Neoliberal Economic Restructuring Research Articles

Migrant sex work beyond slavery and trafficking: Sex work, unfree labour and the crisis of social reproduction in Ghana

This paper examines the working lives of migrant women in the sex sector in Ghana, in light of surging global interest in the governance of “slavery and trafficking”. The paper draws on qualitative data gathered in Ghana in 2021, namely 30 interviews with migrant sex workers. Interview data document wide-ranging and systematic labour exploitation, including some of the worst forms of unfreedom characterised as “modern slavery”. Yet the majority of workers report that they entered into and stay in sex work out of economic necessity (i.e. rather than individualised, extra-economic relations of coercion), typically due to caring responsibilities. To explain this, the paper makes two interrelated arguments: firstly, it shows why the concept of “unfree labour” is more appropriate than “modern slavery” for capturing how extreme exploitation emerges from a continuum of labour unfreedom in the Ghanaian sex sector. Unfreedom is (re)produced through state laws, relations of (re)production, and trajectories of neoliberal economic restructuring, which have given rise to widespread precarisation and informalisation. Secondly, the paper argues that extant studies of unfree labour should pay greater attention to the crisis of social reproduction as a key structural driver of unfree labour. This crisis constitutes the broader material conditions in which migrant women in Ghana enter into and stay in highly exploitative forms of work within the sex sector, as a means of household survival. The paper contextualises this crisis not only in relation to neoliberalism, but to the longue durée of colonial capitalism in Ghana.

Life next to a landfill: urban marginality, environmental injustice and the Roma

The site known as Lipnica is a segregated Roma settlement built on the edge of a municipal landfill in the district town of Turčany, central Slovakia (fictitious names have been used for the site and the town). The settlement emerged as a result of processes rooted in neoliberal economic restructuring, accompanied by a sharp rise in unemployment in the 1990s. The settlement was originally built to provide temporary housing for those who were in arrears for rent in municipal flats, and originally consisted of one apartment building and several modular cabins. In the following years it expanded, and today it is an ethnic quasi-ghetto for approximately 400 Roma inhabitants. From a theoretical perspective, an analysis of the Lipnica settlement is situated at the intersection of critical race theory and environmental justice theory. In this article, we describe the trajectory leading to the formation of the settlement and analyse how the impoverishment of the Roma, coupled with the construction of the community as ‘maladjusted’ anti-social others, facilitated their spatial exclusion. We conclude that the case demythologises culturising explanations for the emergence of Roma settlements, by using empirical data to show how Lipnica developed as a result of intentional discriminatory policies of the local ruling class used against an ethnic minority.

James Crotty’s Advice to Koreans

The Korean economy achieved rapid economic growth with equal income distribution for over three decades until the late 1990s when, in 1997, a financial crisis occurred. Mainstream economists and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) attributed this crisis to the problem of East Asian crony capitalism. The Korean government accepted this perspective and implemented neoliberal economic restructuring and financial opening after the crisis. However, James Crotty argued that the crisis in Korea was a result of haphazard financial opening and the withdrawal of state intervention. Most importantly, he extensively criticized the post-crisis economic reform in Korea imposed by the IMF. He believed that it would lead to lower economic growth and higher inequality, and he advised Koreans to oppose it. This article examines Crotty’s argument about the Korean economy and how the latter changed in the 21st century. JEL classification: F34, H12, O19, O53

Revolution, Change, and Democratic Transition in Egypt Since 2011: A Critical Political Economy Approach

The causes, consequences, and trajectory of the 2011 uprising in Egypt have been and continue to be a subject of scholarly debate. This article is situated within this debate with a particular focus on the role of political economy factors in engendering democracy and democratic transition. The key research objectives are to address why the Egyptian people came together in 2011 in an unprecedented show of solidarity to overthrow the Hosni Mubarak regime, to evaluate the interpretive frames for this uprising from two overlapping but fundamentally opposed perspectives—liberal democracy and radical democracy; to assess the extent to which the adoption of neoliberalism, accompanied by poverty and inequality, played a role in fomenting the countermovement against the regime; and to identify the underlying structures and process that links the 2011 uprising to the regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The article concludes that the imposition of a neoliberal regime of capital accumulation, with dispossession and upward wealth redistribution at its heart, created the conditions for the rise of radical democratic mass movements that overthrew both Mubarak and Mohammed Morsi. The article further underlines that the regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi not only halted the democratic reforms demanded by the Egyptian people but continues, at a faster pace, to impose the same neoliberal economic restructuring that catalyzed the uprising in the first place.

Insidious Concern

Abstract This article examines media that couches criticism of trans medicine, pediatrics, and activism in terms of “care” or “concern” for trans people and youth in particular. It identifies these as “insidious concerns,” speech acts, utterances, and proclamations that would harm that which they claim to care for or about. It proceeds to argue that this type of discourse is endemic to a wider crisis of social reproduction exacerbated by neoliberal economic restructuring. Through historical contextualization, cultural analysis, and ethnography, this article highlights the racist, nationalist, and reactionary undercurrents motivating the current trans panic in the United States. It concludes that theoretical attention to social reproduction might offer new insights for trans studies that can act as counterdiscourse to “insidious concern.”

Disentangling ecosystem services preferences and values

Preferences for ecosystem services provide information on what people find important in their human-nature relationships, which can enhance environmental governance. However, preferences are ‘reason-blind’, obscuring the underlying values that shape them. Increasingly, values – concepts or beliefs about desirable end states or behaviours that transcend specific situations and guide behaviour – receive attention in environmental governance, but lack of clarity in values terminology could hamper communication and reduce the ability to successfully align governance. There is a need to disentangle preferences and values to examine whether ecosystem services preferences provide adequate information on people’s values. Seychelles provides an interesting case to study the relationship between policy, preferences, and values, due to recent neoliberal economic restructuring and emergence of the blue economy. We conducted 50 semi-structured interviews with resource users (fishers, tourism operators) and 130 population-wide Portrait Values Questionnaires to explore differences across the population and examine the link between values and preferences. We find a disconnect between ecosystem services preferences and underlying values. Exploring people’s reasons for prioritising ecosystem services can improve understanding of underlying values, contribute to reconciling conflict, and clarify impacts on communities. Newly introduced worldviews and values accompanying the blue economy have the potential to clash with collectivist values found in Seychelles. Potential mismatches need explicit discussion to make decision-making more procedurally complete, but also improve equity and public support.

Juridifying agrarian reform: the role of law in the reconstitution of neoliberalism in Bolivia

ABSTRACT In development studies, law is typically seen as a passive and neutral instrument through which development policy is effected. Using mid-1990s market-led agrarian reform in Bolivia as an example, this article reveals how certain logics internal to law have characterised an approach to development policy that reframes social concerns and political subjectivities and interaction in a way that advances neoliberal economic restructuring while curtailing opposition. This included the emergence of a depoliticised, dehistoricised, technocratised approach to agrarian reform that reconstituted peasants and Indigenous peoples as market actors formally equal to landowners, while limiting their opportunities for dissent and resistance.

Neoliberal Economic, Social, and Spatial Restructuring: Valparaíso and Its Agricultural Hinterland

The analysis of the neoliberal restructuring of Chilean port cities and their hinterland suggests there was a functional coupling of neoliberalisation, precarisation, reterritorialisation, extraction, and logistics. To address this process properly, we expanded the boundaries of our analytical scale to include not only the port city, but also its hinterland, and be able to examine the flow of commodities and labour. The analysis demonstrated that the effects of neoliberal restructuring of Valparaíso and its hinterland has had interconnected ambivalent effects. Although social and economic restructuring of agricultural hinterland and port terminals in Chile increased land and port productivity and economic competitiveness, this pattern of capitalist modernisation benefitted neither the increasing masses of temporary precarious workers in the countryside nor port cities such as Valparaíso, marked by territorial inequality, socioecological damage, urban poverty, and a growing sense of closure of the littoral and reduced access to the ocean. These negative externalities and frictions have triggered local political controversies, commercial and economic disputes, labour strikes, and urban and socio-territorial conflicts.

Inland Shift: Race, Space and Capital in Southern California. By Juan D. De Lara

Inland Shift argues that the logistics economy has reconfigured metropolitan spatial rearrangements as a handmaid to modern capitalism. Juan D. De Lara arrives at this conclusion through the broader interdisciplinary study of racial capitalism. This text builds upon Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism “by arguing that logistics represents a major rearticulation of modern capitalism” (1). De Lara relies on a multi-scalar analysis of commodity production and consumption to outline how transnational capital movement has reformulated the human geography of Greater Los Angeles. Moreover, he argues that these alterations are informed by local historical contexts, and uses the Inland Empire as a case study to show how “the extended commodity chains of neoliberal economic restructuring created new social and spatial relationships” between and within contemporary global cities (3). His quantitative efforts are deepened by more than 100 interviews, a half-decade of participant observation, and community-based research on Southern California labor history. This approach advances recent scholarship on how capitalism manipulates space to facilitate contemporary race and place making.

From global workers to local entrepreneurs: Sri Lanka’s former global factory workers in rural Sri Lanka

Working in Sri Lanka’s urban free trade zones (FTZs) introduces Sri Lanka’s rural women to neoliberal ways of fashioning selves, which subsequently not only shape village entrepreneurial activities but also initiate negotiations in kinship, marriage, domestic arrangements, and community relations. The knowledges and networks that they develop while at the FTZ allow former workers to connect with global production networks as subcontractors, making them part of the cascading system of subcontracting that furthers the precarity of regular FTZ work. This article explores how these former workers manipulate varied forms of capital – social, cultural and monetary – to become local entrepreneurs and community leaders, while simultaneously initiating changes in rural social hierarchies and gender norms. When neoliberal economic restructuring manifests within local contexts it results in new articulations of what it is to be an entrepreneur and what it is to be a worthy, young, married woman. Overall, the paper sheds light on the fragmented and uneven manner in which neoliberal ethos take root in rural South Asia.

Creative individuals, \u201cKaya Bola\u201d exceptionalism and sustainable development in twenty-first century Ghana

This article pays attention to the activities of Kaya Bola (KBs)—informal waste collectors in Kumasi, Ghana whose imperatives are given little attention in the sustainable development narratives. How their activities illuminate good livelihood practices, proper city governance, and foster economic empowerment are discussed using multiple research methodologies. As the article shows, KBs have used their exceptional skills in waste collection to launch themselves into sustainable urban employment. They are intensely situated in the specifics of articulations and imbrications in many other processes. The most useful are that beyond keeping the city clean, they have also emerged as a campaign to combat joblessness, social exclusion, urban discontent, and spatial fragmentation associated with rigid labor arrangements under the neoliberal economic restructuring. The article contends that their image as unruly and messy is misleading. Contrary, their contribution toward the urban space calls for a recalibration of policies toward achieving the SDGs.

Barrio BravoTransformed: Tourism, Cultural Politics, and Image Making in Mexico City

ResumenEl presente artículo analiza los procesos del desarrollo urbano y la política cultura en la Ciudad de México, concentrándose en la manera en que la restructuración de las ciudades, guidada por políticas neoliberales y la economía simbólica, impacta distritos desfavorecidos. A partir de la investigación etnográfica, hacemos uso del turismo en el conocido barrio Tepito como lente para explorar cómo los diferentes actores interactúan con estos procesos. A medida que los espacios urbanos son recreados para el consumo cultural, una gama de actores intenta convertir los “slums” en destinos atractivos y experiencias de consumo. Estas estrategias de desarrollo reescriben el significado y valor de estas conocidas áreas en la ciudad, generando conflictos por el control sobre la representación y la venta de los espacios. Sostenemos que mientras la reestructuración de la economía neoliberal y el crecimiento de la economía simbólica agravan las desigualdades socio‐espaciales y al mismo tiempo abren espacios en donde se dan nuevas oportunidades para impugnarlas. [Ciudad de México, desarrollo urbano, desigualdad social, turismo urbano]

Transnational intersectionality and domestic work: The production of Ugandan intersectional racialized and gendered domestic worker regimes

Domestic work has evolved and adapted in the global South in distinctive racialized and gendered forms as a result of neoliberal economic restructuring. With the case of Uganda, this article applies a transnational intersectionality framework to neoliberal economic restructuring to identify how domestic worker regimes are produced. A transnational intersectionality approach spotlights the translocation of diverse Ugandan domestic workers embedded within the structural forces of economic organization, reproductive labor, state policies, and geography. Drawing from extensive fieldwork from three regions of Uganda, the study’s two main findings document: (1) the production of an intersectional racialized domestic worker regime as a consequence of the Ugandan aid state; and (2) the production of an intersectional gendered domestic worker regime supported by the weakening and underfunding of social development policies in the Ugandan national budget. These regimes show how race, gender, and regional demarcations of domestic work intersect in distinct forms connected to restructuring. A transnational intersectionality approach exposes the diversity of patterns in reproductive labor in Uganda.

Food Banks and Food Insecurity: Cases of Brazil and Turkey

The ascendency of global neoliberal economic policies seriously challenged universalist and right-based welfare policies and promoted the idea of targeted and selective allocations to the poor with private provision for the better of in both high-income and developing countries since the mid-1980s. This article focuses on food banking as an example of targeted social provisioning and provides contrasting observations from food bank programs in Brazil and Turkey. The article traces some different approaches and practices of food banks, and argues that food banks could be part of the progressive social policies that address the root causes of hunger among developing countries within neoliberal economic restructuring.

Creative precariousness, urban discontent and cultural networks: An introduction to a public lecture with Néstor García Canclini

Following from a public lecture at City University London, the articles discuss the interface between creativity, urban transformation, precariousness and social networking. This introduction places the lecture within the framework of North–South academic exchanges and in relation to how Latin American cities are responding to the rise of the creative economy in urban policy development. The main article, written by Néstor García Canclini, provides the foundation for an anthropology of precariousness and creativity in the context of globalised urban discontent and the transformation of space through information technologies. Voicing classical cultural studies concerns about identities, economy, global imaginaries and political resistance, he examines the strategies and networks that young creative producers, cultural entrepreneurs and artists use to navigate contradictory transnational processes. The article offers a renewed critical perspective into creative urbanism, connecting local cultural practices with global processes of neoliberal economic restructuring, urban violence and social exclusion. In doing so, it delineates the possibilities for an emancipatory transformation of urban space in times of increasing uncertainty.

Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice

Reviewed by: Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice Samantha King Rebecca Prentice, Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2015. 248 pp. There has been growing recognition in recent years that the pressures associated with neoliberal governance models are actually promoting and expanding participation in alternative, illicit, and informal economic practice in a variety of social contexts. This dynamic has raised new and reinvigorated enduring anthropological questions related to the cultural meanings of economic practice and the role of hegemonic formations in both shaping and being shaped by local livelihoods. Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice offers a significant and nuanced contribution to these debates. This book presents an engaging ethnographic exploration of how women garment workers are negotiating neoliberal economic restructuring from the particular cultural and historical perspective of the Caribbean—a region often characterized as being on the losing side of globalization. In Trinidad, IMF-backed restructuring began opening protected national markets to intense global competition in the 1990s, a process that substantially reconfigured production requirements and employment opportunities in the local garment industry. As production became more unstable and demanding, a significant portion of garment work shifted to the informal sector. Today, Trinidad’s garment industry is comprised of a variety of dispersed, heterogeneous sites including factories, illegal sweatshops, independent workshops, and home-based enterprises. In Thiefing a Chance, Prentice demonstrates how the agency and flexibility of women has facilitated these transitions and in many ways enabled the local garment industry to endure. Her conclusions and analysis [End Page 975] are based upon 15 months of ethnographic research in Trinidad, which included nine months working on the shop floor at Signature Fashions, a pseudonym for a local garment factory that produces high-end fashions for the regional clothing market. What Prentice uncovers in the factory is a hidden world of productive labor through which illicit and informal practices have become integral, yet unacknowledged, aspects of the neoliberal order of work. Through such practices, known collectively by workers as “thiefing a chance,” women utilize the factory as a resource to surreptitiously engage in entrepreneurial activities such as training themselves on new machines, professionally finishing homemade garments, and copying Signature Fashions patterns for outside use. These types of covert strategies reference a cultural discourse common throughout the Black Atlantic that valorizes opportunistic and flexible economic practice as an expression of individual independence and creativity. Such endogenously derived forms of economic self-expression are intimately informed by the persistent need for Caribbean people to continually negotiate and adapt to capitalism’s enduring influence in the region—from plantation slavery through neoliberal economic restructuring. Yet recent anthropological work has also noted a substantial overlap between this historically informed subaltern expression of flexible self-reliance and the entrepreneurial ethos venerated by the contemporary neoliberal order. In this important book, Prentice seeks to ethnographically document this convergence and consider what it means. Thiefing a chance, she argues, represents a metaphor for local life under neoliberalism as the “expression of an individualistic, enterprising subjectivity” embraced and embodied by workers that “both subverts and con-firms” contemporary capitalist discipline (90). The book is organized into eight chapters, each of which draws upon rich ethnographic detail to further the anthropological analysis. The introduction highlights the main arguments of the text (as described briefly above) and outlines the theoretical and methodological approaches of the book. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the Signature Fashions factory and brand. Prentice begins by situating Signature Fashions within the political economic history of the garment industry in Trinidad and then moves to an analysis of the relations of production in the factory. This discussion interrogates the nature and practice of industrial flexibility, or the ability of production to respond to dynamic market conditions. While this has generally been theorized as a crucial achievement of the neoliberal [End Page 976] firm, Prentice convincingly demonstrates how, at Signature, flexibility is a complex and contested process that is often facilitated by the coordinated, covert actions of workers as opposed to the formal structure and deliberate planning...

Kirsteen Paton: Gentrification: a working-class perspective

Among urban scholars there is much debate about the consequences of gentrification, in particular about the question whether gentrification displaces the original and less affluent residents. Kirsteen Paton’s book Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective critically engages with this debate, arguing that displacement has been too narrowly focused on eviction and forced physical movement. Reworking Hackworth’s definition of gentrification as the creation of urban space for the more affluent user, she aims to show how gentrification also seeks to create the affluent user and thus results in cultural displacement as well as various types of physical displacement. Gentrification is a way to manage and discipline rather than displace low-income residents, Paton argues. The book is ambitious in promising nothing less than ‘a new sociological perspective on gentrification’ (p. 5). Paton weaves together literatures on hegemony, class analysis, gentrification and neoliberal economic restructuring. Through an empirical investigation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Paton aims to demonstrate how gentrification is as much a consensual strategy as it is coercive. The book offers stimulating critiques of various literatures and is rich in ideas. Her empirical work is a case study of the regeneration of Partick, Glasgow, which is a ‘predominantly ‘‘white’’ working-class’ and now gentrifying neighbourhood with the motto Industria dilat or ‘we are enriched by industry’ (p. 61). Paton gathered the ‘locational narratives’ that describe ‘people’s residential biographical stories of how and where they live’ (p. 54) of 49 people (previously) living in Partick. In four chapters, which are preceded by an elaborate theoretical chapter, she stages her interviewees in an exploration of various themes among which class and place, consumer citizenship, othering and displacement. Paton’s most thought-provoking conclusion, in my reading, is that ‘gentrification is not always a zero-sum game for working-class residents, who at times rework gentrification processes, on their own terms for their own gains’ (blurb). This insight is detailed in a

“But Many of These Problems are About Funds…”: The Challenges Immigrant Settlement Agencies (ISAs) Encounter in a Suburban Setting in Ontario, Canada

A large number of studies have focused on the neoliberal political and economic restructuring of non-profit immigrant settlement agencies (ISAs) through a policy analysis framework. While policy analysis is key to determining how resources are distributed among non-profit organizations, the challenges that ISAs encounter in planning and delivering services extend beyond limited financial resources in the sector. This research focuses on the system-level challenges ISAs encounter in planning and delivering services to newcomers in the suburban municipality of the Peel Region, Ontario, Canada. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with frontline staff and executive directors in settlement organizations in Peel Region, Ontario, Canada, to understand the complex challenges they face within a highly federalized and neoliberal policy environment. The results indicate that although funding dollars are a large concern for ISAs, the conditions attached to funding, such as the types of programs settlement providers are able to offer, mandatory quotas, and restrictive eligibility criteria, hinder ISAs from being able to plan and implement programs that better respond to the needs of immigrants in Peel Region. The results also demonstrate that restrictive funding criteria contribute to competition with other ISAs for limited resources and challenge the structure and continuity of programs. Many of these challenges are exacerbated by the transportation system unique to suburban settings.

Interpreting Urban Informality in Chegutu, Zimbabwe

Using data derived from participant observation and stories told by people in Chegutu, Zimbabwe, this paper argues that urbanites who engage in informal economic activities sometimes defend their right to the city through repertoires of quiet encroachment. To that end, findings from this study demonstrate the connection between the micro (Chegutu) and the macro (across Zimbabwe) in relation to the nature of economic activities people carry out in response to the prevailing poor material conditions. The ability of urban subalterns to secure their livelihoods has been dealt a heavy blow by reckless neoliberal economic restructuring and gross economic mismanagement by the political leadership in Zimbabwe. This article complements the growing body of literature on the urban informality by analysing the various ways people sustain their livelihoods in an economy where market-driven production has replaced national capitalism.

“Putting a Stamp on Racism”

In 2005, the Servicio Postal Mexicano sparked an international controversy with its release of a postage stamp series commemorating Mexican comic book character Memín Pinguín, a racialized caricature of a boy of African descent. This article examines of the content and tenor of Mexican and US media debates surrounding the character, from its condemnation in Washington as an offensive racial stereotype to its promotion by Mexican government officials as a national ambassador. These and other racial-national discourses that structured the Memín debates relied upon and reinforced a prominent post-NAFTA racial project: the putative “black-brown divide.” In the context of neoliberal economic restructuring, this material and imaginary demarcation of blackness and latinidad as discrete racial-regional geographies on both sides of the border has become a crucial terrain of struggle for processes of state formation in the United States and in Mexico. Articulations of “black versus brown” obscure entangled histories of racial-colonial formation and bolster national efforts to manage and/or disavow difference. They also re-entrench state authority and legitimacy at a moment when the private interests of capital are prioritized over and at the expense of the common interests of impoverished national publics.