Neoliberal Values Research Articles

Forcing quality without substance: a critical analysis of evaluating teacher education programmes in South Korea

ABSTRACT In this study, the South Korean policy of evaluating the nation’s entire teacher education programmes regularly, which was introduced amid the globalization and rising popularity of neoliberal education reforms, was examined. Over the years, this policy has been criticized widely for its minimal impact on transforming teacher education. Employing the theoretical frameworks of teacher quality and teacher education accountability, a variety of relevant policy documents and teacher educators’ accounts were analysed to examine this problem. The results reveal that policymakers’ intention of quality assurance through this evaluation affirms an instrumental and neoliberal value, reflecting the global education reform discourse that associates teacher quality with the nation’s economic competitiveness. Aligned with this value, policymakers legitimize government control of teacher education and implement policies based on a narrow conception of teacher quality and the use of high-stake accountability mandates, thereby causing fear-based compliance with the programmes rather than genuine improvement in quality. The results suggest that any teacher education reforms that aim for meaningful teacher learning should reframe their conception of teacher quality based on a thoughtful and collective deliberation on what good teacher education is by actively engaging diverse stakeholders.

“Going-With-The-Flow” or “Getting-Things-Done”: A Folk Model of Intensive Parenting Among Middle-Class Parents

Research on intensive parenting norms still lacks a systematic framework to account for the ways these translate into everyday childcare practices and underlying logics and ideals. Based on in-depth interviews with 42 middle-class Israeli parents, we delineate a folk model of intensive parenting associated with ideals of self-fulfillment. The model comprises two parenting approaches, each differentiated into practices, logics, and cultural discourses. The first approach is characterized by “going-with-the-flow” practices stressing expressive bonding geared toward the child’s desires. It points to a logic of aspiration development grounded in therapeutic discourse. The second approach is associated with practices of “getting-things-done” by “activating” the child to accomplish goals and reflects a logic of capability enhancement grounded in neoliberal discourse. By deconstructing contemporary parenting, we show that therapeutic and neoliberal values converge at the discursive level but are experienced as contradictory in everyday practice, thus accounting for the tensions of intensive parenting.

Peer socialization of male adolescents in digital games: Achievement, competition, and harassment

Abstract Socialization theories suggest that, due to social change and technological transformation, peers and media have become important institutions of socialization for young people. Assuming that male adolescents use digital games for processes of peer self-socialization, this article investigates the values they mediate in digital games and how these values are related to their practice (with a focus on harassment) in digital games. Applying a qualitative research design, 36 male adolescents who frequently play various (multiplayer) online games were interviewed about their values and practices when gaming. The results show that the young gamers share individualistic values promoting performance, competition, and achievement, which seem to facilitate practices of online harassment. We conclude that, in their gaming practices, male adolescents mediate and reproduce neoliberal values as increasingly shared by society. Regarding their practices of harassment, however, they seem to use digital games as a moratorium that lets them break free from societal restrictions.

Marcel Mauss and the magical agents of our time

This article revisits Marcel Mauss’s theory of magic in the context of contemporary capitalism. Mauss saw magic as the art of transforming, socially accomplished via processes of differentiation that endow specialised agents, and their symbolic acts, with an ambiguous and unstable potentiality to do the extraordinary. Applying Mauss’s conception, we argue that significant figures of late capitalism, such as leaders, consultants and entrepreneurs, are set apart and socially constituted as magical agents with supernormal powers to solve unfathomable problems, ‘create value’ and make things happen. Based on collective beliefs and expectations, they are infused with a transformative social efficacy that further entrenches dominant neoliberal values and practices. The article contributes to highlighting the continued sociological relevance of Mauss’s theory of magic and his insistence on the importance of symbolic thought and action in the constitution of the social.

COMPETIR PARA QUÊ? PERCEPÇÕES DOCENTES SOBRE AS REFORMAS DO ENSINO SUPERIOR PÚBLICO NO BRASIL

ABSTRACT The marketization and financialization of higher education in Brazil can bring severe social and economic consequences. This research aimed to understand how the faculty body of a public university in Brazil perceives the reforms of the public higher education system, which are currently undergoing political approval. The results of the analysis of variance test suggest that there is a significant difference between professors aligned with neoliberal values and those who are not, in the direction that the alignment to neoliberal values undervalue the importance of the public higher education system to society. Also, professors aligned with neoliberal values are more likely to give away administrative autonomy to external stakeholders, focusing more on meeting students’ expectations, and seeking private sponsorship to raise funds.

La costruzione dell’identità di genere nei manuali LS fra l’ideologia di genere e l’ideologia neoliberale: un’analisi comparativa dei manuali di italiano LS e di serbo LS

This paper aims to analyse the elements of gender ideology and neo-liberal ideology in a corpus composed of three Italian and two Serbian as a foreign language textbooks. The focus of the study is centered on the representation of activities related to the purchase of clothes and accessories, analysed from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. The results indicate that neoliberal values are sustained through the idea that women are naturally predisposed to be clothes and fashion consumers. On a broader scale, the results implicate that the educational materials taken into examination lack a critical pedagogy approach, and that they do not employ the critical and the transformative potential of education, instead they are limited to the reproduction of dominant ideologies.

The formation of Poland’s Modern Historical Policy (2000s)

The article is devoted to the early stage of the formation of the concept of historical politics as a special sphere of public administration in Poland (2004–2007). The prerequisites for its appearance, its background, the logic of its main ideologists are considered. The author analyzes the typology of this phenomenon presented in the Polish academic literature. It is pointed out that its main features are derived from the ideological originality and politic identity of the “Law and Justice” party. It was the notion of their political predecessors and their place in Polish history, which was strengthened in this movement, that determined the main accents of the historical policy of the Polish governments in 2005–2007. Attention in the article is also paid to the criticism of this policy by the main opponents. The Polish historical politics is also analyzed at the regional level as a natural reaction of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe both to the previous system and to the new neoliberal values coming from the West. The spread of a certain political fashion for the politics of memory is seen as part of the conservative trend in the politics of the countries within the region. At the same time, the author points out a number of specific partizan features of the historical policy of “Law and Justice”, which impede the implementation of its main goal — the consolidation of the nation — and turn it into a means of internal political struggle.

Aspiring to Dutchness: Media Literacy, Integration, and Communication with Eritrean Status Holders

Based on 13 interviews with Eritrean status holders and professionals in Amsterdam this article explores how paying attention to media skills and media literacies may help gain a better understanding of what matters in exchanges between professionals and legal refugees in the mandatory Dutch integration process. Media literacy needs to be decolonised in order to do so. Starting as an inquiry into how professionals and their clients have different ideas of what constitutes “inclusive communication,” analysis of the interviews provides insight into how there is a need to (a) renegotiate citizenship away from the equation of neoliberal values with good citizenship and recognising needs and ambitions outside a neoliberal framework, (b) rethink components of formal and informal communication, and (c) reconceptualise media literacies beyond Western-oriented definitions. We propose that professionals and status holders need to understand how and when they (can) trust media and sources; how what we might call “open-mindedness to the media literacy of others” is a dialogic performative skill that is linked to contexts of time and place. It requires self-reflective approach to integration, and the identities of being a professional and an Eritrean stakeholder. Co-designing such media literacy training will bring reflexivity rather than the more generic term “competence” within the heart of both media literacy and inclusive communication.

The making of ideal immigrant settlement workers: examining the technologies of ruling power in Canadian immigrant service organisations

ABSTRACT Underpinned by neoliberal rationalities, the contractual relationship between government funders and immigrant-serving organisations (ISOs) has led these agencies to promote neoliberal values of competition in the business market, prioritising quantity over quality in their services in order to secure government funding. Informed by Foucault's concept of governmentality as its theoretical framework and institutional ethnography (IE) as its methodology, our study investigates the work experiences of 18 immigrant settlement workers (ISWs) at three ISOs in western Canada. This study identifies how following an outcomes-driven evaluation approach, as required by the federal government, produces a series of textually mediated accountabilities, constructing translocal textual social relations that further coordinate and govern ISWs’ conduct in their local ISO workplaces. This evaluation approach, as analyzed in our study, is exercised as the technologies of ruling power, which is strengthened by the ruling of systems, workplace knowledge, social relations, and the governed-self, producing ideal ISWs who are self-accountable, self-regulated, adaptable, and productive. This process of making ideal ISWs legitimises ISWs’ apparatus role in reinforcing technologies of ruling power from the individual, organisational and institutional perspectives to better serve the agenda of the state.

Ship of Darkness: Jazz and/as Affect in the Global Cruise Industry

Ship of Darkness: Jazz and/as Affect in the Global Cruise Industry

A Policy Analysis of National Occupancy Standards with a Focus on Their Impact on Women Who Have Experienced Gender-Based Violence in British Columbia

For the past three decades, National Occupancy Standards (NOS) have been the default standard used by government and non-governmental housing organizations in Canada to assess housing suitability. However, there is growing concern that the prescriptive nature of these standards limits access to housing for those most in need, including women+ who have experienced gender-based violence and their families (Knowles et al., 2019). In this paper, we draw on Ginsberg and Miller-Cribbs’ (2005) framework for policy analysis that explores the feasibility, efficacy, quality, access, and ethics of NOS. This work also draws on a feminist ethics of care framework (Tronto, 1994) that places human relationships at its centre (Walker, 2007) and critically explores the extent to which government policies effectively care for its citizens (Sevenhuijsen et al., 2003). Together these frameworks help demonstrate the limitations of NOS, and the role they play as a barrier to housing. This has important implications, especially in light of Canada’s National Housing Strategy Act that recognizes the right to adequate housing as a “fundamental human right affirmed by international law” (National Housing Strategy Act, 2019). We conclude by outlining four recommendations for future policy, including the need to recognize NOS as guidelines, create new housing suitability policies that prioritize safety, create housing suitability policies with families, and reduce family poverty. This policy analysis provides an important reminder of the need to critically examine policies that shape social work practices and the colonial and neoliberal values that are often embedded in them. Keywords: National Occupancy Standards, Gender-Based Violence, Housing Policy, Feminist Ethics of Care, Policy Analysis

Ordinary Writing: Theorizing the Affective Structures of the Present in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds

The present work explores how affect is conceptualized throughout The Hundreds (2019), a collaborative project between Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart composed of one hundred poems of one hundred words each (or multiples of one hundred). Throughout these poems, the authors affectively reflect on and theorize about everyday life through experimental ethnographic and writing practices, self-imposing a word restraint to their writing with the objective of exploring the creative and theoretical possibilities behind alternative ways of writing affect theory. Focusing on the unique fusion of poetry, ethnography and theory present in their work, this text explores the formal qualities of the poems and how the distinctions between criticism and fiction are blurred through a series of creative and experimental tactics that point towards radical ethical pedagogies and resist neoliberal values in academia. Some of these tactics specifically subvert academic conventions regarding citation, authorship and enunciation, and point towards innovative ways of inhabiting the place of the scholar and understanding academy itself. One of the central questions this investigation seeks to answer is how form is used by Berlant and Stewart in The Hundreds to theorize affect, with a special focus on how their efforts amount to what could speculatively be called «ordinary writing», a method to creatively describe and conceptualize the ordinary.

Coping with Welfare Shame: Responses of Urban Indigenous and Non‐Indigenous Peoples to “Mutual Obligation” Requirements in Australia

AbstractThis article examines how Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people in cities navigate welfare and the mutual obligation regime in Australia. Since the introduction of the mutual obligation requirements (MORs) and the accompanying “Work for the Dole” program, initially for Indigenous and later for non‐Indigenous welfare beneficiaries, welfare recipients from both groups are perceived as morally deficient people and are stigmatized by paternalistic state surveillance. Drawing on the idea of shame as a cultural boundary‐making process, this article shows that although welfare recipients from both groups have reinterpreted the concept of “mutual obligation” based on their cultural values and practices, contesting interpretations of the concept within each group have hindered them from fully deflecting shame by disrupting and replacing normative scripts of conduct. This article argues that such variations occurred first because the interpretations that both groups adopted to cope with government surveillance are already mobilized by the state to justify intervening in citizens’ lives, and second because the sociospatiality of a city such as Adelaide, where a broad range of neoliberal policy experiments have been implemented, facilitates the internalization of neoliberal values among citizens, regardless of whether they are Indigenous or not. [mutual obligation, “work for the dole” program, Indigenous, welfare recipients, shame]

Extension, austerity, and emergence: Themes identified from a global scoping review of non-urban occupational therapy services.

Rural communities contribute to national wellbeing, identities, economies, and social fabrics yet experience increased risk of mortality, morbidity, and disability, coupled with lower levels of income, formal education, and employment than urban citizens. Despite higher need, occupational therapy services are maldistributed to urban locations. Publications about non-urban services discuss predominantly outreach-based, individualist, rehabilitation for specified diagnoses/age groups. However, given this population level inequity, it is unclear why individualist focussed services are more commonly discussed. Understanding intentions expressed in publications about non-urban service design may identify assumptions/limitations to current approaches and contribute to improved future services. Each of 117 publications identified in a scoping review was read by two reviewers to independently identify themes. Provisional themes were discussed and modified in an iterative process to develop final themes/subthemes. The first author reinterrogated the publications and coded data to identify relevant examples to support the identified themes. Three key themes and nine subthemes were identified. Hegemonic perspectives were found in the themes (i) Extension of urban practice and (ii) Austerity, particularly in the Global North. Non-urban services were typically extended to non-urban contexts underpinned by austerity and neoliberal values such that non-urban persons and their context were problematised rather than service or funding design. A counter-hegemonic perspective was found in the theme (iii) Responses to situational realities more commonly in Global South publications, which valued non-urban contexts, and focussed on developing non-urban communities and promoting justice. The hegemonic paradigm links occupational therapy services with neoliberal notions of individualism, private provision of care, and efficiency/market value, rather than the occupational therapy values for justice. The profession must consider our role in perpetuating injustice for non-urban people and consider if and how more contextually tailored counter hegemonic place-based paradigms can be developed from and with regional, rural, and remote practice.

Conflicting Perspectives on the Internationalization of Higher Education: Evidence from the Turkish Case

The internationalization of higher education (IHE) has become a key policy issue for governments, a research field for scholars, a strategic priority for universities, and a career orientation for administrative staff. Yet, with recent social, political, and economic trends heavily embellished by globalization and neoliberalism, the term IHE has resulted in conflicting perspectives. Although there are numerous analyses on IHE, these analyses seldom focus on conflicts among different constituencies of the university (leaders, academics, administrative staff). This study aims at exploring the perspectives of key constituencies on the common conception and practice of IHE. The study was designed as basic qualitative research in which the data set was collected from four flagship universities in Türkiye. The results indicated a variety of academic, economic, political, and socio-cultural conflicts by different constituencies. These conflicts are mostly related to the association of IHE with neoliberal values while the progressive values remain invisible.

Shifting terms: Development discourses and moral imaginaries in Indian state service provision

How are multiple visions of state–society relations accommodated within the daily practices of the post-liberalization Indian state? How does state service provision relate to these shifting normative framings of state duty and citizen responsibility? This article examines these questions through an ethnographic study of citizen–state encounters in rural north India. Focusing on the presentation of social services and programmes through a single village council, I trace how development discourses under the post-liberalization state oscillate between welfarist principles of distribution and neoliberal values of self-sufficiency. As the state is fashioned variously as a provider or a more distant facilitator of enterprising activity, I explore how citizens manage these shifting normative terms, negotiate the varied demands of bureaucratic claims-making, and engage with moral ideals of responsibility and care.

Epistemic injustice and neoliberal imaginations in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) policy

Abstract This article examines the construction of epistemic injustice in creating and implementing an EMI policy. Drawing on “epistemic injustice” (Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press) and “misframing” (Fraser, Nancy. 2009. Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world. New York: Columbia University Press), we discuss how the EMI policy in Nepal’s school education has reinforced the epistemic nature of social injustice. Taking an ethnographic approach, we have analyzed how EMI policies are created, interpreted, and implemented in two public schools located in historically marginalized ethnic minority/Indigenous communities. Our analyses show that the schools misframe and misrecognize Indigenous/ethnic minority parents’ and children’s linguistic knowledge and awareness of language education policy. While reproducing neoliberal values, EMI policies construct a deficit identity of Indigenous/ethnic minority communities by erasing and stigmatizing their knowledge of mother tongues in school. Such policies not only promote an English-only monolingual ideology but also pose multiple challenges for epistemic access of Indigenous/minority students and affect parents’ “party of participation” (Fraser, Nancy. 2009. Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world. New York: Columbia University Press) in policymaking process.

Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services: An Act of Resistance against Australia's Neoliberal Ideologies.

The individualistic and colonial foundations of neoliberal socio-political ideologies are embedded throughout Australian health systems, services, and discourses. Not only does neoliberalism undermine Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collectivist values by emphasizing personal autonomy, but it has significant implications for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services (ACCHS) operate within Community-oriented holistic understandings of well-being that contradict neoliberal values that Western health services operate within. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the role of ACCHS in resisting the pervasive nature of neoliberalism through the prioritization of self-determination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. Utilizing a critical evaluative commentary, we reflect on Aboriginal political leadership and advocacy during the 1970s and 1980s and the development of neoliberalism in Australia in the context of ACCHS. Community controlled primary health services across Australia are the only remaining government-funded and Aboriginal-controlled organizations. Not only do ACCHS models resist neoliberal ideologies of reduced public expenditure and dominant individualistic models of care, but they also incontrovertibly strengthen individual and Community health. ACCHS remain the gold standard model by ensuring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights to the self-determination of health in accordance with the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Neoliberalism for young learners in an EFL context: a mixed-methods approach

ABSTRACT Studies on the salient role of neoliberalism in education have increased rapidly in recent years. These studies highlighted the presence of neoliberalism in language teaching materials in different contexts. However, research exploring the reality of neoliberal mentality in young learners’ (YL) English language teaching (ELT) materials are sparse. Contributing to this barely-touched line of research, this study, employing a mixed-methods approach, examined the two most frequently used young learners’ ELT textbooks (i.e. ‘Family and Friends’; ‘Super Minds’) taught in Iranian private language institutes. We further explored teachers’ perspectives on neoliberalism. The findings revealed that young learners’ textbooks are notably filled with neoliberal values such as ‘fame & celebrity’ and ‘material wealth’. The qualitative findings also revealed that most teachers are unaware of the presence of neoliberalism in the textbooks. Implications for teachers, young learners, and policymakers are discussed.

The Ecological Root Metaphor for Higher Education: Searching for Evidence of Conceptual Emergence within University Education Strategies

Recent research has suggested that Higher Education would benefit from the adoption of institutional models that relinquish ties to industrial thinking and associated metaphors. This long-established, market-led managerial perspective has been colonised by neoliberal values that work against education. A move towards models that have greater resonance with ecological thinking is considered to better align the institutional purpose with tackling the wicked problems of the current century and promoting social justice. This paper considers the role of root metaphors in promoting and maintaining an ecological perspective and asks if there is any evidence for the emergence of ecological thinking in institutional education strategies that might support the development of the imagined future of the ecological university. Qualitative document analysis suggests that the move towards the adoption of the ecological root metaphor will require a punctuated change that is not compatible with the typical incremental nature of change within universities. The incremental adoption of ecological terminology may trigger an increase in pedagogic frailty if the root metaphor remains linked to the neoliberal ideology of consumerism. The construction of strategy documents needs to consider how key concepts are related to each other and how they can portray a coherent image of the institution’s ambitions.