labour.” The diversification and heterogenization of migrant labour within neoliberal frameworks raise ethical and human rights concerns, including issues related to fair wages, working conditions, and access to social protections. After a neoliberal era in Latin America, the emergence of post‐development politics in the region led to increased efforts to address the needs of these populations. This article seeks to contribute to debates about “differential inclusion” in South–South migration and access to labour and social protection by analysing a specific case study of young Venezuelans, a recently growing phenomenon that has a great impact on the region. Ecuador is noteworthy because it hosts one of the largest populations of Venezuelan migrants and refugees and has adopted a human rights perspective in conjunction with public investments in social policy, health, and education. Despite efforts to legalize the work status of Venezuelan migrants, a more restrictive policy began to be implemented in 2019 that limited their access to formal labour and social protection. Within these complex dynamics of differential inclusion, instead of seeing these young migrants and refugees as victims, we analyse their resilience strategies of accessing social provisions while coping with informality and irregular status, as well as conditions of multiplication of labour. Using four real‐life stories as examples taken from a larger ethnographic study, we illustrate how dynamics of differential inclusion intersect with the gender, age, and legal status of young Venezuelans in Ecuador. The case studies are complemented with structural explanations from 6,000 household surveys collected between 2017 and 2020.

The Global Disappearance of Decent Work? Precarity, Exploitation, and Work‐Based Harms in the Neoliberal Era

This thematic issue offers an international perspective on precarious work and the social harms generated by such work. In the following introduction, we contextualise these trends in relation to entrenched neoliberal policy, rising contractual insecurity, the proliferation of borders, and other forms of institutional discrimination and inequality. We distinguish between formal contractual insecurity and the subjective experiences of precarity, interrogate the types of harms that accompany precarious work, and set out a social justice perspective for an engaged critique of precarious work. The collection is truly global in its scope, encompassing case studies from Bangladesh, China, Czechia, Ecuador, Finland, Italy, India, Jordan, Latvia, and Spain. These case studies draw out the diverse contexts for rising precarity, ranging from post‐soviet, post‐socialist, and neoliberal transitions to post‐colonial and neocolonial contexts, examining how precarity is shaped by and interacts with divisions of ethnicity, migration status, gender, sexuality, and class. This thematic issue arises out of the work of the (In)Justice International Collective and is dedicated to the organization’s founder, Dr. Simon Prideaux, who passed away in 2023.

De kallar oss för partners: Betydelsen av maskulinitet för konstruktionen av gig-arbetare som nyliberala subjekt

In today’s neoliberal era, the gig economy is rapidly expanding. Gig jobs span various sectors of the labor market and have been both lauded as an opportunity to enter the workforce and criticized for their insecure and precarious nature. While previous research has emphasized the importance of gender in understanding contempo-rary neoliberal development, such as how ideals of femininity are used to interpellate female subjects as malleable workers in developing countries, less attention has been paid to masculinity. This article offers an empirically based analysis of how masculinity is employed to construct subjects within a specific context of gig work situated in the urban space, and the resulting implications for the gig workers’ understanding of themselves and their situation. Drawing on interviews with six gig-working food delivery drivers – all young men – the study sheds light on the precarious positions these workers inhabit while being framed as neoliberal masculine subjects through ideological associations to entrepreneurship. The overarching argument of the article is that the neoliberal structure of the gig-platforms propels exploitative relations in the labor market, masked behind gender associations.

Indian Farmers’ Struggle 2020–2021: Contemporary Agrarian Questions and Challenges for a Marxian Political Ecology of Agriculture

This essay draws from critical agrarian studies and the history of farmer’s movements in India in order to shed light on a central problem that the Marxian political ecology of agriculture must confront: how can we develop an ecologically adequate approach to agrarian questions without falling into populism? Or, put differently, how can we reformulate the intuitions of food sovereignty movements through the perspective of the ‘global worker’, thus revealing the ‘unity of the diverse’? It does so by reflecting on debates surrounding the meaning of the agrarian questions in the 21st century, responses to the farmers’ struggle against the so-called new farm laws, and the crisis confronting capitalist world-ecology in the neoliberal era. In particular, the essay thinks through the Bernstein–McMichael debate in the context of the recent farmers’ struggle. It concludes by posing some problems that the Marxian political ecology must confront today.

The New Politics of Inflation and Economic Disruption: Unlearned Lessons from the 1980s and 1990s in Australia

In the 1980s, debate over inflation and unemployment in Australia promised to lead to new institutional priorities based on revised, corporatist principles. However, labour's functional capacity to influence policy, particularly anti‐inflation policy, evaporated during the neoliberal era. Recently, new contradictions in the economy have emerged (as well as a new mode of accumulation, with altered production demands and political pressures), exposing lessons that remain unlearned from the prior stagflation years and permanent problems and incapacities for the contemporary polity.

Exploring the creative city in post-revolutionary Downtown Cairo: On coworking spaces and neoliberal strategies in New Egypt

ABSTRACT This paper examines the remaking of Downtown Cairo in the post-revolutionary era through real-estate’s adoption of the creative city approach using a neoliberal strategy of adaptive reuse for historical buildings. Through mapping a new narrative of coworking spaces in Downtown Cairo and carrying out spatial and observational analyses of Consoleya coworking space as a case study, the paper situates and theorizes spatial practices of the creative city and explores the subject formation of the entrepreneurial citizen as a neoliberal strategy to pacify Downtown Cairo. The analysis draws on the work of Harvey’s entrepreneurial urbanism, Bourdieu’s social construct of capital, and Foucault’s subject formation to demonstrate coworking spaces’ monetization of Downtown Cairo, generation of class privileges and exercise of control through an entertaining atmosphere of co-creation. The case study epitomizes New Egypt’s neoliberal era of soft control recurring in the ongoing urban regeneration projects of Downtown Cairo.

Tracing ideologies, influences, and politics: the shaping of a state monopoly in Turkey’s sports system (1920s–1990s)

ABSTRACT Despite Turkey’s changing political regimes, sports have remained under state governance since 1938. This article analyzes the ideologies, influences, and politics that have shaped this state monopoly over the sports system across three phases from the 1920s to the 1990s: establishment, stabilization, and instrumentalization. The establishment phase aimed to align sports with nation-building ideals, incorporating nationalist ideology and paramilitarism. The stabilization phase embraced a statist approach influenced by socio-economic conditions and Soviet influence. The instrumentalization phase, beginning with the Özal years, utilized sports for political discourse and socio-economic purposes, retaining the state-run system even during the era of neoliberalization.

Elite Reproduction and Power in the Neoliberal Era: The Image-Making of King Carl XVI Gustaf as ‘Sweden’s Leader’

Elite Reproduction and Power in the Neoliberal Era: The Image-Making of King Carl XVI Gustaf as ‘Sweden’s Leader’

Reanimating Public Happiness: Reading Cavarero and Butler beyond Arendt

Abstract This article takes as its point of departure Hannah Arendt’s discussion of public happiness, contextualising it within her thoughts on politics, democracy and revolution. It draws on Arendt’s discussion of how the expression “pursuit of happiness” has historically shifted from a public understanding of happiness into an increasingly privatised one. The article engages with Arendt’s account of public happiness in order to reanimate her radical democratic critique of how representative politics reduces the scope of political action and participation; and how the notion of happiness in a neoliberal era can only be interpreted in economistic and subjectivist terms. Furthermore, the article turns to examine how recent works in contemporary political thought, namely, those by Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, extend and transform the stakes of Arendt’s account of public happiness. On one hand, Cavarero’s notion of surging democracy is considered as an account of radical politics that keeps alive the Arendtian concern with public happiness by contextualising it within contemporary political struggles and social movements. On the other hand, Butler problematises Arendt’s discussion of politics for its neglect of precarity; however, this article argues that Butler’s work on assembly extends Arendt’s by highlighting possibilities of resistance, radical democracy and even public happiness amid experiences of loss and grief. Although prima facie it might appear that happiness and precarity are opposed to each other, this article points towards contemporary political practices, such as those of Ni Una Menos, that are critically reanimating public happiness through the intertwining of affective registers that range from joy to grief.

Introduction | Introduzione

The growth and sharpening of social inequality at both a global and national level is a key theme of the current public and academic debate. This rise in inequality, one of the most significant social facts of the contemporary world, extends beyond the neoliberal era as its permanent legacy: it is also found in the chaotic transition to a historical phase marked first by a return to protectionism and then by the eruption of conflicts in various parts of the world.

Imperial Past, Neoliberal Present, Dependent Future: A Political-Economic Approach to Urban Development of Bursa

Urban spaces, as the material representatives of past capital accumulation strategies, survive or get replaced on the basis of actors' strategies and partnerships. Periodization allows conceptualising these decisions and subsequent spatial change with respect to evolving local and national settings. The study focuses on expanding such approaches to Türkiye's experience beyond the two primate cities Istanbul and Ankara by the example of a secondary city, Bursa. The study uses maps, plans, official documents and newspapers corresponding to the periods and literature to form the connections between the actors' decisions and the spatial changes. The results highlight that while the previous periods' urban fabric and heritage is being replaced during the neoliberal era in parallel with the national experience, the problems faced as a secondary centre in close proximity to a primate city reduces local agency much more severely, leaving the urban space more vulnerable to exogenous influences.