Neoliberal Society Research Articles

An Examination of the Causality of Meritocracy and the Collective Boredom of the Young Generation in Dramas: Focusing on <My Liberation Notes>

It is difficult to view the one-person culture centered around the youth generation as a cultural characteristic of a specific generation. Just as Simmel believed that capitalist changes in relations were behind the emergence of individualism since the modern era, the emergence of the one-person culture was not spontaneous either. Behind the one-person culture, there are youth who have encountered problematic situations such as NEETs, reclusive youth, and the n-po phenomenon. This draws attention to the special emotional state of the youth generation called ‘collective boredom.’ Boredom is an emotional state that leads to apathy resulting from repeated frustration and the abandonment of choices or orientations. The boredom experienced by the youth generation is a causal relationship between two social factors. One is the alienation phenomenon caused by the spread of neoliberalism, and the other is the meritocracy that emerged with capitalism. When the alienation of youth, which has been caused by long-term exposure to the discourse of meritocracy and neoliberal market logic in Korean society from elementary school to the early years of social life, becomes an emotional state, the youth generation experiences ‘collective boredom.’ A drama that well depicts the collective boredom of the youth generation is <My Liberation Notes>. This work allows us to look into the basis of the emotional state of the youth generation in Korea. All the characters in the play pursue happiness, but that soon leads to giving up, resignation, and boredom. Baudrillard said that the premise of equality is happiness, and that the happiness of modern people cannot escape the logic of a consumer society. Therefore, both equality and happiness are fictions created by a consumer society. However, the youth generation has become helpless against grand discourses such as equality as they experience repeated alienation due to meritocracy. The characters in the work lose the power to resist the established society accustomed to competition and achievement, the society that only expects the next achievement instead of fair compensation for achievement, and the neoliberal society that removes even the protective shield after frustration, and reveal an emotional state of collective boredom. This can be said to be the fundamental cause of the one-person culture. This paper examines how the youth generation in <My Liberation Notes> escapes and resists each individual’s command of existence based on the characteristics of boredom that modern philosophy has focused on. Through the characters in the work, the author depicts a situation in which the young generation encounters ‘deep boredom’ in order to ‘break through’ the oppression of the older generation, the injustice of consumer society, and the false consciousness of growth discourse. This shows a meaningful narrative solution to the reality that the young generation faces, and allows us to understand the choices of the young generation, such as the one-person culture and n-po phenomenon, from a fundamental perspective.

The makings of the debtor: Morality tales and economic reasoning in contemporary neoliberal societies

This article explores both how the debtor became a key actor in contemporary society and relatedly how indebtedness went from being a deplorable, exceptional condition to be avoided to a normal everyday precondition of modern life. Personifying the credit side of futurity, possibilities, enjoyment or accumulation, the debtor is an ambivalent and precarious actor, never an end unto itself, but always a means to something else. The debtor is always embedded in cautionary tales. She or he needs to redeem and discipline her-/himself to become economically sound and accepted within the free market order. In line with this, while crucial for the functioning of neoliberal society, the debtor has not been a project or focus of neoliberal theory. This article explores how the debtor – despite debt being a prominent part of neoliberalism, was not theorized by neoliberals but by their critics both within academia and in activist circles.

Choice, calculation, and consumer empowerment

Consumer choices are always relationally produced, an outcome of consumers’ inevitable reliance on such entities as choice architectures, calculation tools, discourses, and more. This means that giving consumers choice does not make them free from external influences. But if consumer choice cannot fully liberate consumers, must we abandon choice promotion as a path to consumer empowerment, a widely embraced approach in neoliberal societies? While this seems to be the conclusion of many critics of empowerment-through-choice, this conceptual article argues that choice promotion can still play an important role in empowering consumers. We make our case by developing a Callonian perspective on choice and consumer empowerment, which calls attention to the role of “calculative devices” in configuring consumers as more or less powerful choosers. We identify four qualities of calculative devices that enhance the “calculative power” of consumers: (1) calculative enrichment, (2) calculative stabilization, (3) calculative flexibilization, and (4) calculative contestation. The Callonian perspective opens new ways to study consumer empowerment and offers a critical account of consumer autonomy.

Women’s care work activity as unpaid and continuous labour

Work, depending on who performs it and in what context, is burdened with various symbolic and social meanings. An interesting example of these dependencies is the issue of women’s unpaid caregiving work. It is crucial for thefunctioning of late capitalist, neoliberal society, yet it remains marginalised in dominant discourses - to the extent that it is not accounted for in GDP calculations in Poland; it is systematically unseen and undervalued by the state. I analyse the issue of such work through my field research, carried out from July 2021 to February 2022, on the eating habits of retired women in Warsaw. I conducted 39 interviews with retirees, during which the topic of food served as a means of understanding the stories of their lives, in which wage labour intertwined with household efforts. The lives of the interviewees were filled with the experience of constant “busyness” - many of them spoke of free time as regained or obtained for the first time in retirement. In the article, I analyse the role of unpaid caregivingwork in their lives, what significance it had for them in the past and present, and how it was embedded in the surrounding network of relationships.

The Biopolitics of Disability

This article investigates the biopolitics of disability in the ablenationalist England of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go and examines how a neoliberal society urges its citizens to depend on market-based private medical management to be able-bodied individuals in order to fully participate in society. It also analyses the lives of clones who reside at Hailsham, a boarding school, as well as those of the non-cloned human beings living in the community outside Hailsham to illustrate the Agambenian ideologies of zoē and bios. The less explored and less debated sections of the novel, such as the fictional state of England, the institutions that produce and raise human clones like Hailsham, and the society of non-cloned human beings who are waiting for organ transplantation, are examined to exemplify how ablenationalism and able-disabled become strategies for inclusion in a neoliberal society of Ishiguro’s fictional England, thus problematising the ableist notion of inclusion as presented in Never Let Me Go.

Tracing views of the intensive mothering discourse in Latvia and on Twitter (X)

ABSTRACT While each new generation since Latvia regained independence has been slowly edging toward libertarianism and equality, childcare in everyday life is still understood as primarily a woman’s burden, echoing both the intensive mothering discourse of Western neoliberal societies and patriarchal traditions inherited from the Soviet gender system. This article aims to map the saturation of ‘intensive parenting’ discourse and differences in opinion between Latvia’s population and Twitter (X) users by comparing the results of a survey involving both samples.

Neoliberal Societies and The Death Drive: The Aim of All Life Is Death

Neoliberal Societies and The Death Drive: The Aim of All Life Is Death

Digital platforms as Ideological State Apparatus: precarious work and legal subjectivity in neoliberal society

Resumo O avanço da precarização do trabalho e o desenvolvimento da tecnologia da informação no arranjo social específico que caracteriza o capitalismo contemporâneo suscita a discussão sobre o papel das plataformas digitais no processo de reprodução das relações de exploração específicas desse momento histórico. Partindo das concepções de Evgeni Pachukanis e de Louis Althusser e buscando uma aproximação para com as reflexões de matriz foucaultiana de Pierre Dardot e Christian Laval, o presente artigo propõe o entendimento das plataformas digitais como aparelho ideológico de Estado que realiza uma ideologia regional centrada na subjetividade empresarial (ideologia do empresariamento de si). Conclui-se, assim, que o aparelho ideológico das plataformas digitais atua na reprodução das relações de exploração características da sociedade neoliberal pela constituição de uma forma de subjetividade que promove ativamente o próprio assujeitamento como vivência imaginária de uma relação do empresário com seu próprio “capital humano”.

The moral economy of student debt: A pharmacological approach

Over the past three decades, student debt has surged in most English-speaking countries. Despite this trend, enrollment at universities has steadily risen, which testifies to the enduring appeal that higher education still exerts on middle-class individuals and families. Nevertheless, the policies responsible for this growing indebtedness have also stirred up their share of controversy. In an attempt to make sense of these debates, this article focuses mainly on the English and American cases to demonstrate how moral arguments have been put forth both in favor of and against using credit to finance education. Because it shows the ambivalent and unstable nature of the normative principles underpinning debt relations, the concept of moral economy is particularly well suited to discuss this phenomenon. On one hand, it explains how certain ethical expectations seemingly justify the need to incur debt for educational pursuits. On the other hand, it also shows why the perceived legitimacy of student debt eventually comes to be challenged. At its core lies an undecidable choice between antinomic values, as the decision to study on credit involves both a striving for personal autonomy and subjecting oneself to an exploitative relation of dependence. Recognizing this fundamental ambivalence, the article develops a ‘pharmacological approach’ to address the issue of student debt, aiming to better grasp the social and political tensions surrounding higher education in neoliberal societies.

The Mode 3 Networked University

The idea of a modern university is a constantly changing and often contested concept. This paper traces the idea of a university using three modes. These modes are the Mode 1 Ivory Tower, Mode 2 Factory and Mode 3 Network. This framework draws upon higher education literature as well as three modes of knowledge production. I use these modes as a framework to describe the genealogical and historical development of the university in the Western world. These however are not purely historical and elements of their characteristics can be found within and between university institutions today. A genealogy shows a historical path dependency (i.e a teaching and research institution) of the idea of a university and a new materialism perspective shows the coming together of the many elements of the network assemblage which includes the discourse on the idea of a university clashing with new ideas, technologies and policy. The growth and development of the modern university from small, autonomous, elite and autonomous in mode 1 to large, mass regulated factory with marketplace outputs within neoliberal societies is well documented. The Mode 3 Network University is emerging with a potential for universal access with networked societies and technologies and has many actors influencing its becoming and idea. The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic and a broadening multidisciplinary approach to the field of Networked Learning has been called for and I introduce the possibility of theoretically analysing the becoming and enactment of the Mode 3 Network University using concepts and frameworks from the broad field of New Materialism. Such approaches take into account the complex assemblage and network of actors which are human and non-human in the growing and diversifying university. The growth and marketisation of the university has added to this complexity with commercial 'unbundling' taking place. Degrees, institutions and functions are being unbundled and rebundled and this active complex network of actors including technologies, humans (academics, students, employers, wider public) and the residual path dependency of the three modes are in tension and conflict but come together to enact the modern university. New Material methodologies allow for these many influences to come together in a 'flat ontology' to allow for a more nuanced and new approach to research in Networked Learning.

KADEM’s vision of gender justice and neopatriarchal masculinity in illiberal Turkey

ABSTRACT Women’s and LGBTI + rights have always been under attack in Turkey, but recent developments in AKP’s attempts to consolidate a pro-family, pro-birth, and Islamist gender regime based on the ‘moral’ regulation of women and LGBTI + creates an atmosphere that must be examined in detail. KADEM, a women’s GONGO established in 2013, plays a crucial role in this anti-gender backlash context, positioning their line of action as a challenge to the global feminist attempts to impose Western standards on Turkish society while advocating for women’s rights from a culturalist position. We analyse KADEM’s construction of men and masculinities in the materials on their website to understand their strategies of legitimisation of a form of neopatriarchal masculinity along the traditional ‘family values’ to see how KADEM serves as a transmitter of an Islamic neopatriarchal culture, with its implicit justifications of men’s patriarchal roles and duties in a neoliberal society.

Fratelli tutti e a superação do individualismo pela educação

Fratelli Tutti, an encyclical written by Pope Francis, addresses the themes of fraternity and social friendship, emphasizing the need to recognize, to value and to love all people, regardless of the physical proximity or the place where they were born or live. Individualism, however, is approached as one of the main challenges of contemporary neoliberal society. By reflecting on this issue and its implications for the common good, this article seeks to situate education as a form of overcoming selfish indifference. Based on Charlot (2020), Laval and Vergne (2023) and Benincá (2010), the dialogical education is defended as an essential element for promoting a culture of encounter and a sense of brotherhood.

Cripping and queering gender-based violence prevention: bridging disability justice, queer joy, and consent education

Although frequently relegated to the periphery in conversations about gender-based violence prevention, the disabling impacts of traumatised subjectivity both affect survivors’ abilities to fully participate in sex and contribute to survivors being more than twice as likely to be sexually (re)victimised compared to peers without trauma histories. In this paper, we seek to crip and queer approaches to gender-based violence prevention, particularly consent education, by learning from 2SLGBTQ+ and disabled trauma survivors’ affective experiences of queer, crip sexual joy and the radically messy ways in which they establish their own care networks for deeply pleasurable sex through the principles of disability justice. Refusing pathologising understandings of survivors as those who need to be cured, we highlight traumatised subjectivity as emblematic of the ambiguity and ambivalence inherent in sex as well as the possibilities for caring, consensual sex that moves beyond the concept of consent employed in colonial, neoliberal capitalist societies’ binary (Yes/No) consent laws. Drawing on the work of crip and queer theorists such as Mia Mingus, Alison Kafer, Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, and J. Logan Smilges, we reveal how disability justice principles, such as interdependence, collective access, and access intimacy, offer transformative understandings for anti-violence efforts.

When dissident bodies proclaim their places as dissonant bodies.

This essay aims to present the concept of dissonant bodies and give visibility to these bodies in the field of public health from anti-colonial and queer perspectives. These bodies are often considered dissidents. Their existence is considered abject, disposable, and marginalized by neoliberal and necropolitical society. It is presented as another possibility in the face of the logic and political strategies of hegemonic reproduction of capital-life and health policies. It debates tensions of new possibilities and alternatives of other modes of existence and inclusive worlds, in which all lives are considered, in their singularities and differences, radically equal in the validation of their ways of living.

Dressing up the place: Urban lifestyle mobilities and the production of “fashionable” tourism destinations in rural Japan

The past three decades of neoliberal structural reforms in Japan has established tourism policy favoring privatization, deregulation, and flexible mobility of capital to encourage decentralized markets. Within this system, attracting skilled urban migrants to rural regions has emerged as a central component of planning and development. Drawing on Kawamura's theory of fashion-ology, this study details the process of how rural tourism destinations are produced and (re)fashioned by urban-to-rural lifestyle migrants who bring new practices, aesthetics, and meanings to place. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021/2022 in the rural coastal town of Aoshima, we outline the co-constitutive dynamic between “star migrants”, industry “gatekeepers”, and “consumers as producers” in the production and consumption of “fashionable” rural destinations. The article contributes to literature on how rural tourism destinations are governed in contemporary neoliberal societies and provides insights into the unequal urban-to-rural power relations that continue to define Japan's regional revitalization programs.

Assembling the multitude: the transversal potential of categories for social work practice

This article elaborates on a theoretically informed model of action rooted in the concept of professional resistance, which approaches groups of people and social problems in an alternative way to the dominant modes of managerial practice. The aim is to create conditions for approaching groups with social needs differently and to be able to act politically for social change within contemporary society. We will do this by exploring the potential of the assembly in line with Hardt, Negri and Butler, as well as the notion of transversal politics as developed by Yuval-Davis, for creating political subjectivities and alliances across differences. The reason for this theoretical approach is based on how the effects of categorisation and its political function can sometimes be challenging to identify. This is argued to especially be the case within a neoliberal capitalist society where categories induce competition between precarious groups to maintain the political status quo.

A construção da sociedade neoliberal brasileira: qual o lugar da democracia?

Abstract The paper aims to analyze how democracy is structured within the neoliberal capitalist system in the Brazilian context. While neoliberalism requires market liberalization, reduction of the social state, and financialization of life, democracy presupposes political and economic equality, public apparatus, and inclusion; thus, it is necessary to discuss this conflicting relationship. The first session of the work discusses the economic, political, and social system of neoliberalism, understanding its requirements and characteristics, as opposed to democratic pretensions, to enter into Brazilian particularities. The second topic analyzes the construction of a neoliberal society in the country, establishing the investigation through the clash between social development and neoliberal advancement in Brazil. Finally, it examines the presence of neoliberal capitalism from the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) governments to the first two years of the Bolsonaro government, questioning the place of democracy. For this, the research used the deductive approach method and type of bibliographical and documentary research with a qualitative approach. In conclusion, we highlight the obstacle that neoliberalism imposes to realize a substantial, egalitarian, and plural democracy, marginalizing its power and restricting it to the electoral sphere.

Metacommunity: the current status of psychiatry and mental healthcare and implications for the future

We review the origins and history of community psychiatry and the challenges posed to it by advancing technology and the neoliberal political economy and society that have prevailed since the 1990s. We summarise both achievements and shortcomings and argue that the term ‘community’ fails to acknowledge the gap between its original ambition and the outcomes of its implementation. We argue that, because of the changes that have taken place, the implementation of community psychiatry's objectives as conceived originally is likely to continue to fail. To sharpen current awareness and thinking and optimise future policy discourse and service strategies we revisit the concept of ‘metacommunity’. This is a historical descriptive label that aims to encapsulate the fundamental transformations that have taken place. These in turn demand of psychiatrists and other mental health providers both more socially critical thinking and mental health activism in the public sphere. Ultimately, beyond both community and metacommunity psychiatry, what is required is a democratic psychiatry.

‘Brandsluts’: Instagram influencers and conspicuous consumption in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT Post-Apartheid South Africa shifted to a culture of consumption, originating with a transition to a neoliberal society [Sana, V. (2022). Bits of bytes and bites of bits: Instagram and the gendered performance of food production in the South African Indian community. Agenda, 36(1), 100–108), alongside access to a globalized world. During apartheid, consumption was strictly regulated, and racialized. This culture of consumption has been prevalent since the mid-1990s. As apartheid regulations lifted, the freedom of movement, choice and the ability to consume unreservedly, opened possibilities previously unimagined for much of the population. Consumption in South Africa is largely characterized by the unique contextual and symbolic processes that inform it. Consumption practices have impacted performances of identity and anxieties of belonging in turn [Sana, V. (2022). Bits of bytes and bites of bits: Instagram and the gendered performance of food production in the South African Indian community. Agenda, 36(1), 100–108]. This paper examines the visual representations of consumption practices on Instagram. Using critical consumption studies, an analysis of various Instagram influencers' consumption uncovers how South Africans affirm their place in the neoliberal global stage through acts of consumption. The article considers the consumption of products as a product itself to be consumed, and how this links to debates around conspicuous consumption in South Africa.

The Symbolic Capital of the Neoliberal University

The paper examines the concerns about the enduring value of liberal education in the broader context of a shift from a liberal to a neoliberal society. While so much literature on "the neoliberal university" tends to characterize neoliberalism as a hostile force invading the sacred space of the university, the knowledge comprising neoliberalism is in large part the product of research coming out of universities. Using the concept of symbolic capital to explore the role of university researchers in developing and consecrating neoliberal ideas, the paper argues that even in this era of heightened skepticism toward experts and expertise, university researchers play a key role in shaping both formal policy and popular common sense. The paper ultimately characterizes the university as a key site of struggle over what gets to be considered knowledge, and academic workers as central to this ongoing and urgent political struggle.