Neoliberal Challenge Research Articles

Fostering educational excellence and addressing neoliberal challenges: Perspectives from principals and educators in Arab private schools in Israel

This study delves into the firsthand experiences of educators within private Arab schools in Israel in response to the escalating trends of privatization. Through conducting semi-structured interviews with 10 principals and educators from private institutions, a phenomenological approach was employed to uncover their perspectives on achievements and neoliberal challenges encountered in their educational roles. The findings elucidate a nuanced interplay of factors propelling the privatization process, including the demand for quality education, the cultivation of identity, and discontentment with public schooling systems. Participants highlighted the advantages offered by the flexibility and resources available in private educational settings. Nonetheless, concerns surfaced regarding issues of equitable access, regulatory oversight, workload demands, and clashes with the Ministry of Education’s privatization policies. Educators articulated both the benefits and risks associated with the privatization of schools. The study advocates for the implementation of standardized oversight mechanisms, specialized training to uphold principles of equity, fostering public–private partnerships, and the necessity for further research to shape practical policy that align privatization with educational excellence and equal opportunities. Insights gleaned from educational leaders navigating the complexities of privatization serve as a compass for devising strategies aimed at enhancing Arab schooling through evidence-based reforms.

Occupational security: A holistic values-based framework for supporting occupations and safety

ABSTRACT In an ongoing era of global-scale, cascading, and intersecting crises, including climate change impacts, ongoing armed conflicts, and the COVID-19 pandemic, security is becoming increasingly challenging. The escalating dangers and restrictions arising from these events, adversely affecting life itself and related occupations, has resulted in insecurity disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable and marginalized communities. This often contributes to outcomes that directly relate to security, such as poverty and homelessness. In this conceptual work, we present occupational security as a holistic means to understand and address safety concerns for individuals and populations adversely affected by crises, that have both local and global impacts. Besides global crises, long-term, ongoing, and interrelated security risks from racism, poverty, lack of shelter, and colonisation are also in the purview of occupational security. This concept extends the notion of occupation by including non-humans. Using a values-based framework, occupational security challenges neoliberalism and neoliberal notions of security, which are individualist in nature; and instead, provides a collectivist approach. The values proposed for this framework incorporate sustainability, justice, peace, compassion, authenticity, and accuracy to ensure occupational security and safety for all. We propose that the framework of occupational security has the potential to enhance occupational science scholarship, as well as facilitate collaborative engagement with wider disciplines concerned with issues of security.

Complex Interventions for a Complex System? Using Systems Thinking to Explore Ways to Address Unhealthy Commodity Industry Influence on Public Health Policy.

Interventions are needed to prevent and mitigate unhealthy commodity industry (UCI) influence on public health policy. Whilst literature on interventions is emerging, current conceptualisations remain incomplete as they lack considerations of the wider systemic complexities surrounding UCI influence, which may limit intervention effectiveness. This study applies systems thinking as a theoretical lens to help identify and explore how possible interventions relate to one another in the systems in which they are embedded. Related challenges to addressing UCI influence on policy, and actions to support interventions, were also explored. Online participatory workshops were conducted with stakeholders with expertise in UCIs. A systems map, depicting five pathways to UCI influence, and the Action Scales Model were used to help participants identify interventions and guide discussions. Codebook thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Fifty-two stakeholders participated in 23 workshops. Participants identified 27 diverse, interconnected and interdependent interventions corresponding to the systems map's pathways that reduce the ability of UCIs to influence policy. These include, for example, reform policy financing; regulate public-private partnerships (PPPs); reform science governance and funding; frame and reframe the narrative, challenge neoliberalism and gross domestic product (GDP) growth; leverage human rights; change practices on multistakeholder governance; and reform policy consultation and deliberation processes. Participants also identified four potential key challenges to interventions (ie, difficult to implement or achieve; partially formulated; exploited or misused; requires tailoring for context), and four key actions to help support intervention delivery (ie, coordinate and cooperate with stakeholders; invest in civil society; create a social movement; nurture leadership). A systems thinking lens revealed the theoretical interdependence between disparate and heterogenous interventions. This suggests that to be effective, interventions need to align, work collectively, and be applied synchronously to different parts of the system, including multiple levels of governance. Importantly, these interventions need to be supported by intermediary actions to be achieved. Urgent action is now required to strengthen healthy alliances and implement interventions.

Issues of monolingualism: A new expression of Neo-Colonisation? The ideological underpinnings of language education in Australia: The case of New South Wales

In recent decades, the drift toward English monolingualism has been a significant concern in Australian multilingual education. Despite Australia being multicultural and linguistically diverse, extensive research has shown that the nation is still adversely affected by a persistent ‘monolingual mindset’. Potential weaknesses regarding multilingual education have been long addressed but no satisfactory countermeasures have been implemented. A recent challenge to the conceptual underpinnings of the ‘monolingual mindset’ have emerged in the last half-century from the neoliberal marketisation of education. Discouragement of multilingualism and multiculturalism may be related to Australia's ‘liberal status quo’, in which language education has not been provided with adequate structural support from Australia’s liberal government and society. While Australian language educators have made continuous efforts to maintain ethnic minority ‘community languages’ within this context, these efforts will seemingly remain ineffective if a monolingual mentality is permitted to remain at a structural level. Recently, a neoliberal challenge has been levelled to make such structural changes, with the privatisation of education encouraging the learning of minority languages and cultivation of ethnic identities. However, political problems are raised by this response, which risks stressing ethnic conflict and political tensions. This paper investigates the issues around Australia’s liberal ‘monolingual mindset’, the structural causes for its discouragement of language learning and the strengths and weaknesses of its responses. This paper utilises a qualitative approach to analyse documents relevant to current language syllabi in New South Wales. Through critical discourse analysis, thematic categorisation will reveal the values and interests contained in these documents. New South Wales has been chosen as a reference for other Australian states and territories regarding language planning and education due to its rich multicultural and multilingual makeup. This study is intended to motivate further inquiry into what may motivate students to pursue future language studies.

OA isn’t free, it costs folks like you and me

Despite the framing of open access (OA) as a progressive movement that challenges neoliberalism and champions the public good, academic labour is often left out of these analyses (Eve, 2017). In a bid to liberate academic labour from the neoliberal hands of commercial publishing, advocates of OA have argued that making scholarly work “free” can help to establish an academic commons (de Rosnay, 2021). However initiatives to mandate OA in academia like “Plan S” set the stage for academic labourers to be compelled to give up rights to their intellectual property (Frantzvag & Stromme, 2019). In this essay I argue that the broad acceptance of OA as the liberatory savior of academic publishing is misguided, as it obscures the right-wing libertarian roots of the movement and would see academics voluntarily alienate themselves from their labour (Golumbia, 2016). Drawing on Golumbia’s (2016) Marxist reading of the political economy of OA, I argue that devaluing academic labour by characterizing it as unproductive and immaterial negates the abstract labour that produces scholarly works. Undoubtedly, libraries have an important role to play in the OA “revolution” (Burns, 2018), although not as assenting boosters but as critical voices that advocate for the rights of workers.

COVID-19 response – lessons learned: challenging the neoliberal TINA discourse through social work education

ABSTRACT Social work academic literature has consistently documented the detrimental effects of the neoliberal phase of capitalism on society and has issued calls against it. This paper supports and furthers these claims. It is informed by a critical pedagogy and Gramscian lens and argues that the COVID-19 public health emergency context provides some lessons which can be used to discredit the ‘There is No Alternative’ (TINA) neoliberal discourse. More specifically, it argues that the pandemic offers an updated critique of the TINA discourse, as it revealed that there is an alternative to public spending cuts, that market-based solutions are irrelevant for the well-being of society, and that the social value of life-sustaining activities such as caring, is important for the social reproduction of society. This paper is a call for action to all social work educators who espouse the progressive values of our profession, to utilize these lessons learned and challenge neoliberalism. Relevant examples towards this aim are offered.

A Defence of the Relevance of Neorealism in the Post-Bipolar World

This article evaluates the validity of neorealism in explaining contemporary international events. It is argued that three decades since the end of bipolarity and despite the neoliberal challenge, neorealism still provides convincing explanations of world politics. Within this context the basic theoretical precepts of Kenneth Waltz's neorealism are presented before moving on to outline the main aspects of the neoliberal challenge since the end of the Cold War. Then the response of structural realism is evaluated. Finally, through an analysis of recent normative and empirical discourses, this article reaffirms structural realism's credibility as a theory of international relations.

French female youth and sports inspectors and the challenge of neoliberalism during the Trente Glorieuses

In a society where the politics of life is geared toward maximizing the physical and psychological dimensions of human capital to ensure economic growth, France’s Inspectorate for Youth and Sports played a key role in disseminating a new mode of governance of bodies and youth—a form of self-governance based on the rising neoliberal values that emerged during the period of the Trente Glorieuses. Representing a tiny minority in an essentially male bastion, a small number of women, cherry-picked for their expertise and effectiveness as inspectors, came to play a vital role in a new mode of youth governance aimed, against a backdrop of social control, at encouraging young people to assume greater self-responsibility and to take ownership of their physical education and activities. Guided by research in the human and social sciences as a basis for rethinking how physical education is taught in schools, women may be seen as key contributors to the emergence of a new ethos designed to develop the ability of French youth to adapt to the social and economic transformation of capitalist society by appealing to the psyche (superego) and self-regulation. Despite promoting a “differentialist feminism”.

I was wondering: reflections on collaborative practice by five researchers in Australia, New Zealand and the United States

ABSTRACT The catalyst for this article stems from my reflections (Peter) on the efficacy of collaborative engagement I recently experienced with colleagues in my university and similar institutions in the United States (US) and New Zealand (NZ). Accordingly, I invited research scholars (Christina and Geoffrey) from Australia, (Vicki) from NZ and (Jenni and Rachel) from the US to reflect upon the connectedness, care and community they experienced from collaboration in research projects with me. The framework I chose for their sharing was the Harvard Visible Thinking Routine; ‘I see, I think, I wonder’ (2009). The purpose of this article is to highlight the potential outcomes of reflective practice as researchers in three countries share their perceptions and perspectives concerning their experiences of connectedness and community in confronting isolation and neo-liberal challenges that we encounter in our research endeavours. Each person shares their unique ontological experiences as researchers, including how these experiences transformed their views concerning the value they ascribe to collaboration in relation to their work. Finally, despite our diverse ontological perspectives and geographic separation, we highlight authentic sharing among scholars internationally as an invaluable practice to potentially alleviate the lived experiences of isolation and separation that research scholars may acknowledge in their work.

Feminist revolution: a fight for recognition, redistribution and a more just world

ABSTRACT The contribution of feminism, as a critique of social inequalities and as a complex way to challenge neoliberalism and patriarchy, has been crucial in Chile – especially in the last few years. Various events have been particularly relevant: the plight of those seeking free, safe abortion; the feminist revolution of May 2018; and the performance by ‘Las Tesis’, as well as the expressions of other feminist organisations during the Chilean revolt in October 2019 (18-O). These events have been part of a key step in Chile: the process of changing Pinochet's Constitution. This process of change will have a commission with gender parity: for the first time in the world, the Constitution will be written equally by men and women. How feminist principles are incorporated in the new Magna Carta will be very important. By ‘feminist principles’ we mean, among other things, the recognition of different identities and rights – such as reproductive rights or reproductive work – that have remained historically hidden, and this denial has contributed to deepened inequalities. We will analyse this process using feminist perspectives and tools such as redistribution, which defends and favours a more just distribution of resources and wealth; recognition of different groups; and intersectionality, incorporating interconnected systems of discrimination and oppression. Another contribution in this revolutionary process is, following Butler, the invitation to consider vulnerability, not as a purely passive position that yields the site of agency to different forms of paternalism, but rather as the condition of possibility of resistance.

The social question in neoliberal times

ABSTRACT The paper examines the origins of the idea of “the social question” in the nineteenth century, the rise of the welfare state, the challenge of neoliberalism, and the new transnationalized social question.

Advocacy NGOs and the neoliberal manufacture of the street voice

ABSTRACT In the previous decades there has been an unprecedented proliferation of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) working in different policy fields. In hand with this process of ‘NGOisation’, there has been a growing academic debate regarding the role of NGOs in terms of their influence promoting or resisting the expansion of neoliberalism. For some, NGOs are organisations that have become domesticated by neoliberalism, aiding the spread of its influence around the world; while for others, there are still some NGOs that remain critical and attempt to challenge neoliberalism. Engaging with this debate, this article critically explores the role of two advocacy NGOs involved in processes of education policymaking during the recent education reforms carried out in Chile. Drawing on Foucault’s theoretical work on governmentality, the research investigates the extent to which these NGOs contest Chilean neoliberalism or conversely, as subjects of governmentality, serve to protect and extend its hegemony. Finally, the article argues that NGOs can use their image as representatives of civil society to pacify demands for radical changes and allow the government to control the social sphere from a distance.

Common pool resource institutions: The rise of internet platforms in the social solidarity economy

AbstractThe research problemTheories of organising are dominated by a neoliberal agenda. This authority has been disrupted by social and sustainable entrepreneurship research that highlights alternatives to this hegemony. The motivation for this paper is to argue that the emergence of internet platforms contributes to new ways of working in the social solidarity economy (SSE). We focus our exploration on organisational practices and characteristics, evaluating platforms as contributions to commoning.MethodOur approach offers a way out of the public–private dichotomy. We build theory by positioning the SSE as a series of approaches that hybridise redistribution, reciprocity and market: three distinct strategies of social organisations for achieving their primary purposes. Utilising Elinor Oström's theory of common pool resource institutions (CPRIs) and her design principles, we appraise three internet platforms (Kiva, Loomio and Kickstarter). We triangulate organisational, academic and media narratives to assess the embeddedness of their commoning practices and potential as social innovations for a postcapitalist economy.Contribution to knowledgeSocial enterprises (SEs) can develop internet platforms that use CBPP to build and support the SSE. This is the first paper to deploy Oström's work to study how SEs use CBPP, thereby developing the theoretical connections between these two fields. Our findings are part of a discourse that challenges neoliberalism and identifies how the SSE contributes to sustainable development.

Neoliberalism From Above and Cosmopolitanism From Below: A Korean-English Meetup Group in the United States

Abstract This article applies theories of cosmopolitanism-from-below A. Appadurai (2011), F. Kurasawa (2004) to an empirical case. Drawing on participant-observation and interviews conducted over the course of 20 months at a Korean-English Meetup group in the United States, this article explores the practices of an explicitly “cosmopolitan” group. Specifically, it focuses on U.S. Americans and Korean interns, and considers their experiences and motivations within the broader structures of neoliberalism. The group is identified as alternately exemplifying and challenging neoliberal logic and the article considers the relationship between neoliberalism and different forms of cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan ethos fostered by the group’s founder and reinforced through members’ practice offers preliminary but hopeful evidence of a cosmopolitanism that challenges neoliberalism and the uneven distribution of cultural/economic capital.

Sink or swim? Responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of English in neoliberal Brazil

This article discusses the results of a four-year investigation on the neoliberal challenges faced by socioeconomically underprivileged students in Brazil who were majoring in English teaching. It is a qualitative study that employs the concept of language as a sociocultural and dialogical practice as well as the concepts of responsibility and agency; it also examines the relationship between these students’ experiences and neoliberalism as seen in language education. The data generated by questionnaires, students’ essays, and semi-structured interviews reveal that the participants’ initiatives to engage themselves in outside classroom interactions acted as counter-centralizing forces. By exercising their responsible situated agency towards their English language appropriation process, these participants react against neoliberal challenges viewed here as hierarchical centripetal forces that constrain their access to different kinds of capital. The study participants are also guided by the agency of spaces promoted by discourses marked by decolonial thinking; however, though these students find different ways to negotiate neoliberal challenges, it is still crucial that the faculty in charge of the investigated context build on existing decolonial practices in the classroom. In doing so, more students can become part of “discursive actions” that foster their responsible situated agency towards a more egalitarian society.

Challenging Neoliberalism Through Radical Adult Education in a Chilean Union School

This article presents the results of a descriptive case study of the Union School of the Chilean nongovernmental organization (NGO) Alejandro Lipschutz Institute of Science (ICAL-Spanish acronym). The study contributes to the field of adult education by providing a contemporary example of what Gramscian pedagogy can look like. Theoretically, this case contributes Latin American social movement-based analysis of neoliberalism, and its impact on the nature of work for working-class people. The study presents an example of educational praxis; the dialectical relationship between theory and educational practice that emerges from ICAL’s efforts to advance the Chilean union movement’s struggle to challenge neoliberalism through educational and leadership development work.

WORK AND GLOBALIZATION

This paper aims at analysing some aspects of work and globalization from historical perspective with an intention to better understand neoliberal globalization challenges of the last 30–40 years. The trade globalization, which united the world in the 16th century, was followed by the industrial globalization with decisive transformation of the work area, for instance, marginalizing the agriculture. The post-1945 globalization is more complex, although based on technological-scientific revolutions, it is characterized by other important dimensions: geopolitical, economic (financial), socio-cultural, environmental, and some of them have disturbing consequences for the work area. Among them I discuss the President Trump’s rejection of neoliberal globalization, which resulted in the “export” of millions of jobs from USA to China, the collapse of the middle class and populist reactions of the general public and in the world of politics. Meanwhile the work area is full of uncertainty, but the situation is different in different parts of the world.

Bogotá's Left Turn: Counter‐Neoliberalization in Colombia

AbstractFor the political left, decentralization has increased both the appeal and the importance of governing the city, and yet sharp constraints limit the left's transformative potential when it controls that level of government alone. Bogotá is an important case in point under the recent mayoral administration of Gustavo Petro (2012–15), a demobilized guerrilla leader who sought to implement a series of urban policy reforms that together represent one of the most substantively radical and intellectually coherent attempts to challenge neoliberalism in all of Latin America. Focusing on the four policy arenas through which Petro hoped to transform the city (environment, housing, transport, and trash collection), the article documents the veto power of the firms whose privileges he threatened, as well as the tools through which they derailed reform. In contrast to the failure of his political economy agenda, Petro was indeed able to enact a number of progressive social policy reforms precisely because they did not threaten the profitability of the city's entrenched growth machine.

Neoliberal challenges in context: a case of Hong Kong

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the neoliberal challenges and problems facing public schools in the particular Hong Kong context. Design/methodology/approach Based on a systematic and critical analysis on the history and socio-political context of Hong Kong’s school policies and practice as well as the official documents and statistics, this paper examines the impacts of neoliberalism in four main aspects of school education in Hong Kong: school governance, accountability, privatization and government expenditure. Findings Convergence, as well as deviation, on neoliberal globalization occurs in the particular Hong Kong context. School bureaucracy has irresistibly expanded. Policymakers have placed increasing emphasis on instrumentally evaluating schools while decentralizing, diversifying and privatizing education. School leadership has become focused solely on succeeding within those imposed performance management and metrics, pulling ahead of school competitions and prioritizing easily quantifiable and measurable tasks. Teachers have faced a potential threat from the loss of autonomy through the market logic and consumerist metrics. The rise of privatized education has further intensified school practices based on competitiveness and performativity. On the other hand, resource cutbacks and financial constraints – problems that are generally inflicted by neoliberal discourse – have rarely occurred in Hong Kong. Research limitations/implications This study is part of concerted efforts in research that adopts the comparative and critical perspectives emerging from different social contexts to consider and flesh out how neoliberalism look across the school systems, how it challenges the systems differently, and how it evokes various responses from within the systems (Apple, 2001). Taken all the efforts together, a finely nuanced understanding of the trails of neoliberalism can help collectively re-discover school education as a social good, and collectively re-imagine and reshape alternatives for the future. Originality/value This paper offers an international and comparative perspective and further nuances to an understanding of how neoliberal policies and ideology are recontextualized in countries across the globe given particularities of different local contexts.

Governing complexity to challenge neoliberalism? Embedded firms and the prospects of understanding new realities

Many initial assumptions about the appeal of global development and governance have run aground on the shoals of countervailing realities and interests. The overall trend of political despair and disillusionment, the loss of confidence in the markets as a unique arbiter of value creation and distribution, and the marketable appeal of governance best practices seem to have reached their nadir. Management literature has begun to question these issues and to call for a deeper understanding of the dynamics of political, social and corporate change. The question of (corporate) governance is plural and needs multilevel approaches to meet the new challenges of complex realities, especially the pressure of neoliberalism with two central consequences: financialization and globalization of economies. In this reflexive article, we aim to initiate avenues for new thinking at the institutional, corporate and academic levels. Institutional and regulatory frameworks need to be seen as local systems connected internationally and not global systems adapted locally. Theoretical frameworks need to be more integrated to grasp the same phenomena with multiple lenses. Methodological approaches and tools need also to be reinforced mutually to overlay the dichotomic examination of these complex realities.