Neoliberal Management Research Articles

A New Service Class in the Public Sector? The Role of Femonationalism in Unemployment Policies

This article aims to explore the content embedded in the figuration of ‘foreign-born unemployed women’ and how discourses of gender equality are used to create an emerging racialised service class within the Swedish public sector. Influenced by the concept of femonationalism, the article explores how the introduction of the Extra Services unemployment reforms facilitates the creation of a service class whose purpose is to make it possible for the regular workforce to continue to function despite cutbacks and the neoliberal management of professional care work in the public sector. The study identifies a shift in the discourse, where, while migrant women continue to be represented as victims in public discourses concerning unemployment, they are also represented as being lazy and unwilling to work, qualities that legitimate the need for more repressive interventions towards the group, often described as feminist interventions that will rescue migrant women and their children.

Social work’s ‘black hole’ or ‘Phoenix moment’? Impacts of the neoliberal path in social work profession in Portugal

ABSTRACTThis article proposes a reflection about the transformation of social work practices in the context of a neoliberal path, particularly in Portugal. Within this context, social workers try to adapt their professional practices combining, by several processes, the core values and goals of the profession and the new demands of efficiency under the so called ‘impact philanthropy’ model. Several paradoxical effects derive from such changes. Not only relevant negative constraints and substantial transformations on the core goals of the profession are emerging, but also new forms of work are being shaped. So, are we witnessing a renewed opportunity to revalue social work (the ‘Phoenix’ moment) or an increased possibility of its depletion and emptiness (the ‘black hole’ moment)? To discuss this thesis are presented data from a study based on interviews with Portuguese social workers about the impacts of neoliberal management assumptions in their practices, as well as their processes of adjustment. Results show, in fact, many impacts (negative and positive) concerning the management of work processes and the conception of the practice’s teleological basis and values. Additionally, adjustment processes or procedures (‘tactical’ or ‘strategic’ adjustment) used by professionals are identified.

“That would be my red line”: an analysis of headteachers’ resistance of neoliberal education reforms

ABSTRACTIn neoliberal times, marketisation, managerialism and performativity suggest a values-free approach to educational leadership. School leaders, tasked with driving educational reforms, have not always resisted the reforms they find unpalatable, such as a standards agenda, prescribed curricula, high stakes testing and the fragmentation of the education system. By virtue of their long service, it might be assumed experienced headteacher/principals are largely compliant having successfully managed a school’s performance and secured its place in the market. Some have embraced reforms; others may not see education as values-free, having entered the profession motivated by a desire for social justice and having developed inclusive educational philosophies. The focus here is on headteachers’ resistance of the neoliberal reforms they opposed. I report findings from empirical research exploring 10 headteachers’ critical negotiation of English education policy reforms. Their resistance took many forms as “everyday” or hidden and overt forms of resistance. Importantly, it could be seen in the semblance of compliance as game playing, selectivity, masquerade and reinvention. Drawing on theories of “everyday resistance” and conceptualisation of the daily resistance of colonialism as mimicry and sly civility taking place in a third space of ambivalence and ambiguity, I argue that recognition of headteachers’ critical negotiation of policy reforms as resistance signal the potential for future collective action. These heterogeneous everyday practices are influenced by time, context and intersecting sources of power. Post-colonial resistance theory provides the tools with which to uncover what is often hidden.

Challenges to critical legal education: A case study

The article analyses the impact of the neoliberal policy framework and managerialism on critical legal education in the context of Waikato Law Faculty, University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. The delivery of critical legal education challenges the ideology and implementation of current tertiary education policy and training because it is designed to deliver critical knowledge and not just vocational information. Waikato Law School was established in 1990 the year the neoliberal tertiary policy was enacted in the Education Amendment Act 1990. It represented an attempt to introduce a more critical and inclusive approach to legal education. The article provides an account of the struggle to maintain a critical approach under a statutory framework that requires conformity to government policy designed to cut the cost of tertiary education and integrate universities into a neoliberal policy framework. The case study is intended to illustrate the insidious influence of the policy on undermining a legal education that prepares students to think critically. It is also intended to illustrate that it is possible to resist this interference in the fundamental role of the academic to be the critic and conscience of society.

El código de aguas del modelo neoliberal y conflictos sociales por agua en Chile: Relaciones, cambios y desafíos

Este documento describe las características del modelo de gestión neoliberal del agua existente en Chile desde los años ochenta, y su relación con el surgimiento de diversos conflictos por agua a lo largo del país durante la última década. Se propone una tipología de conflictos y se describen los nudos centrales en torno a los cuales ellos se organizan. Se exponen algunos cambios del modelo producto de los conflictos. Finalmente, se explican los desafíos y obstáculos para la instalación de un modelo de gestión integrado y sustentable del agua en Chile.

‘Smart, clued-in guys’: Irish rugby players as sporting celebrities in post-Celtic Tiger Irish media

Abstract Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom ended with the 2008 global financial crisis. There followed a series of severe ‘austerity’ budgets and public service pay deals involving cuts in public service provision and employment reform. These were accompanied by approving Irish media narratives of atonement for Celtic Tiger ‘excess’ and, more recently, of corresponding ‘recovery’ through collective and individual discipline and entrepreneurial endeavour. This article focuses on the interplay between Irish media narratives of austerity and recovery and constructions of gender, class and national identity in representations of rugby players as celebrities. It explores how elite players have been presented as exemplary of the neo-liberal management of physical and economic risk, and how the repeated focus on successful struggles with diet and injury and post-career educational and business investments highlights their optimizing of the physical and social capital afforded by celebrity status. The emphasis on discipline and ‘smart’ economic management chimes with the hegemonic political and media discourse of ‘no alternative’ government austerity, and with economic recovery through individual acceptance of responsibility.

The University as a 'Giant Newsroom': The Uses of Academic Knowledge Revisited

Almost a decade ago I published an article (with Dr Kylie Brass) based on Australian Research Council-funded research1 about criticisms in the media and public sphere of ‘ivory tower’ academe, and how, under pressures of ‘relevance’, ‘accountability’, and ‘brand identity’, academic knowledge was being progressively and institutionally encouraged to engage with everyday media discourse. In this and other articles on universities and public communication policies, we explored the ways in which the products of university-based academic labour were being increasingly placed in the service of wider public discourse, with some perils both for that knowledge and those who generate it. In the ensuing years, these pressures have intensified in tandem with the marketization of higher education and the often-remarked hegemony of neoliberal managerialism. The decline of the mainstream press (certainly in paper form) and the rise of user-generated, social and mobile media have produced a more intimate and volatile relationship between universities and the media/public sphere. In addressing the subject of publishing and mediatization, it is timely to re-assess the uses and trajectories of academic knowledge, the technologies that convey it, and the implications for its producers.

Student Evaluations, Neoliberal Managerialism, and Networks of Mistrust

Though student evaluations and their flaws have been much commented on lately—in addition to recent coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, and NPR’s education blog, major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have also devoted coverage to this issue—there has been little attention paid to student evaluations’ place and function in the larger ideological framework of contemporary higher education. That is, the flaws of student evaluations are not isolated from the larger issues threatening higher education today, but rather are symptoms of the way neoliberal policies have reshaped the university and the roles of teachers and students within it over the past three decades.

Top Cover: On Administrative Activism in the Neoliberal University

There must be acts of resistance to neoliberalism in academe. We must use our capacities for critical dialogue as a force of disruption, resistance, and revival. Instead of docile academic subjecivities, ones that play into neoliberal managerialism, we need to adopt a more paralogical approach to academic dialogue. Namely, we must use dialogue as a disruptive force rather than an affirmative one. Critical exchange is at the heart of academic freedom, and academic freedom—the freedom to teach as we choose without interference—is predicated on keeping the “critical” in critical exchange (or inquiry) activated. Neoliberal academic culture strives to stifle critical thought and thinking. We can be a force of resistance to neoliberal academe by awakening and privileging our critical capacities—and tough criticism may be the only way to awaken academe from its neoliberal slumbers. Without a strong auto-critique discourse to counter-act the strong discourse of neoliberalism, resistance becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Post-secularism in multiple modernities

‘Post-secularism’ is a term that has emerged in various disciplines, including sociology, to reflect religion’s move back into the public sphere and the need to take into account the voice of religious actors in any contemporary analysis of society. This article argues that post-secularism is, in fact, a specific type of secularism that deals with the neoliberal management of religion in the public sphere. To unpack this argument, the article will first explore what is meant by post-secularism, and then, via a case study of Shari’a in Australia, it will move to the theory of multiple modernities in order to underline the relativeness of such a term. It will then be proposed that what is meant by post-secularism is, in fact, a type of secularism (perhaps ‘late’ rather than ‘post’) in neoliberal societies.

“It’s Us, You Know, There’s a Feeling of Community”: Exploring Notions of Community in a Consumer Co-operative

The notion of community infers unity and a source of moral obligations in an organisational ethic between individuals or groups. As such, a community, having a strong sense of collective identity, may foster collective action to promote social change for the betterment of society. This research critically explores notions of community through analysing discursive identity construction practices within a member-owned urban consumer co-operative (CC) public house in the UK. A strong sense of community is an often-claimed CC characteristic. The paper’s main contributions stem from using the lens of identity work to critically unpack the notion of community through highlighting paradoxical tensions of community residing within CCs. The findings reveal that the notion of community may be illusionary with counter-veiling forces, one that reflects a more traditional sense of connection, attachment and communion, and the other of boundaries, disconnection or division. As these repertoires collide, tensions are evident between the hegemonic discourse of neoliberal managerialism and that of democratic collective ownership. Despite these individual-level tensions, communities may operate within boundaries enabling an organisational and societal ethic, beyond the individual.

Corporatism in Korea: a Yuhan case study

Yuhan is a small-and-medium-size pharmaceutical manufacturing company in South Korea (Korea). It is well known in the industry as a paragon of credibility and sustainability. Concerning the small-but-powerful firm’s remarkable triumph, over the past two decades, a number of academics and researchers have examined the model of management within the context of business management. Yet the firm’s corporatist management in terms of validity should be considered beyond the area of business administration. Unlike previous academic works, this paper assesses the Yuhan experiments within the context of corporate corporatism. The chief argument of this new approach is that corporatism and solidarity grounded Yuhan campaign (stark contrast concepts of neoliberal management) may offer meaningful lessons for the neoliberalism embedded Korean commercial society. While infrastructural conditions of both the public and private sectors are feeble to upheld corporatism, Yuhan style corporate corporatism, as a harbinger of social democratic corporatism, could be an alternative model to supplement such weakness. In rivalry with neoliberal campaigns that persistently creates social polarization and disunity; the solidarism-based Yuhan model would work a solution to overcome threadbare safety net for working and lower middle class in Korean society.

Le roman d’entreprise: Breaking the silence

This article looks at three recent French novels in order to explore key themes in what has become known as the roman d’entreprise: Pierre Mari’s Résolution (2005), Nathalie Kuperman’s Nous étions des êtres vivants (2010) and Thierry Beinstingel’s Retour aux mots sauvages (2010). The figure of the entreprise functions both as a fictional representation of the post-Fordist workplace environment in companies such as France Télécom, and also as a means of tackling wider issues of work and social organisation in an era of neoliberal managerialism. The concepts of capitalist realism, organisational miasma and virtuality are used to analyse the ways in which the three novels convey the distinctive affective landscape of the contemporary entreprise. Fiction is used to consider the prolix and self-referential nature of the managerialist entreprise, which enables it to exert a significant influence on the individual and collective subjectivities of employees. The three novels focus on the capacity of the entreprise to capture language and impose an affect of silence on employees.

Re‐making the global economy of knowledge: do new fields of research change the structure of North–South relations?

How is global-North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas - climate change, HIV-AIDS, and gender studies - through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, through resource inequalities, workforce mechanisms, and intellectual framing. Yet there are tensions in the global economy of knowledge, around workforce formation, hierarchies of disciplines, neoliberal management strategies, and mismatches with social need. Intellectual workers in the Southern tier have built significant research centres, workforces and some distinctive knowledge projects. These create wider possibilities of change in the global structure of organized knowledge production.

Transition pedagogies and the neoliberal episteme: What do academics think?

There has been much discussion of the massification of higher education and its impact on contemporary universities in terms of increased demands on academic staff in the context of neoliberal managerialism, and the power regimes which govern the sector. Less is written about the pedagogies used under neoliberalism. Many academics view tertiary education as both an individually and socially transformative process, and there is a sense that the current discursive environment engenders an inertia wherein this commitment is lost. This paper focusses on a small qualitative study of staff working in two universities at the bottom of the league tables. Their perceptions of pedagogical work and their views of their transformative potential under neoliberalism is discussed. The argument is made that there is the potential for building a space for critical education in contemporary universities. This article explores these issues, arguing that the use of transition pedagogies can create a transformative education.

Flexible academic man: Two cases compared

With the acceleration of the neoliberal management of academic institutions, the rules of evaluation change continuously in unpredicatable ways. In this contribution, we analyze the changes in evaluation criteria in two cases, one Italian and one in the UK. Despite the diversity of contexts, both are characterized by technologies of self designed to create a new human type: the “flexible academic person”.

Picking Up Speed: Re-Thinking Visual Art Education as Assemblages

In contemporary visual arts education, neoliberal managerialism has meant that education has become end-product driven. This article builds on a mindset of how to perform an affirmative critique by analyzing relationality as entanglements of subjects and objects, or educational assemblages, in the visual arts classroom. Drawing on visual ethnography in an upper secondary school in Sweden, we analyze speeds and intensities as bodily experienced affect. The speed and intensity increased in the classroom when the teacher introduced materials connected to a film project. The complex encounters and entanglements between human and nonhuman bodies accelerated the intensity in the educational assemblages. As a result, we suggest a methodology of visual invention that can resist the logics of the neoliberal discourse and unleash the potentials for creativity by working with learning encounters as well as becoming open and sensitive toward unexpected events.

Understanding the meta-discourse driving homeless policies and programs in Toronto, Canada: The neoliberal management of social service delivery

Although Canada is one of the top 10 trading nations in the global economy, homelessness continues to be a significant social problem. To understand this paradox, we examine academic debates on best practices, the genesis and sociocultural contexts of recent policies, and community-based homeless services. Our critical review unveils the underlying ideology of service provision: the meta-discourse of neoliberalism, which results in time-limited programs, divorced from community needs, with an ad hoc development of services. We resist this discourse by highlighting how a social work commitment to social justice can mitigate the new neoliberal requirements in homeless services delivery.

The Mother of All Wombs

This article traces a lineage across historical and contemporary performative cultures of motherhood: 19th century infant portraiture, contemporary viral news media and prenatal technology associated with the spectacle of digitised foetal sociality. Read together, these scenes depict a series of trajectories that map normative maternal subjectivities and their animation by, and embeddedness in, repertoires of visual culture. In different ways they work to secure the ontology of futurity that is attached to ideals of the child while erasing the maternal figure from view and imposing the vast machinery – the camera, Facebook – as central to the womb’s perceived supplementarity. They show that in the contemporary context of the viral performativity of digital media, a maternal labour of effacement is specifically activated to present a new face of the future: the ‘viral child’. The viral child, as a figure who is ostensibly able to give birth to itself, alienates the mother from the conditions of her reproductivity and instead stages itself as foundational to the neoliberal management of family life-worlds.

Womenomics, ‘Equality’ and Abe’s Neo-liberal Strategy to Make Japanese Women Shine

By international measurements, Japan fares poorly on gender equality. With the second largest gender pay gap and the worst record for women's political representation among OECD countries, Japanese women have limited access to positions of power and influence. The government has begun to address these inequalities with a raft of policies that attempt to bridge these chronic gender gaps, with the recent policies of the Abe administration being referred to as 'womenomics'. Heralded by many as an important step in the right direction, womenomics has also been criticised as a misguided co-optation of feminism. This Survey discusses the implications of the 'long-working-hours' culture on gender equality policies and the implementation of womenomics within a climate of neo-liberal management practices justified through chronic economic stagnation. Far from the empowering outcomes it rhetorically espouses, this evaluation suggests that womenomics is further exacerbating the bipolarisation of Japanese women into two groups: a small elite minority capable of assimilating to masculinised working patterns versus the vast majority of women ghettoized into insecure underpaid 'non-regular' work that denies access to crucial benefits.