Neoliberal Framework Research Articles

The Neoliberal Production of Cultural Citizenship in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats

This essay draws together theories of neoliberalism and immigration to examine their shared interest in individual agency and the power of the nation-state. Though both theoretical perspectives tend to separate subject and object positions, this essay argues that Ruth L. Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats (1998) problematizes such a bifurcated understanding of subjectivity by narrating the complex political and economic positionality known as cultural citizenship—that is, a subject’s self-determination within the state even as the state’s normative structures influence the subject. Through Akiko Ueno, a Japanese housewife, Ozeki shows how an immigrant’s subject and object positions cannot be separated from one another within the transnational framework of neoliberalism. The narrative foregrounds the simultaneity of these experiences to suggest that opportunities for freedom and agency are, paradoxically, both possible and impossible. This essay contends that My Year of Meats envisions forms of substantive individual and communal resistance to neoliberal values while also identifying how socially-produced cultural citizenship still places immigrants within the purview of the neoliberal nation-state.

The Economic Argument for Stakeholder Corporations

The mainstream economic theory of the corporation is written to fit within the neoliberal framework of perfectly efficient markets. The entity itself — the corporation — is hypothesized as simply a site for freely negotiated contracts between rational actors, and the privileges granted to the corporation by public power are erased. As all negotiations between rational actors lead to efficient outcomes, the theory goes, the dominance of shareholders and their exclusive authority in decision-making must be the most efficient structure for corporations. The neoliberal economic theory that underlies shareholder primacy is deeply flawed and does not reflect how corporations actually operate and distribute value between stakeholders. While many economists that the shareholder primacy model is, and always has been, a “natural law” of the market, its dominance in American corporate governance is only decades old — and ultimately, shareholder primacy is a failed economic model. By documenting the economic arguments made to support shareholder primacy and showing why these assumptions do not hold, this article adds to the growing literature on the effects of corporate shareholder primacy. I argue that shareholder primacy should be replaced by a model of “stakeholder corporations,” in which stakeholders collectively engage in corporate governance and own corporate equity.

Forest management in Bolivia under Evo Morales: The challenges of post-neoliberalism

Based on a study of the forest sector in the northern Amazon region of Bolivia, this paper addresses the reasons why the Bolivian so-called “postneoliberal” project is an adjustment of neoliberalism rather than a departure from it. First, Bolivia has aimed not so much at breaking away radically from neoliberal frameworks as at reasserting the importance of the state and of the national scale in regulatory actions. Second, the neoliberal period has left behind the insuperable legacy of a neoliberal approach to nature: by allowing local stakeholders to access forest resources, it has reinforced a commercial relationship with the non-human world. Third, it is not easy to reverse the internationalization of forest governance. All in all, the Bolivian state's reterritorialization of the country's margins through the control of forest resources has perpetuated processes that were initiated during the hybrid neoliberal period (1993–2005), though the focus has shifted from commoditizing the forest for the benefit of local stakeholders to facilitating the redistribution of this resource on a national scale. Since 2006 Evo Morales's forest governance has tried to integrate this multiscale dimension to create a pragmatic management model that combines agrarian colonization, conservation and extractivism. This explains both the apparent contradictions of the new Bolivian forest policy and the difficulties in creating a radically new form of governance. The case of Bolivian forests shows the extent to which neoliberalism has shaped spaces and scales in a way that guarantees its own resilience.

A policed state – higher education quality policies and influences on Asian tourism scholarship

ABSTRACTThis paper examines tourism academic policy impacts of higher education subscribing to arbitrary citation impact measures of quality and the consequence towards tourism scholars engaging within intra-Asian mobilities. The research objective is prompted by the lack of insights exploring whether the default academic policies have shaped Asian identities (in a personal and professional capacity), and if such antecedents facilitate or inhibit the pursuit of tourism scholarship. With Asia as a region postulated as a corridor that will likely sustain high growth, it is probable that there is a corresponding increase in terms of tourism scholars interacting with Asia. For this reason, this research seeks to uncover the implicit nature of ethnic academic identities amidst the contemporary higher education frameworks that seek to scrutinise quality outcomes. To achieve the research objectives, intra-Asian tourism academics were shortlisted from a range of Asian countries delivering tourism programmes in English. Each academic was contacted via email in their respective institution, where the research aims were stated, and a personal invitation presented to be part of the sample. As a result, this process derived a total of 22 completed online surveys. The findings showed that very few scholars immediately identified with their ethnic background or nationality. Rather, there was a greater emphasis on career or research expertise. This research further highlights the tensions that exist between one’s ethnic background and the professional expectations and pressures of tourism scholars within a neo-liberal framework of higher education policymaking.

Rethinking Control: Complexity in Agri-environmental Governance Research

First paragraph: Discourse on governance always faces the challenge of describing, and usually simpli­fying, the many voices who formally and informally participate in controlling, and therefore governing, shared outcomes for community members both locally and globally (Callon, Lascoumes, & Barthe, 2009). Environmental and agricultural governance faces this problem redoubled, as outcomes and governing bodies cross boundaries between spe­cies, affecting humans and nonhumans, animals and otherwise (Latour, 2017; Tsing, 2015). Ad­dress­ing incoher­ence, difference, and complexity (Law, 2004) is a general research concern among social scientists who wish to avoid subjugating otherwise margin­alized participants. By looking to measurements and research methods that arise from studies outside politics and economics, actors that would be hidden or silenced by political economic critiques and metrics may become visi­ble. For engaged governance research, the benefits of this are clear: a more inclusive social science of govern­ing stakeholders. This edited collection brings together diverse international scholarship in agri-food social science research to rethink the frame­work of agri-environmental governance. The edi­tors frame the selection of essays as efforts to look to the mess of stakeholders, legislators, grow­ers, eaters, food councils, lands, crops, assessments, and so forth as a governing assemblage. By doing this, researchers are able to explore meanings and social experiences that diverge (although do not entirely separate) from neoliberal (e.g., large, cor­porate) frameworks in ways that complicate the governing underpinnings that are continually at work (re)territorializing the world of agriculture, food, and environment policy and praxis....

Canal Commands and Rising Inequity

Public sector irrigation is rapidly changing in India, and the state of Maharashtra is no exception to this. Public sector irrigation projects that were designed independently of groundwater are increasingly being used to harness ground- water. This has been a gradual ongoing process which has shifted benefits from public to private. Increasing use of groundwater in canal commands has huge implications for equity, both in terms of direct access to water and decision-making in its use and allocation, and also indirectly, in terms of changing land and labour relations. Changing discourse in the water policy, prioritising the private over public interests is contributing substantially to these inequities. Without wanting to suggest that water inequities are an outcome of the present neoliberal framework alone, this article reflects the concern that the neo-liberal language has become dominant in steering water policies and programmes that hold implications for water access, allocations and decision-making. This article uses examples from canal irrigation projects in Maharashtra and the emerging policies around its governance to highlight the increasing privatisation of a public resource.

(Un)Regulated Relations: An Ethnographic Perspective of Dog Ownership on Isla Mujeres, Mexico

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the regulation and management of dogs in the Mexican municipality of Isla Mujeres. It shows how dogs, on Isla Mujeres, are managed under a neoliberal framework of a decentralized government which relies on the personal responsibility of citizens and the outsourcing of essential services to non-government and private organizations. In so doing, this paper demonstrates some of the political and organizational contexts within which human-dog relationships are situated. In particular, it analyzes the ways that humans relate to dogs within a regulatory and socio-political framework. This paper is based on a six-week period of ethnographic research, primarily situated within an international non-government animal rescue organization. From this vantage point, this paper shows how neoliberal approaches to dog management within the municipality creates tension between personal and governmental responsibilities and fosters reliance on the third sector to provide animal welfare and wellbeing services. Within this network of distinctly human relationships, the wellbeing of animals is obscured, leading to a series of animal welfare crises within the municipality.

Liberation through Cooperation: How Library Publishing Can Save Scholarly Journals from Neoliberalism

This commentary examines political and economic aspects of open access (OA) and scholarly journal publishing. Through a discourse of critique, neoliberalism is analyzed as an ideology causing many problems in the scholarly journal publishing industry, including the serials crisis. Two major efforts in the open access movement that promote an increase in OA funded by article-processing charges (APC)—the Open Access 2020 (OA2020) and Pay It Forward (PIF) initiatives—are critiqued as neoliberal frameworks that would perpetuate existing systems of domination and exploitation. In a discourse of possibility, ways of building a post-neoliberal system of journal publishing using new tactics and strategies, merging theory and praxis, and grounding in solidarity and cooperation are presented. This includes organizing journal publishing democratically using cooperatives, which could decommodify knowledge and provide greater open access. The article concludes with a vision for a New Fair Deal, which would revolutionize the system of scholarly journal publishing by transitioning journals to library publishing cooperatives.

Challenges to critical legal education: A case study

The article analyses the impact of the neoliberal policy framework and managerialism on critical legal education in the context of Waikato Law Faculty, University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. The delivery of critical legal education challenges the ideology and implementation of current tertiary education policy and training because it is designed to deliver critical knowledge and not just vocational information. Waikato Law School was established in 1990 the year the neoliberal tertiary policy was enacted in the Education Amendment Act 1990. It represented an attempt to introduce a more critical and inclusive approach to legal education. The article provides an account of the struggle to maintain a critical approach under a statutory framework that requires conformity to government policy designed to cut the cost of tertiary education and integrate universities into a neoliberal policy framework. The case study is intended to illustrate the insidious influence of the policy on undermining a legal education that prepares students to think critically. It is also intended to illustrate that it is possible to resist this interference in the fundamental role of the academic to be the critic and conscience of society.

Thinking Outside the Box: The National Context for Educational Preparation and Adaptation among Chinese and Korean International Students

Despite growing scholarly interest in international education, few studies have examined how the broader historic, structural, and cultural contexts of sending nations inform the global perspectives and pedagogical strategies of international students before and after migration. Based on surveys and focus groups with Korean and Chinese international students at one public university, the study provides an in-depth look at national differences in learning contexts as they may affect the educational and social adjustment of international students through the lens of gender, family, and nation. We argue that international students view and experience their overseas education through different historical and national understandings of family, economy, and culture within mainland China and South Korea—the former emphasizing geopolitical concepts of family and nation centered on China’s position within the global hierarchy and the latter invoking “compressed” neoliberal frameworks representing a time-space compression of traditional hierarchies and neoliberal free-market ideals in Korea. The study reconciles and synthesizes micro- and macro-levels of analyses by comparing the ways Korean and mainland Chinese international students navigate their educational experiences in the United States based on their respective nationalistic frameworks and shifting gender/family relations in the homeland.

Premises, Perils, and Promises of ASEAN Integration

This article is aimed at analyzing the premises, perils, and promises of ASEAN integration. Beyond examining the region’s situation, this article will also draw lessons from the European Union and various incipient Latin American integration projects. Specifically, this article will address the following questions: (a) How does the ASEAN’s founding myth affect the ASEAN integration project’s general direction? (b) What is wrong with ASEAN’s current neoliberal framework? (c) What country will be the likely hegemon of the ASEAN economic and socio-cultural community? (d) Is a solidarity-based, people-centered, grassroots-driven, and non-neoliberal model for ASEAN integration possible and sustainable? (e) What lessons can be drawn from the European and Latin American integration schemes?

Locura y neoliberalismo. El lugar de la antipsiquiatría en la salud mental contemporánea

Este artículo pretende analizar los cambios en la comprensión de la locura luego de la irrupción del movimiento de la antipsiquiatría y examinar los procesos de adaptación de sus planteamientos en el marco del ascenso y auge del neoliberalismo. De acuerdo a la observación crítica de los postulados del movimiento de «ex pacientes o sobrevivientes de la psiquiatría» y el modelo de “recuperación” [recovery] en salud mental, se describen las transformaciones ideológicas en la comprensión y abordaje de la locura en la salud mental contemporánea. Finalmente, se examina la vigencia de la antipsiquiatría en un contexto neoliberal en base al reconocimiento de la importancia de la defensa de derechos de ciudadanía, el fortalecimiento de la autonomía y la construcción de una política de alianzas en el campo de la salud mental, así como el potencial transformador de los espacios comunitarios y movimientos sociales que reivindican la locura como base de su identidad colectiva.

For Reproductive Justice in an Era of Gates and Modi: The Violence of India's Population Policies

This article addresses India's contemporary population control policies and practices as a form of gender violence perpetrated by the state and transnational actors against poor, Adivasi and Dalit women. It argues that rather than meeting the needs and demands of these women for access to safe contraception that they can control, the Indian state has targeted them for coercive mass sterilisations and unsafe injectable contraceptives. This is made possible by the long-term construction of particular women's lives as devalued and disposable, and of their bodies as excessively fertile and therefore inimical to development and progress. It further considers how population policy is currently embedded in the neoliberal framework of development being pursued by the Indian state. In particular, it argues that the violence of population policies is being deepened as a result of three central and interrelated aspects of this framework: corporate dispossession and displacement, the intensification and extension of women's labour for global capital, and the discourses and embodied practices of far-right Hindu supremacism. At the same time, India's population policies cannot be understood in isolation from the global population control establishment, which is increasingly corporate-led, and from broader structures of racialised global capital accumulation. The violence of India's contemporary population policies and the practices they produce operate at several different scales, all of which involve the construction of certain bodies as unfit to reproduce and requiring intervention and control.

From informal housing to apartment housing: exploring the ‘new social’ in a gecekondu rehousing project, Turkey

This article engages with the question of the ‘new social’ that emerges in the relocation of the poor in slum renewal projects. Drawing upon both Lefebvre’s theorization of abstract space of capital and social space of people, and the neoliberal framework in which the economic dominates the social, the complex relationship between the spatial and the social embedded in political economy is demonstrated. In the Turkish context, the ‘new social’ is situated at the intersection of spatial transformations, housing representations, neoliberalism and Islam. In the housing estate of the case study, the abstract space was challenged by the bottom-up responses of some residents who tried to create their social space rooted in their previous experiences in the gecekondu; it was reacted by other residents who embraced the higher status of apartment living. The void produced by destroying the gecekondu habitus was filled by religious activities and consumption-inspired everyday practices.

Cracking the Code: the social mobility commission and education policy discourse

Promoting social mobility seems to be simple common sense. However, the solutions proposed in the UK under successive governments reflect a problematic individualism that is not about helping all of the poorest children, but about encouraging the poor to become as ruthless and competitive as the middle and upper classes. This article shows how the emphasis on competition is delivered in social mobility policy through the language and metaphors that are used. It examines how the problem of social mobility is represented through a critical discourse analysis of Cracking the Code: How Schools Can Improve Social Mobility. This 2014 report, produced by the UK Government’s Social Mobility Commission, uses metaphors, especially sporting metaphors, to engage the reader in its discourse. These include ‘key steps’ and ‘marginal gains’, ‘walking the walk’ and ‘stepping up to the plate’, being ‘sharp-elbowed’, and ‘cracking the code’ itself. These metaphors tell a story of competitiveness. The report exemplifies a wider climate in which we are now trying to ‘crack’ entrenched issues such as poverty, but still working within the neoliberal framework where the solution is yet more competition. Through metaphor, the report seeks to justify, disguise and normalise such competition, and make it seem common-sensical.

A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC AND REGIONAL POLICY IN BRAZIL IN THE LAST TWO DECADES

Este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar as mudanças da estrutura brasileira e nordestina, com base na política econômica e regional implementada nas últimas duas décadas. Portanto, propõe-se inicialmente realizar uma análise do rumo destas políticas, busc

Open science initiatives: challenges for public health promotion.

While academic open access, open data and open science initiatives have proliferated in recent years, facilitating new research resources for health promotion, open initiatives are not one-size-fits-all. Health research particularly illustrates how open initiatives may serve various interests and ends. Open initiatives not only foster new pathways of research access; they also discipline research in new ways, especially when associated with new regimes of research use and peer review, while participating in innovation ecosystems that often perpetuate existing systemic biases toward commercial biomedicine. Currently, many open initiatives are more oriented toward biomedical research paradigms than paradigms associated with public health promotion, such as social determinants of health research. Moreover, open initiatives too often dovetail with, rather than challenge, neoliberal policy paradigms. Such initiatives are unlikely to transform existing health research landscapes and redress health inequities. In this context, attunement to social determinants of health research and community-based local knowledge is vital to orient open initiatives toward public health promotion and health equity. Such an approach calls for discourses, norms and innovation ecosystems that contest neoliberal policy frameworks and foster upstream interventions to promote health, beyond biomedical paradigms. This analysis highlights challenges and possibilities for leveraging open initiatives on behalf of a wider range of health research stakeholders, while emphasizing public health promotion, health equity and social justice as benchmarks of transformation.

Creating Surplus Labour: Neo-Liberal Transformations and the Development of Relative Surplus Population in Indonesia

ABSTRACTMany among the world’s population are surplus to the requirements of capital accumulation. These are people who become engaged in precarious employment both in rural and urban contexts and those who are involuntarily unemployed. Their presence has been particularly acute in “peripheral countries.” Mainstream economic literature explains this in terms of the dual labour market, where it is argued that surplus labour will eventually disappear with market-led economic development. Contrary to this explanation, this article argues, using Marx’s concept of relative surplus population (RSP), that under the existing neo-liberal framework such labour vulnerability is continually being created. This article charts the developmental history of Indonesia and demonstrates that the growth of RSP is an outcome of a neo-liberal transformation which favours capital accumulation at the service of global markets. Neo-liberal adjustments shape the development of RSP in three related ways. First, the adjustments change class relations and transform state orientation. Second, the reconfiguration of class dynamics and the state shapes the model of accumulation. Third, the model of accumulation eventually affects the size of RSP. It is argued that the disconnection between the domestic agricultural development and industrialisation has contributed to the maintenance of a large RSP in Indonesia.

Neoliberal capitalism and China's strategic patent framework for the global intellectual property regime

Neoliberal capitalism and China's strategic patent framework for the global intellectual property regime

‘Smart food city’: Conceptual relations between smart city planning, urban food systems and innovation theory

Abstract This paper develops a conceptual link between smart city planning and urban food systems research in terms of governance and innovation. The ‘smart city’ concept is linked to an urban research agenda which seeks to embed advances in technology and data collection into the infrastructures of urban environments. Through this neoliberal framework, market-led and technological solutions to city governance and development are prioritised. The urban food movement has a different trajectory compared to the smart city agenda, comprising a diverse mix of urban food production practices, including community and grassroots-based social innovations, and associated more recently with food security discourses. Recognising these ideological and epistemological differences (between the smart city and the urban food movement) is important for conceptualisations of ‘smart food city’ governance. Based on theoretical reflections, review material and findings from a European project on city-region food systems, the paper argues that smart technology can be an important part of the solution to city food challenges but in combination with social innovations to enable flexible modes of governance that are inclusive, technologically and socially-orientated and linked to specific city-region contexts. Key elements include city regionalism, new organisational structures and connectivities, a circular model of metabolism and social practices.