Neoliberal Hegemony Research Articles

Владно-ресурсні аспекти геополітики і формування ризиків стосовно країн Латинської Америки і Карибського басейну.

In this paper, an attempt is made to raise the question of the nature of modernity as such, with an understanding of the key development trends and the characteristics of political processes at the global and regional levels with a description of future risk issues. In the framework of the research vector, the insufficient study of the issue of the qualitative content of geopolitics was emphasized in connection with the completion of the US approval of neo-liberal hegemony and the corresponding reformatting of the world with the beginning of the introduction by the United States of America of a political and economic strategy for national development. It has been recorded that in the context of the implementation by other actors of world politics of the intentions of a new contouring of a multipolar world, a range of issues is being updated regarding the formatting of political and economic processes at the national-state level and awareness of the risks of the future, the search for ways to minimize them. Thus, the article analyzes the power of resource aspects of geopolitics, offers a vision of the nature and content of prospects, identifies risk zones in the context of the implementation of today's strategies in general terms and, in part, in relation to the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is concluded that under the conditions of “fluid modernity” and the establishment of a multi-polarity of the world with centering of the poles based on resource understanding of modern infrastructural power, the nature of the transformation of the “poles of the world” is fleeting, that is, the process of struggle to expand zones of influence, “territories of responsibility” is being updated, the risks of conflict are growing, with a separate problem of the forms and extent of social conflict. In the Latin American context, in particular, the significance of the very definition, production and distribution of risks, awareness of its “level by conditional score of the scale of values” It is emphasized that the prospects for formatting the world and regional changes largely depend on the development of processes in the USA, the leader of the democratic world and world economy.

The Kingdom, the Power, the Glory, and the Tawdry: Neoliberal Hegemony and the “Undoing” of the Demos

The Kingdom, the Power, the Glory, and the Tawdry: Neoliberal Hegemony and the “Undoing” of the Demos

Activism in changing times: Reinvigorating community psychology: Introduction to the Special Thematic Section

The field of community psychology has for decades concerned itself with the theory and practice of bottom-up emancipatory efforts to tackle health inequalities and other social injustices, often assuming a consensus around values of equality, tolerance and human rights. However, recent global socio-political shifts, particularly the individualisation of neoliberalism and the rise of intolerant, exclusionary politics, have shaken those assumptions, creating what many perceive to be exceptionally hostile conditions for emancipatory activism. This special thematic section brings together a diverse series of articles which address how health and social justice activists are responding to contemporary conditions, in the interest of re-invigorating community psychology’s contribution to emancipatory efforts. The current article introduces our collective conceptualisation of these ‘changing times’, the challenges they pose, and four openings offered by the collection of articles. Firstly, against the backdrop of neoliberal hegemony, these articles argue for a return to community psychology’s core principle of relationality. Secondly, articles identify novel sources of disruptive community agency, in the resistant identities of nonconformist groups, and new, technologically-mediated communicative relations. Thirdly, articles prompt a critical reflection on the potentials and tensions of scholar-activist-community relationships. Fourthly, and collectively, the articles inspire a politics of hope rather than of despair. Building on the creativity of the activists and authors represented in this special section, we conclude that the environment of neoliberal individualism and intolerance, rather than rendering community psychology outdated, serves to re-invigorate its core commitment to relationality, and to a bold and combative scholar-activism.

The Kingdom, the Power, the Glory, and the Tawdry: Neoliberal Hegemony and the “Undoing” of the Demos

The Kingdom, the Power, the Glory, and the Tawdry: Neoliberal Hegemony and the “Undoing” of the Demos

Post-work Futures and Full Automation: Towards a Feminist Design Methodology

Abstract Among business leaders, government officials and academics there is a general consensus that new technological developments such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the internet of things have the potential to “take our jobs.” Rather than resisting and bemoaning this radical shift, theorists such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have argued that full automation, universal basic income, and future thinking, should be demanded in order to challenge neo-liberal hegemony. Helen Hester has gone on to consider the limits and potentials of this manifesto in regard to the automation of reproductive labour. In this article, I take this work as a starting point and consider the significant burden that is left at the designer’s door in the post-work/post-capitalist imaginary. I explore the changes that would need to be made to design methods: techniques that are themselves part of the history of industrial capitalism. Focusing on the automation of domestic labour and drawing on feminist theory and emergent design practice, I begin to develop a feminist design methodology; without which I argue that an emancipatory post-work politics cannot be realised.

Transparency as Ideology, Ideology as Transparency: Towards a Critique of the Meta-aesthetics of Neoliberal Hegemony

Abstract Along with the increasing commodification of all aspects of culture and the persistent aestheticisation of everyday life under late capitalism, there is an equally increasing longing for objectivity, immediacy, and trust. As the mediation of our everyday experiences augments, a generalised feeling of mistrust in institutions reigns; the sense of a need to bypass them increases, and the call for more “transparency” intensifies. As transparency manages to bypass critical examination, the term becomes a source of tacit social consensus. This paper argues that the proliferation of contemporary discourses favouring transparency has become one of the fundamental vehicles for the legitimation of neoliberal hegemony, due to transparency's own conceptual structure-a formula with a particularly sharp capacity for translating structures of power into structures of feeling. While the ideology of transparency promises a movement towards the abolition of unequal flows of information at the basis of relations of power and exploitation, it simultaneously sustains a regime of hyper-visibility based on asymmetrical mechanisms of accountability for the sake of profit. The solution is not “more” transparency or “better” information, but to critically examine the emancipatory potential of transparency at the conceptual level, inspecting the architecture that supports its parasitic logic.

Struggles from Below in the Twilight of Neoliberalism


 Laurence Cox grew up around social movements and has been involved, since the early 1980s, in many different movements across several countries. Cox co-founded and co-edits the activist/academic movement journal Interface, co-directed an MA on activism in Maynooth, and works with activist PhD students. He is a senior lecturer in sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. His recent books include Why Social Movements Matter (2018) and, with Salar Mohandesi and Bjarke Risager, Voices of 1968 (2018). Most of his work is available free online via laurencecox.wordpress.com, academia.edu, and elsewhere. Here, Dylan Taylor talks to him about the tensions between activism and academia, the importance of Marxism in the study of social movements, and the decline of neoliberal hegemony.

Destituent power in the European Union: On the limits of a negativistic logic of constitutional politics

Since the euro crisis, protest movements present the European Union as a neoliberal hegemony that undermines democracy and prevents progressive reforms. They call for acts of resistance and partial disintegration to force a renegotiation of the treaties. In this article, I ask whether these ‘disruptive’ political strategies can be defended as a democratic practice of constitutional politics. To that end, I turn to the notion of destituent power, according to which opposition to or withdrawal from public authority can function as a legitimate trigger for constitutional change. I systematise the emerging debate on destituent power and discuss the plausibility of competing approaches. I argue that destituent power is best understood as grounded in popular sovereignty. It denotes the right to dismantle constitutional orders without the intention to construct new ones. While this idea supports some of the acts of contestation proposed by European protest movements, it faces a lure towards the jurisgenerative dimension of constituent power. Ultimately, the potential of a purely negativistic logic of constitutional politics is limited.

Freedom to Struggle: The Ironies of Colson Whitehead

This essay explores the changing role played by the idea of freedom in the fiction of Colson Whitehead. I begin by outlining some of the significations of ‘freedom’ within American culture before and during the period of neoliberal hegemony, placing particular emphasis on trends in the word’s provenance for African Americans between the civil rights era and the time in which Whitehead is writing. I then undertake an extended comparison between Whitehead’s novels Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and The Underground Railroad (2016). I argue that in Apex—published against the background of the Bush doctrine and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—Whitehead treats freedom ironically. The novel both pursues and treats critically a postmodern aesthetics that envisages symbolic action on language as the primary ground of politics. The Underground Railroad, by contrast, inhabits an African American literary genre—the novel of slavery—that is strongly wedded to discourses of bondage and freedom. This novel, arriving a decade after Apex, shows Whitehead responding to changes in American society and culture—particularly the advent of Black Lives Matter and a growing public awareness of the implications of mass incarceration policies for African Americans—that seem to call for a more sincere reckoning with the notion of freedom. I conclude with a discussion of time in Whitehead, arguing that his distinctive engagement with temporality lies at the heart of the vision of freedom after neoliberalism offered by his fiction.

Locally grounded principles for a Good Society

There is a revival of interest in the notion of a Good Society, within the context of the search for an alternative to neoliberal hegemony, but the concept remains imprecise. One way to provide greater clarity is to focus on underpinning principles. Attempts to date have largely taken a top-down approach. This article provides a new perspective by considering principles that should underpin a Good Society from a local, grounded perspective. It draws on research with people on low incomes from Black and Minority Ethnic groups, whose voice is rarely heard in debate. Findings include differences with more top-down approaches but also points of resonance. It is argued that developing a more robust construct of a Good Society with potential for broad appeal, requires linking principles to the realities of the lives of marginalised and disadvantaged groups, and with process a key consideration.

Using creativity to envision a good society

This paper considers research into civil society’s visions of a good society. In the context of this research, a good society was understood to be visions for society that included a variety of alternatives to the current neoliberal hegemony. These visions of a good society ranged from increased state intervention to place-based community level visions for society. Creative challenges were developed using creative participatory research approaches which are described below. These were framed around three core requests to civil society: to grow, encourage and converse. These core requests aim to empower the development of a broad solidarity of human values. This paper uses the theoretical perspectives of cultural, social, community and human capitals (Bourdieu, 1984; Flora and Flora, 2008; Putnam, 1995) to critically evaluate the creative challenges that have been developed by participatory research with civil society groups. The paper seeks to critically evaluate civil society’s visions of a good society, and to frame a counter-narrative to neoliberalism, which reflect creative challenges; to grow and encourage a civil society ‘field’ (Bourdieu, 1984).

The bureaucratic distortion of academic work: a transdisciplinary analysis of the UK Research Excellence Framework in the age of neoliberalism

ABSTRACTIn the years since the second Thatcher government (1983–87), and continuing until the present, universities in the UK have been subjected to a series of neoliberal reforms which have had a deleterious effect on academics’ working conditions and on the kind of research they are required to produce. 1986 saw the introduction of regular sector wide audits of research and scholarly activity designed to make academics more ‘productive’ and the institutions in which they worked more ‘competitive’. This article takes as the object of its investigation the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the most recent iteration of the UK government sponsored assessment exercise. It adopts a transdisciplinary approach which draws on political economy, social theory and critical discourse analysis. The analysis exposes the ways in which the Research Excellence Framework constructs an illusion of intellectual excellence and innovation whose true purpose is the neutralization of the university as a centre of independent knowledge creation and learning, and hence as a potential locus of intellectual opposition to the neoliberal hegemony. The article concludes by calling on academics to refuse the narrow model of research valorized by the REF and to reclaim the idea of the university as a public good.

Negotiating the tensions: A critical study of international schools’ mission statements

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how international schools negotiate the competing demands set forth by the discourses of ideological ‘internationalism’ and ‘market-driven’ multinationalism. This was accomplished through a critical discourse analysis of the mission statements of 46 Association of American Schools in South America (AASSA) member international schools. By identifying the interdiscursive and intertextual elements of the mission statements, we found that the potential tensions emerging from these competing discourses are often obfuscated, thus creating the semblance of congruency. This paper argues that by not acknowledging and disentangling these competing discourses, international schools may be subject to potentially detrimental consequences, which include marginalising their social and political possibilities and perpetuating neoliberal hegemony.

Food for Thought: Reflections on a Counter-hegemonic Food-related Intervention in a South African University

ABSTRACTCurrently the Academy operates primarily as a space that helps to create and cement neoliberal hegemony in the Gramscian sense. However, since hegemony is never complete, universities are a site of struggle and the opportunity exists to engage in a “war of position” within them. This must necessarily involve allowing space for counter-hegemonic discourses to emerge through critical reflection on “common sense” discourses, as well as the deliberate inclusion of counter-hegemonic thinking and theory from below. This article reflects on an attempt to do this in a South African university, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in relation to the issue of food. The Food Festival was an attempt to subvert interlocking hegemonic discourses, including that of food security, by “reading the world” (à la Freire) in order to understand the actual nature of existing food systems as inherently oppressive, and “inserting” the concept of food sovereignty as developed by the global peasants’ movement La Via Campesina. After considering the counter-hegemonic intentions of the Festival, the article reflects on its uneven success.

Precarietà, flessibilità e teoria del capitale umano

Moving from a foucauldian point of view, I will try to framing the problem of precariat in the broader perspective of neoliberal hegemony. So, after describing some of the peculiarities of precarious life forms, I will analyze the human capital theory, with which pedagogical reflection has to open a confrontation. To this end, at the conclusion of the essay, I will briefly consider some alternative proposals to human capital theory.

A Political Genealogy of Dance: The Choreographing of Life and Images

This article provides a genealogical critique of the history and modernity of dance. In doing so it establishes the political importance of dance as an art not principally of the body and its biopolitical capacities for movement, but of images and imagination. It traces the development of dance as an art of imagination, lost and buried in the works of Domenico da Piacenza, Jean-Georges Noverre, and Loïe Fuller, as well as its counter-movement expressed in the work of Rudolf Laban. It also locates contemporary dance within this political conflict by exploring new works, especially those of Ivana Müller, which call upon beholders to use their imaginations through the evocation of histories and memories. Such works can be understood to be deeply political, it will argue, because they work to transform society by creating time for a belief in the impossible. At its best, dance does not simply incite bodies to move but suspends movement, transforming the very image of what a body is capable of. These aims and practices of dance speak to contemporary concerns within political practice, theory, and philosophy for a reawakening of political imagination in times of crisis and neoliberal hegemony.

The CUT’s Experience during the Workers' Party Governments in Brazil (2003-2016)

This paper looks at the development of the Unified Workers’ Central of Brazil (CUT) during the four consecutive Workers’ Party (PT) governments, first under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and later under Dilma Rousseff. The analysis draws on various aspects of the power resources approach, but focuses specifically on institutional power. The government found it politically difficult to implement a left-wing programme, due to the complex nature of the ruling coalition and its conservative opposition in the broader context of neo-liberal hegemony and financial globalisation. By continuing to establish dialogue with social movements, the PT governments stimulated forms of social participation in developing public policies, reinforcing existing institutions and creating new ones. By using its institutional power, the CUT was able to strengthen its participation in public institutions. There were hardly any substantial debates on labour or employment conducted without the CUT’s participation. On the other hand, the privileged spaces in the labour arena did not achieve structural changes capable of redefining the country’s development model and the standard of work regulation.

Industrial relations in Italy in the twenty-first century

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reflect on the developments which have characterized Italy’s industrial relations from post-war Fordism to neo-liberal hegemony and recent crisis, with a particular focus on the major changes occurred in the twenty-first century, especially those concerning concertative (tripartite) policy making between the government, the employers’ organizations and the trade unions.Design/methodology/approachThis study is a conceptual paper which analysis of main development trends.FindingsItaly’s industrial relations in the twenty-first century are characterized by ambivalent features which are the heritage of the past. These are summarized as follows: “collective autonomy” as a classical source of strength for trade unions and employers’ organization, on the one hand. On the other hand, a low level of legislative regulation and weak institutionalization, accompanied by little engagement in a generalized “participative-collaborative” model. Due to the instability in the socio-political setting in the twenty-first century, unions and employers encounter growing difficulties to affirm their common points of view and to build up stable institutions that could support cooperation between them. The result is a clear reversal of the assumptions that had formed the classical backdrop of the paradigm of Italy’s “political exchange.” This paradigm has long influenced the way in which the relationships between employers, trade unions and the state were conceived, especially during 1990s and, to some extent, during 2000s, that is the development of concertative (tripartite) policy making. However, since the end of 2000s, and particularly from 2010s onwards national governments have stated their intention to act independently of the choices made by the unions (and partially the employers). The outcome is the eclipse of concertation. The paper explores how the relationships among the main institutional actors such as the trade unions (and among the unions themselves), the employers, and the state and how politics have evolved, within a dynamic socio-political and economic context. These are the essential factors needed to understand Italy’s industrial relations in the twenty-first century.Originality/valueIt shows that understanding the relationship among the main institutional actors such as the trade unions (and among the unions themselves), the employers and the state and their politics is essential to understand the change occurred in contemporary Italy’s industrial relations.

Articulating virtue: Planning ethics within and beyond post politics

Post-foundationalist political theories have provided some of the most radical tools of critique in recent years. As well as challenging the dominant orthodoxy of achieving consensus in decision-making, they give voice to claims that the world can be conceived differently than how it is expressed in contemporary neoliberal hegemony by the reassertion of disagreement as fundamental to democratic politics. However, this conflict itself is a means not an end: it provides the intellectual tools to dissemble the dominant qua hegemonic version of contemporary society and its concomitant framing of values, but it does not provide a way in which to assess the validity of any counterclaims to the contemporary hegemony. Post-foundationalist approaches can critique the status quo for its practice and ontology, but do not offer substantive grounds for an alternative. This is of particular importance for planning as an outcome-based activity; engaging daily with ideas of better or worse developments. If planning is to be conceived as ‘the art of situated ethical judgement’, questions of value judgement are central to any theoretical conceptualisation or critique. The article develops this argument by considering the contribution that Alasdair MacIntyre’s ethical and political thought could make to this debate. MacIntyre’s notion of virtue ethics demonstrates how ethical judgement can be made without the need for an enlightenment foundationalist ontology to underpin its claims. The article demonstrates how this approach allows for new ways of thinking through the ethical questions implicit in much of the post-foundationalist critiques of planning practice and, in turn, offers a situated way of judging outcomes, which is not constrained by the post-political condition.

The developmental state: can it travel from East Asia to Eastern Europe?

The demise of Leninist regimes was accompanied by the hegemonic rise of the free market ideology with neoliberalism being its most ideal-typical embodiment. Yet, the decades of the neoliberal hegemony on both global and regional sales have not removed the state and its role in promoting development from research and policy agendas. Moreover, neoliberalism has produced a string backlash in forms of nativist and populist reaction. Thus, the article sets out to trace the genealogy of the state within the framework of the late Leninist regimes and post-Leninist period, asking a question about the relevance of the East-Asian developmental state experience to post-Soviet conditions. The article discusses the experience of Japan and South Korea, while exploring theoretical underpinnings of the sociological discourse of the state and its role in the development. Thus, the article comes up with a condensed narrative of the history of the developmental state both as an institutional arrangement and sociological discourse. It discusses and evaluates the contribution to the sociology of the developmental state of such scholars as Alice Amsden, Peter Evans, Bruce Cumings. The article conceptualizes the relations between the developmental state and neoliberalism. It also identifies the causes of the developmental state crisis and evaluates the Easter-European experience with constructing such a state. The article defines the stumbling blocks on the way of building the developmental state in Ukraine. It is argued that given Ukraine’s proximity to the EU as well as pluralistic nature of the Ukrainian society the authoritarian option is not viable for Ukraine. At the same time, Ukraine is unlikely to succeed in building the developmental state, being caught in a struggle with a kleptocratic polity which has been unable so far to produce a long-term developmental polices.