Neoliberal Logic Research Articles

“If I was better at managing all this”: The role of neoliberal logic in framing one teacher's narratives about accountability

Neoliberalism influences teaching not only through educational policies like high-stakes testing but also through more fundamentally shaping understandings of teaching and learning. This case study explores how neoliberalism framed the sense-making of one critically-oriented teacher in an accountability-constrained school through a discursive analysis of her teaching narratives. While documenting the teacher's consistent critique of accountability policies like high-stakes testing, the analysis also identifies the more insidious ways neoliberal logic shaped her thinking through frames of individual responsibility and of equating neoliberalism with reality. These findings suggest implications for how critically-oriented teacher educators and researchers consider teacher agency and resistance.

Struggles for Regulatory Hardening: Exploring Swedish Politics on Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract In recent years, the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has undergone a shift towards hardening, illustrated by a wave of new mandatory and state-based regulation. This article aims to understand the dynamic behind this shift, by studying struggles for regulatory hardening in the Swedish Parliament. Drawing on a critical theory of contradictions, it proposes an understanding of CSR as a contradictory social formation, which structures the parliamentary struggles. Moreover, it suggests that although the hardening trend could amount to a crisis of the traditional understanding of CSR, politicians remain embedded in a neoliberal logic of regulation. The article ends with a call for research to continue to explore alternative roads towards minimizing corporate harm in the future.

Uncovering the discursive ‘borders’ of professional identities in English early childhood workforce reform policy

The early childhood workforce in England has experienced periods of policy attention and more recently policy neglect. During the past two decades (2000–2022) the extent of interest in workforce policy has fluctuated with episodes of investment followed by phases of disinvestment. Throughout this period, early childhood educators have been subjected to multiple, often conflicting and shifting demands upon them, which have evolved with varying political priorities. This paper builds on earlier analyses and exposes how neoliberal logic has been advanced in the intervening years and continues to permeate the terrain. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of nine English early childhood workforce policies numerous, dominant, institutional discourses and reciprocal obligation are discerned. This analysis uncovers how policies of standard setting, credentialising and surveillance create discursive borders which are established and maintained to create the ‘ideal’ professional identities of early educators. It is contended that these conceptual and discursive borders delimit versions of professional identities and thereby curtail capacity to imagine and act beyond such boundaries. The paper concludes that identifying and naming these borders are important prerequisites for contestation of such institutional discourses and for asserting alternative subject positions.

Governing by slogans

Throughout recorded history, slogans have been an important part of our public life. From political rhetoric and propaganda, to social movements and awareness-raising campaigns, their usage has overcome historical periods, cultural barriers, ethnic affiliation, political systems, party allegiance or personal taste. Arguably more than any other linguistic ‘device’, slogans deliver a clearly recognizable message with as little complexity as possible. Nevertheless, despite their rhetorical ‘economy’, the narratives provided by slogans have also been associated with a simplified or even reductionist portrayal of otherwise complex or controversial phenomena. This article aims to address a range of previously neglected aspects associated with slogans and governmentality. The introductory part provides a genealogy of discussions over slogans and the main shortcomings the use of slogans has been associated with. The central part takes a closer look at zero tolerance, a flagship policy associated with the neoliberal logic of governance. The concluding part of this article outlines the subversive character associated with the mechanism of sloganization.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Scarcity and surveillance in early childhood education

At a time when national discourse in the USA centers the need for professionalization, regulation, and surveillance, this article emphasizes the ways in which neoliberal logics harm those working in early childhood education in the USA. While stakeholders at every level debate proposed solutions to the early childhood education crisis, largely related to furthering regulation, this article brings forward the voices of those doing the work and rejects the idea that neoliberal logics will lead us collectively away from a situation that they created. Guided by the tenets of critical qualitative inquiry, I use narrative inquiry to explore the stories of early childhood educators working in an underfunded, undervalued field. In this article, I highlight two resonant themes that spanned the participants’ narratives, which are related to the impacts of scarcity and surveillance in early childhood education spaces. Based on my findings, I make the claim that early childhood education professionals are strained by increased regulation and surveillance amidst an already toxic prevalence of scarcity of various forms, and that shifts to further regulate the field should consider the voices of the people working in these spaces.

Women's inclusion and neoliberal governmentality in the Swedish digital game industry: An analysis of discursive positions and recruitment strategies

AbstractMany companies within the creative industries present themselves as open and egalitarian while they are, at the same time, marked by vertical and horizontal sex‐segregation. The paper illustrates how this is particularly salient in the digital games industry and further examines how the presence of a neoliberal postfeminist discourse contributes to the neglectance of structured inequality. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with actors in the Swedish games industry. Drawing on the theoretical perception that neoliberal logic reframes contemporary notions of gender and equality through a postfeminist discursive framework, this paper identifies and critically discusses different approaches to understand and tackle the gender divide in the Swedish games industry. While postfeminism has been characterized as apolitical or even anti‐feminist, this paper discusses how such postfeminist expressions could also be understood as connecting to the feminist project of de‐gendering. By way of conclusion, this study shows how a postfeminist discourse obscures the reality of gendered inequalities and poses limits to organizational change.

Towards Sensibilities of Caring with and for Museum Objects in a University Context

ABSTRACT Within the prevalent logic of the neoliberal university, teaching and learning are subject to academic audits, performance indicators and quality assurance measures. These impact on the relationships between educators and students, placing an emphasis on self- over collective interests, aspirational mobility, and a culture of ‘speed’ and productivity that leaves little time for reflection. The effects of this are perhaps even more acutely felt in former polytechnic (post-92) universities, where the focus lies on employability, the creative industries, and vocational training. In this context, what does it entail to bring care into the learning environments? This paper considers the activist potential of embodied pedagogies to generate ways of knowing that confront discourses of neoliberal education. Drawing on object-based pedagogic practice with students in face-to-face sessions at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (Middlesex University), the paper considers how such encounters might generate radical practices of care. How might the museum formulate arguments which challenge institutional expectations to perform in the knowledge-based economy? To what extent might these spaces open possibilities for an alternative “commons” beyond neoliberal logics?

“It’s Top Chef, not a personality contest”: grammars of stereotype, neoliberal logics of personhood, and the performance of the racialized self in Top Chef: New York

ABSTRACT This article explores the intersections of racial identity performance, culinary style, and neoliberal logics within reality cooking television. By close reading the performance and evaluation of Top Chef: New York contestant Carla Hall, this article argues that reality cooking competitions depend on a grammar of stereotype in order to transform contestants into characters, and the contestants both acquiesce to and resist these preconceived notions, sometimes simultaneously. Neoliberal logics of personhood both constrain contestants within their ‘characters’/‘brands’ and also allow chefs to agentially and reflexively self-construct particular personas out of their own culinary ethos. Relatedly, food operates as a multivalent racialized signifier of identity, in which the contestants racialize the food and the food racializes the contestants. As Carla Hall’s performance in Top Chef: New York demonstrates, reality cooking competitions place demands on their contestants to ‘appropriately’ perform their identities, and contestants are evaluated by both the judges and the viewers on how they navigate these performances. This article contends that in its reliance on racial stereotype and conflations between labor, identity, and being, Top Chef propagates neoliberal and multicultural/postracial logics, demanding that its contestants of color perform their individualized, racialized identities in ways that the program deems ‘authentic’ and ‘appropriate’.

Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalism in the Filipina/o Diaspora

Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalism in the Filipina/o Diaspora

Limits to disclosures and the continuum of labour exploitation in the Bangladeshi ready-made garment sector

ABSTRACT This paper questions if enough is done to tackle modern slavery within the ready-made garments (RMG) supply chains, through the lens of disclosures in improving work practices. Using evidence from Bangladesh, we find how there is a continuum of labour exploitation where the reality of forced labour is not a static one, but a continuum of experiences highlighting the complexity of the exploitative environment within the dominant neoliberal logic of transparency disclosures. It is imperative not only to make disclosures more robust through due diligence, but support capacity to address exploitation at the lower end of the supply chain.

The affective-discursive ‘pruning’ of neoliberal selves: introducing the notion of self-othering

In this article, I develop the notion of self-othering defined as the affective orchestration of different voices-of-the-self as an important self-constitutive practice of neoliberal subjectivity. I posit that neoliberal subjectification relies on othering those facets—skills, attributes, bodily properties—that do not conform to idealised notions of the self. By applying this conceptual lens to empirical material drawn from a qualitative research project on women’s identity negotiations, my aim is to show that affect, notably what feels right/wrong, plays a crucial role in aligning the body with neoliberal culture. The affective-discursive approach to analysing the dialogical self I propose is based on a problematisation of neoliberal logic and thus draws attention to the normativity of affect. The analysis of practices of self-othering lays bare how certain voices and ways of being become unsayable. However, their presence in people’s self-constructions also suggests that they could be re-articulated to formulate a counter ideal.

Leisure as self-care in the times of the pandemic: Insights from a time-use diary study in India

ABSTRACT In this research note, we discuss how the pandemic forged a renewed interest in self-care among urban older Indians. A reflexive thematic analysis of time-use diaries (N = 15) allows us to examine leisure patterns and everyday subjectivities of middle-class older Indians. In particular, time-diaries reveal a heightened focus on leisure-based enacted self-care practices including meditation, online activity/learning, and socialising. Consistent with previous scholarship of an unequivocal gender inequality in leisure as self-care, we observe distinct differences among men and women in their engagement with self-care. Specifically, while men engaged in outdoor activities as a way to cope with the stress and uncertainties of the pandemic, women’s everyday lives continued to be defined by domesticity and household management. Additionally, we show that while immediately uplifting, the ethics of self-care embodies the neoliberal logic of the entrepreneurial subject that makes self-reliance a necessity to practice responsible citizenship in times of the pandemic. Overall, by shifting the logics of care to the self, we depart from the more commonly held notion of older adults being recipients of care to the crafting of autonomous subjects through the pandemic-led public health practices of committed citizenship and civic virtue.

Bagh, Barsati, Bad Character: women and mobility narratives of neoliberal Delhi

The brief but powerful intersectional protest at Shaheen Bagh in 2020 against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed by India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government presented a paradox: as the immobile and visibly Muslim Indian women protesters, emblematized by the dadis or grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh, formed a blockade, their images quickly went viral. Inspired by their example, many makeshift ‘Shaheen Baghs’ cropped up across the nation, the name of this neighborhood in South Delhi exceeding its location to become a metonym of dissent in a country hurtling toward fascism. This article argues that the protest performative of Shaheen Bagh marked a significant narrative break in representation of Indian women’s iconized mobility after liberalization. Reading Shaheen Bagh along with Anita Desai’s ‘The Rooftop Dwellers’ and Deepti Kapoor’s A Bad Character, I examine the politics of representing women’s mobility in Delhi, and its gendered constraints as well as strategies to overcome and subvert them within the larger context of both Hindutva and liberalization. I conclude by locating a hopeful feminist counternarrative in Shaheen Bagh against the prevalent discourse of marketized Hindutva that melds the cultural and economic logic of both neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism.

Editors’ Note

Editorial| September 01 2022 Editors’ Note Journal of Popular Music Studies (2022) 34 (3): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2022.34.3.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Guest Access Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Editors’ Note. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 September 2022; 34 (3): 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2022.34.3.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search As we write this Editors’ Note, global multimedia streaming service Netflix has just laid off approximately 150 employees, including a significant number of people working for the company’s social media and editorial platforms geared toward diversity—specifically, the channels Most, which centers LGBTQ+ stories; Golden, which promotes content related to the “pan-Asian diaspora;” the Latinx community-focused Con Todo; and the Black-audience-oriented Strong Black Lead. These firings also come on the heels of Netflix’s letting go of several women of color writers at its fandom subsidiary, Tudum. All of this is, of course, occurring as Netflix continues to produce transphobic content while still publicly declaring a commitment to “diversity.” For us (and for many), these events tap into a much broader set of sociopolitical concerns facing our contemporary world, namely the racialized/gendered/sexualized dynamics of labor and tech, the politics of representation, and the neoliberal logics of diversity and inclusion. We, thus, open... You do not currently have access to this content.

“Women, Consider Crypto”: Gender in the Virtual Economy of Decentralized Finance

AbstractDecentralized finance, including cryptocurrency and other blockchain-based applications, promises participants benefits such as financial freedom, security, privacy, and wealth accumulation. More recently, it has also offered the promise of participation, lowering financial barriers, and empowerment—especially to women, the poor, and those residing in the Global South. I argue that the rise of decentralized finance as an alternative development platform is explicitly gendered and calls for feminist analysis. I discuss how cryptocurrency-based approaches to development rest on foundations that are gendered, interacting with hierarchies of race/ethnicity and class. I also explore how they are part of a lineage of neoliberalism, leveraging neoliberal beliefs about entrepreneurialism, financial inclusion, and gender roles. The discussion further introduces the concept of neolibertarianism as an extension of neoliberal logics that advocates for bypassing states entirely in favor of private actors. The current analysis compares this new model of decentralized finance to similarly problematic development trends and assesses how it has—as of yet—failed to deliver on the promises of participation, lowering financial barriers, and empowerment. This analysis concludes with a call to action for feminist and critical scholars, encouraging further work on the topic.

Navigating the politics of recognition in volunteering: perspectives of young volunteers in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT This paper examines young volunteer’s perspectives of recognition in Aotearoa New Zealand. There is a politics of recognition to navigate with the rise of formalized practices of recognition that award and reward volunteer efforts. Many of these practices draw on a neoliberal logic that centre the individual and apply instrumental motivations to their engagement, which we describe as ‘accolades’. Drawing on in-depth interviews with young people, our analysis identifies a disconnect between the dominant forms of accolade that young volunteers receive, and the recognition that they consider meaningful. While volunteers appreciated accolades, they nevertheless treated them with caution and concern, highlighting the potential for accolades to elevate certain individuals while acting to marginalize, exclude and potentially devalue volunteers’ contributions. In contrast to these reservations, young volunteers considered forms of recognition that were relational and justice-based to be significant and meaningful, particularly those that allowed for community solidarity and engaged structural questions of power. In exploring these perspectives, we argue that neoliberal approaches to recognition, despite their prevalence, fail to capture young volunteers’ perceptions of the possibilities of recognition.

Legislated Poverty? An Intersectional Policy Analysis of COVID-19 Income Support Programs in Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT In this paper, we use intersectionality-based policy analysis (IBPA) to examine how COVID-19 income support policies enacted in Ontario, Canada, affected people living with poverty. We find that the privileging of formal labor market attachment in eligibility requirements systemically excluded constituencies most likely to be living with poverty. More broadly, these exclusions represent a retrenchment of neoliberal logics in social policy, and the rejection of universal social welfare programs. In conclusion, we suggest that the experiences of people living with poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic further highlight the need for comprehensive social welfare programs, including a universal basic income.

Narrating the Housing Crisis: Encountering Madness, Homelessness, and Neoliberal Logic in Recent Film-based Narratives


 
 
 This article seeks to articulate how neoliberal thinking perceives—and conflates—the homeless and mad subject in opposition to the middle class “productive” citizen. I engage in a narrative analysis of two cultural artifacts: James Burns’s documentary film, Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Mental Healthcare in Rural America and CTV’s coverage of the Housing First approach as a viable response to homelessness. Using an analysis of neoliberal rationality coupled with a Critical Mad Studies approach, I examine the ways documentary filmmaking engenders particular ways of witnessing the housing crisis. The housing crisis is a direct result of the rise of neoliberal restructuring, yet homelessness is often presented as an individualized failure. Documentary filmmaking can exacerbate these (mis)understandings, even while particular voices offer powerful cultural critique in the form of counternarratives. Counterhegemonic representations of dehousing and madness must emerge from within the consumer/survivor/ex- patient community if they are to offer a reflexive, nuanced, and decisive departure from middle class orientations of health and recovery. I provide recommendations for producers and consumers of media representations of the housing crisis. Film based representation must be grounded in authentic personal encounters, attention to structural violence, and the desire to precipitate critical dialogue. By doing so filmmakers can elicit a response to homelessness that enhances political solidarity, relies on peer-led research, and confronts neoliberal thinking in the contemporary media landscape.
 
 

The settler colonial rootsand neoliberal afterlife of Problem Behavior Theory.

Problem Behavior Theory (PBT) is an influential psychosocial theory that has shaped-and continues to shape-much research on adolescent development in the United States and abroad. It is the product of over a half-century of research conducted by psychologists-cum-behavioral scientists Lee and Richard Jessor. This article engages two striking features of the history of PBT. First, it tracks how, and to what effect, a theory elaborated to explain the so-called "deviant behavior" of a group of Native Americans was extended to explain the "problem behavior" of white, middle-class, settler youth, before coming to circulate as a universal theory of adolescent behavior. Second, it explores how a theory that was meant to explain individual behaviors by connecting them to their larger social contexts came to be embraced by researchers who have been criticized for doing precisely the opposite. To do so, this article draws from Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies scholarship and sheds light on how the logics of settler colonialism and neoliberalism have participated in the coproduction of PBT and its reception.