Neoliberal Lens Research Articles

Academic excellence as “competitiveness enhancement” in Russian higher education

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse critically the Russian Academic Excellence Initiative (the Project 5-100), designed to propel five leading Russian universities into world university rankings (WURs) by 2020, and research it through the lens of neoliberalism. The paper seeks to reveal recurrent discourses and dominant orders of discourse constituting the overall concept of “excellence” in Russian higher education (HE) policy. Design/methodology/approach Since the Project 5-100 has been designed in line with a neoliberal model of academic excellence initiatives, emphasising “competition as a driver of excellence” (Hazelkorn, 2009), Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) has been adopted as a qualitative research method. There is no universally accepted definition of “excellence” in HE policy; therefore, this CDA also aims at revealing the Russian government’s vision of the concept and its voice in HE policy. Findings The paper concludes that the government reinforces neoliberal discourse on the HE agenda and transforms the 5-100 Universities’ identities through emphasising the role of WURs in modernising the HE system. Consequently, within the neoliberal paradigm, the Project 5-100 can be regarded as a manifestation of the commodification of “excellence” in Russian HE policy. Originality/value This research intends to broaden knowledge of excellence initiatives in HE policy and reveal their features and neoliberal natures. It also seeks to contribute in terms of showcasing a qualitative study of the Project 5-100 for future comparative analyses of similar HE policies.

Social bodies and social justice

AbstractThis paper identifies and engages with thesocial bodiesemerging by virtue of the social turn in the life sciences and recent embodied approaches to social justice. Across these diverse domains, bodies are being narrated as shaped by and dependent on their environments. To explore this potentially important and productive convergence, we bring Martha Fineman's vulnerability theory into conversation with neuroscience and environmental epigenetics. We foreground significant intersecting concerns and argue that vulnerability theory – and other embodied models of social justice – is strengthened by taking embodiment seriously, including attending to the social turn in the life sciences. This can enhance the potential traction of these progressive theories. These in turn provide an alternative theoretical framework to the neoliberal lens through which neuroscience and epigenetics have hitherto been translated into policy and practice. We nevertheless acknowledge the potential limitations and dangers of the current biopolitical landscape.

Diverging discourses: Examining how college students majoring in communication define diversity

Colleges and universities in the United States often promote diversity through a neoliberal lens by framing diversity as a celebration of individual differences or a commodity that students can gain by attending their institution. In communication courses, diversity has been conceptualized through both neoliberal and critical lenses, but limited research has investigated how communication students define and explain diversity. The focus of this study was to understand how communication students define diversity. We performed thematic analyses on open-ended survey responses to investigate how communication students define diversity. Four themes emerged from our analyses: (a) diversity is a mechanism for unifying communities, (b) diversity is an affirmation of individual differences, (c) diversity is a harbinger of acceptance and equality, and (d) diversity is a disruptive force that re-centers the voices of traditionally marginalized people. Our findings indicate most communication students define diversity through a neoliberal lens. However, 3% of our participants conceptualized diversity through a critical lens by explaining that diversity should create space for those who are marginalized to have their voices heard. We conclude by providing recommendations for communication instructors to incorporate more critical conversations about diversity into their classrooms and foster diverging discourses about diversity across communication curricula.

Urban China through the lens of neoliberalism: Is a conceptual twist enough?

Neoliberalism as a hegemonic global ideology and framework of governance has been the subject of extensive critical analyses in geography and urban studies. Despite the conceptual difficulties involved, a growing number of scholars have attempted to apply this critical discourse to China. In this commentary, we critically interrogate the urban China literature that deploys the neoliberal lens, mostly authored by scholars outside China, and we raise the fundamental question as to whether this discourse can ever capture the central stories or trajectories of China’s urban transformation. We examine the interpretations of China’s urban land property market, urban inequality and its spatial manifestation, and the emerging urban governmentality – the areas in which neoliberalism has been most often invoked – to highlight the utility and limitations of a neoliberal treatment of China. We argue that the neoliberal representation of China’s urban (re)development, with its preoccupation with capital and class interests, is unable to effectively capture the distinctive nature of entanglement of capital, state and society in China, and thus obscures the driving role and the competing rationalities of the authoritarian state, and the rapid reconfiguration of urban society. By citing examples of recent urban China research, we show that the neoliberalism framework, even in its ‘variegated’ or ‘assemblage’ versions, tends to trap China’s analysis within a frame of reference comfortable to Western researchers, and ultimately hinders the development of diversified, potentially more fruitful inquiries of the urban world.

Neoliberalism and urban planning in Toronto: how seasoned planners adjust to their changing circumstances

ABSTRACTThis paper examines what 14 senior urban planners working for various planning agencies across metropolitan Toronto said about their work, interpreted through the lens of neoliberalism. Some still draw on the planning values of the old City of Toronto from the 1970s and 1980s, and most, in various ways, seek to push the bounds of contemporary practice. Consideration is given to the possibilities of emergent planning practices beyond the current neoliberal ascendancy in public life.

Re-positioning female heterosexuality within postfeminist and neoliberal culture

Contemporary western societies are characterised by a new sexual permissiveness, within which sexualised culture has become normalised and mainstreamed. Situated in this new social landscape, and drawing on postfeminist and neoliberal discourses and dominant constructions of heterosexuality, this article critically examines the impact of these constructions on women’s sexual health in its broadest sense, encompassing physical, mental and social well-being. I argue that dominant discourses of heterosexuality are viewed through a postfeminist and neoliberal lens that both obscures the sexist nature of contemporary culture and transforms, repackages and feeds this sexism back to women as their own choice and as a representation of empowerment; and as such, contemporary constructions of women’s sexuality and bodies are deeply problematic, and pose serious risks to women’s sexual health. To address these issues, not only do we need to develop critical media literacy skills, but we also must open up spaces for collective action and push against the existing sexist culture to allow for alternative discourses and understandings to emerge.

‘Decentralised’ neoliberalism and/or ‘masked’ re-centralisation? The policy to practice trajectory of Maltese school reform through the lens of neoliberalism and Foucault

The politics of the later part of the twentieth century have been marked by the emergence of neoliberalism, which has consequently impregnated the global policy climate with neoliberal technologies of government. It is within this political scenario of hegemonic neoliberal discourse that I explore one aspect of school reform in Malta – contrived school networking as mandated by the policy document ‘For All Children to Succeed’ (FACT), issued in 2005, by which Maltese primary and secondary state schools were geographically clustered into 10 colleges. I explore the influence of neoliberalism and the presence/absence of its characteristics, namely, State central control, the ‘empowerment’ agenda and the tension between autonomy and accountability. This is done both through policy analysis and policy reception – I carry out a documentary analysis of FACT and present this together with the leaders’ views, collated from interviews and observation, after being subjected to narrative analysis and interpreted through Foucault’s concepts of discourse and governmentality. Despite the gradual unfolding of the decentralization process, there is a very strong presence of State central control. Besides methodological significance for policy scholarship, this article has particular philosophical implications for educational policy, practice and theory within the infrastructure of globalized neoliberal governmentality.

“This neighbourhood deserves an espresso bar too”: Neoliberalism, Racialization, and Urban Policy

In the Dutch and more broadly European context, urban policymaking has generally been studied through the conceptual lens of neoliberalism. While important, I argue that this neoliberal lens does not fully account for the design and impact of urban policies currently transforming cities like Amsterdam. Following Mustafa Dikeç's (2007, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy) understanding of urban policy as place-making practices that normalize particular distributions of people, authorities and spaces, I propose to focus on underlying visions of the normal and the good city that shape urban policymaking. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research on Amsterdam's “notorious” Diamantbuurt, I argue that this vision is informed by neoliberalism and by racialized concerns with migrants and ethnic minorities. It entails particular classed and racialized preferences that normalize and underwrite the partial displacement that is underway in the neighbourhood.

Reassembling the ‘environment’: science, affect, and multispecies educative practice at the Aquarium of the Pacific

This study utilized Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, theorized through the lens of neoliberalism, to understand how educative assemblages of both human and non-human a...

An argument with neoliberalism

This article argues that the uncritical application of the lens of neoliberalism closes off opportunities for more rigorous analysis of actually existing socio-economic change. We ask whether Australia’s developmental trajectory over the last three decades can be described as neoliberalization and whether the outcome is a variety of neoliberalism. Instead of stitching together a story about variegated neoliberalism, we find an alternative narrative based around the notion of a developmental project more compelling. We document the spatial and political realities that have inhibited the roll-out of neoliberal ideas and practices in the Australian context. We think that instead of expanding the varieties of variegated neoliberalism to accommodate all manner of events and processes in all sorts of places, our task should be to recognize those instances where social, political, cultural or economic changes settle capitalism’s contradictions in ways that diverge from neoliberal frameworks and expectations. Our central point is that the role of academic research is to explain the lived world and to develop abstractions to aid that explanation, rather than to design an abstraction (neoliberalism) and then fit the lived world to its contours.

Branded: International education and 21st-century Canadian immigration, education policy, and the welfare state

Over the past two decades there has been a shift in Canadian education policy from a focus on education as a public good to education as a commodity, with policy language increasingly infused with the strategies of business. Branded ‘Education au/in Canada’, complementary immigration and education policies accommodate seamless entry, renewal, employment opportunities and finally citizenship for the best and the brightest of students abroad. Using a theoretical lens of neo-liberalism and post-colonialism, this article analyses the close intersectionality between immigration and education policy in Canada, illustrates how Canada actively recruits and maintains international students for its nation-building, and discusses the impact on the Canadian welfare state.

Neoliberalism and the making of food politics in Eastern Ontario

Despite their opposition to the dominant agri-food system, alternative agri-food initiatives may unwittingly reproduce central features of neoliberalism. Julie Guthman has been a particularly strong proponent of this view, arguing that food activism and neoliberalism have shaped one another dialectically in California in recent decades. This paper responds to her argument, with a view to distinguishing between what it reveals and what it may conceal about the transformative potential of alternative agri-food initiatives in North America. Drawing on primary research on a variety of community-based food initiatives in Eastern Ontario, Canada, we show how a neoliberal lens does help to illuminate some problematic characteristics of these initiatives, including assumptions about market-based solutions and focus on self-improvement at the expense of state involvement. However, this lens underestimates those aspects of community-based food initiatives that may appear commensurate with neoliberal rationalities but which also push in more progressive directions.

Evaluating Women Entrepreneurs in the Informal Sector: Some Evidence from India

Studies on women entrepreneurs in the informal economy no longer view them merely as a residue from some pre-modern mode of production that is disappearing. Instead, they are either read through a structuralist lens as marginalised populations engaged in low quality work conducted under poor conditions for low pay out of necessity in the absence of alternative means of livelihood, or through a neo-liberal lens as engaged in relatively higher quality endeavour more as a rational choice. The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically these contrasting explanations. To do this, the results of face-to-face interviews with 323 women entrepreneurs operating in the Indian informal economy are analysed. The finding is that although the structuralist representation is largely appropriate for women engaged in informal waged work, it is not so valid for women informal entrepreneurs working on a self-employed basis where incomes are higher, they receive more credit from formal institutions, union membership is higher and such work is more likely to be a rational choice. The outcome is a call to recognise the diversity of women’s experiences in the informal sector and that not all informal entrepreneurship by women in developing nations is low-paid necessity-oriented endeavour carried out as a last resort.

Pedagogy of the consumer: The politics of neo-liberal welfare reform

Abstract Situated against the backdrop of a widespread and growing interest in the linkages between neo-liberalism and welfare, this paper introduces the lens of neo-liberalism as a conceptual strategy for thinking about contemporary issues in education policy. Through charting the historic rise of unfettered market institutions and practices in the context of 1980s England, it highlights the cultural and geopolitical specificity affixed to nation-based articulations and translations of neo-liberalism. Building on this perspective, it considers how market discourses with its pedagogyof the consumer shape a plurality of education sites and practices. To follow, it sets out the specific contributions by authors to this interdisciplinary collection of papers on the themed issue of neo-liberalism, pedagogy and curriculum. It identifies the contexts for their analyses and discusses the implications of their approaches for better mapping the ‘global’ impact of neo-liberalism on welfare states and peoples, specifically the full range of policy enactments and disciplinary practices shaping education customs of pedagogy and curriculum.

Cultural mediation and the making of the mainstream in postsocialist China

A case study of Chinese writers and their participation in the development and production of anticorruption dramas, this article uses the theoretical framework of cultural mediation to understand the reformulated role of media professionals in media and cultural production in postsocialist China. It is shown in the article that Chinese media professionals act as cultural brokers to mediate between divergent needs and demands, a key skill that sutures differences and subdues disruptive forces in the rapidly changing Chinese mediascape. The article first describes cultural mediation at the textual, programming and discursive levels, and then interrogates its ideological implications. It argues that while cultural brokerage seems to generate more ideological openness and polysemy, it also perpetuates an ideological bias by re-semanticizing the state ideology via a neoliberal lens.

EVALUATING WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS IN THE INFORMAL SECTOR: SOME EVIDENCE FROM INDIA

Studies on women entrepreneurs in the informal economy no longer view them merely as a residue from some pre-modern mode of production that is disappearing. Instead, they are either read through a structuralist lens as marginalized populations engaged in low quality work conducted under poor conditions for low pay out of necessity in the absence of alternative means of livelihood, or through a neo-liberal lens as engaged in relatively higher quality endeavours more as a rational choice. The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically these contrasting explanations. To do this, the results of face-to-face interviews with 323 women entrepreneurs operating in the Indian informal economy are analyzed. The finding is that although the structuralist representation is largely appropriate for women engaged in informal waged work, it is not as valid for women informal entrepreneurs working on a self-employed basis where incomes are higher, they receive more credit from informal institutions, union membership is higher, and such work is more likely to be a rational choice. The outcome is a call to recognize the diversity of women's experiences in the informal sector and that not all informal entrepreneurship by women in developing nations is a low-paid, necessity-oriented endeavour carried out as a last resort.

Early Modern “Neoliberalisms”: England and the English Caribbean

By viewing economic, political, and literary developments through the anachronistic lens of neoliberalism, this essay calls attention to largely overlooked interrelations between the market and seventeenth-century arguments for political freedom. The essay tracks the trope of the neo-Roman political slave to tyranny as it collides with the institution of African slavery in early modern political debates over property and in pamphlets protesting injustices in the trades in sugar, slaves, and indentured servants. Using narrative digressions to stage a struggle for primacy between background and foreground and between text and New World context, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: A Royal Slave exploits these tensions between the economic and political domains to reveal the market not only as an ethical framework for political freedom but also as a tyrant ruling over those it dispossesses. Taken together, the essay's texts tell a story about economic and political entanglements that intensify even as the economic realm attempts to establish itself as an independent domain. This story develops alongside another: if freedom was initially conceived out of a relationship between subject and ruler, by the end of the seventeenth century the possibilities for political freedom depended on a set of global relations that included not only the citizen and the government but also its colonies and the markets they produce.

Decentring Global Power: The Merits of a Foucauldian Approach to International Relations

In recent times, the value of a critical approach to the study of International Relations (IR) that makes use of the concepts and methods of Michel Foucault has (again) been put on trial. I will argue in this article that both Foucauldians and their critics often neglect Foucault's radical epistemology that always prioritises practices over political theory. The demand of such an approach is the relentless decentring and diversifying of totalising and unifying accounts of (global) power relations, resulting in a continuous challenge of the traditional meta-theories and concepts of any academic discipline—including IR. The present article will follow this approach and challenge, through the investigation of a particular case of what is commonly perceived as an exercise in “global governance”, the idea that contemporary (global) power relations can be depicted solely through the lens of neoliberalism, sovereignty, or biopolitics. Instead, it will show that (global) power is located in a complex and flexible constellation of diverse and contradictory, mutually constituting and mutually destabilising strategies and tactics at particular sites.

Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy, Culture, and the Politics of Fat

The purpose of this paper is to recast the politics of obesity in the United States in light of the unsatisfactory nature of the current, popular debates on this problem. The paper begins by taking stock of contemporary discussions about obesity through a review and analysis of the popular and academic literature on the topic. We show how discussions of obesity that rely on unidimensional structural, biological, and political causes are not only simplistic but also do not adequately historicize the present so-called epidemic of US obesity. To answer the questions ‘why now?’ and ‘why here?’, we argue, requires an ontological rapprochement between the more dialectical approaches to political economy, cultural studies, and political ecology. After laying out this more integrated approach, we apply it by showing how today's twin phenomena of the discursive war on obesity and the so-called epidemic itself are better understood through the historical lens of neoliberalism, both as a political–cultural economic project and as a form of governmentality. Our argument is that some of the central contradictions of global capitalism are literally embodied. The problem of obesity in its multiple material and discursive senses can then be seen as a partial fix—in some respects, even as a spatial fix—to some of the contradictions of neoliberalism. At the same time, we contend that the neoliberal shift in personhood from citizen to consumer encourages (over)eating at the same time that neoliberal notions of discipline vilify it. Those who can achieve thinness amidst this plenty are imbued with the rationality and self-discipline of perfect subjects, who in some sense contribute to the more generalized sense of deservingness that characterizes US culture today.