Neoliberal Paradigm Research Articles

An endogenous theory of property rights: opening the black box of institutions

From a neo-liberal paradigm, secure, formal and private property rights are crucial to foster sustained development. From this follows that institutions that fail to respond to shifting socio-economic opportunities are pushed to new arrangements. The enigma is posed by developments on the ground. Why would the removal of authoritarian institutions during the Arab Spring or Iraq war not increase market efficiency but rather cause the reverse, while China and India, despite persisting insecure, informal and common institutions, featured sustained growth? This collection posits that understanding these paradoxes requires a refocusing from form to function, detached from normative assumptions about institutional appearance. In so doing, three things are accomplished. First, starting from case studies on land, it is ascertained that the argument can be meaningfully extended to labor, capital and beyond. Second, the argument validates the ‘credibility thesis’ – that is, once institutions persist, they fulfill a function. Third, the collection studies ‘development, broadly construed’, by including the modes of production and beyond, the rural and urban, the developed and developing. This is why it reviews property rights from China to India, and from Mexico to Malaysia, covering issues such as customary rights, mining and pastoralism, but also state-owned banks, trade unions and notaries.

A MARCHA LENTA DA AMÉRICA LATINA NO SÉCULO XXI

The last decade of the 20th century was characterized by two deep changes in Latin American countries. The old developmental paradigm, worn, gave place to the neoliberal paradigm, embraced by Latin American elites and societies. By reaching the 21st century, the region is going through a new paradigmatic change: the exhaustion, after a decade, of the neoliberal dynamics, and the immersion into the search for another destiny.

Policy transfer or policy churn? Institutional isomorphism and neoliberal convergence in the transport sector

While the features of successful policy transfer are well known, there is some evidence that increase in policy transfer is associated with convergence of not just policies but institutional and organisational forms. Institutional isomorphism is often a result of copying organisational form as a way of securing legitimacy rather than seeking successful policy outcomes. It is also influenced by the convergence of the neoliberal paradigm over recent decades which decreases the likelihood of selecting or implementing disruptive policies. This paper interrogates policy transfer as both a normative process of sharing ‘best practice’ and a mimetic process of copying organisational form in order to secure legitimacy. There is a danger that, rather than focusing on good implementation of existing policies, new policies are continually sought, which is often encouraged by isomorphic institutional forms driven by political motivations to reduce public responsibilities for unsuccessful or unpopular policies. The aim of this paper is to develop the conceptual tools for analysis of how and when policy transfer becomes policy churn and the role of institutionally isomorphic tendencies in this transition.

SOCIAL NETWORKS AS DISPOSITIVES OF NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY

This article of theoretical reflection investigates the social networks that emerge in the context of Web 2.0, such as Facebook, as dispositives of neoliberal governmentality in the sense proposed by Foucault. From the standpoint of government of self, the design of social networks establishes a competition for attention that tends to favor the neoliberal culture of performance. In terms of social organization, the way in which users intertwine their connections is paralleled by the neoliberal paradigm of spontaneous market order. Furthermore, the use of personal information on these users, encompassing all their activities within the networks, in order to set up databases to attract advertisers reflects the neoliberal tendency of colonization of the different realms of existence by economic forces. However, the tensions that accompany neoliberal governmentality in social networks reveal its limitations, opening the possibility for these networks to also act as instruments of resistance to neoliberalism.

"You can't choose these emotions… they simply jump up": Ambiguities in Resilience-Building Interventions in Israel.

Following the growing critique of the use of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in post-disaster interventions, a new type of intervention aimed at building resilience in the face of traumatic events has been making its first steps in the social field. Drawing on fieldwork of a resilience-building program for pre-clinical populations in Israel, we analyze the paradoxes and ambiguities entailed in three inter-related aspects of this therapeutic project: The proposed clinical ideology aimed at immunizing against traumas; the discursive and non-discursive practices used by the mental-health professionals; and, participants' difficulties to inhabit the new resilient subject. These contradictions revolve around the injunction to rationally handle emotions in response to disruptive traumatic events. Hence, the attempt to separate between a sovereign rational subject and a post-traumatic subject is troubled in the face of experiences of trauma and social suffering. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these difficulties reconstitute unresolved tensions between mimetic and anti-mimetic tendencies that have been pervading the understanding of trauma in the therapeutic professions. Finally, we discuss how the construction of the resilient subject challenges the expanding bio-medical and neoliberal self-management paradigm in mental health.

Jenseits des Bürgerinvestors: Energiewende need Degrowth

The German Energiewende (Energy Turn) in the electricity sector should be understood as ecological progress and as an example that current politics don’t necessarily all follow the neoliberal paradigm. However, the way of financing the Energiewende has lead to more inequality. Both the ongoing technological transformation following the idea of a Green New Deal and the paradigm „Bürgerenergiewende“ are not in danger with the new EEG regulation scheme. But in order to achieve a wider energy transition covering other important consumption sectors like housing or mobility as well as facilitating a decline of the energy demand, less economical and social inequality beyond citizens’ investment is needed.

‘Joburg has its own momentum’: Towards a vernacular theorisation of urban change

This article demonstrates and advocates the importance of theoretical frameworks which allow for nuance and complexity. Moving away from fixed ways of reading and analysing processes of urban renewal (such as gentrification, revanchism, neoliberal urbanism), it seeks to show how a diversity of imperatives and agendas are present and shape moments of urban change and the practices of actors involved in these. Drawing on research conducted in inner-city Johannesburg which focussed on private-sector-led regeneration, housing provision and security, it demonstrates that the process underway is characterised by a multiplicity of goals and practices. Regeneration is formulated within a neoliberal paradigm, yet through creative strategies and interventions is also achieving developmental goals and expanding the provision of affordable, centrally-located housing. The article details the strategies adopted by organisations specialising in financing social and affordable housing and demonstrates the ways in which these emphasise and are helping to achieve the expansion of housing provision to low-income households. It further discusses the habitus of housing providers in the inner-city and shows how these have been influenced by and respond to the developmental challenges and racial transformation which characterise the area. It thus demonstrates that local contexts, concerns and agendas influence the regeneration process and that putatively global processes such as gentrification, revanchism and neoliberal urbanism, whilst still relevant, need to be used in ways which allow for alternative, vernacular narratives and explanations to emerge too.

Enformasyon Toplumu ve Yeni Orta Sınıflar

Many structural changes have occurred in work and labor processes in the period after the Fordist era. These  transformations have also brought about changes in concepts like worker, employer, work, and labor process.  In this sense, work and labor processes have been made precarious. The transformations have been provided  as an alternative to routines that are alienating-to-worker and non-autonomous work forms that existed in  Taylorist and Fordist systems; and these transformations have tried to be reinforced in human resources  discourses through liberal ideologies. According to the neo-liberal paradigm, today’s society includes an  economic structure that is expanding the middle classes and shrinking the traditional blue-collar working  class. The increase in white-collar jobs is explained by the information society and the importance of  knowledge in labor markets. This research mentions new labor forms that include Taylorist features and  cooperate with various exploitive mechanisms rather than demonstrating liberal discourses.  

Een waardig neoliberalisme in de arbeids- en organisatiepsychologie

Matthijs Bal pleit in zijn artikel voor meer nadruk op het menselijke waardigheidsparadigma in A&O-onderzoek. Menselijke waardigheid biedt een interessant en relevant paradigma voor het kijken naar A&O-vraagstukken. Gezien de dominantie van het neoliberalisme in de organisatiepraktijk én de samenleving staat de A&O psychologie vooral voor de uitdaging om te onderzoeken hoe de menselijke waardigheid kan worden geïntegreerd met het neoliberalisme. Daarnaast stellen we dat het paradigma van menselijke waardigheid nieuwe uitdagingen biedt op het gebied van theorieontwikkeling en onderzoeksmethoden in de A&O-psychologie.

Policy and identity change in youth social work: From social-interventionist to neoliberal policy paradigms

Summary This article analyses – by drawing on ideology critical and psychoanalytical concepts from Slavoj Žižek and Glynos et al. – how political, social and fantasmatic logics interplay and form social workers’ professional identities within two youth social work institutions that operate within different social policy paradigms: a social-interventionist paradigm in 2002 and a neoliberal paradigm in 2010. Findings The article shows how the current neoliberalisation of public policy permeates social work practices through fantasmatic narratives that create professional identities to heal discrepancies in and conceal the political dimension of everyday life. In one institution, within a welfare state-based ideology a compensating-including social professional identity is created in response to the young people’s alleged deficiencies; in the other institution, within a neoliberal ideology a mobilising-motivating identity is created to meet the young people’s alleged excess. In both narratives, however, the young people risk bearing the blame for the failure of the social professional project. Applications Fantasies in both institutions conceal how social workers’ professional identities sustain dominant ideology through dislocating uncertainties, ambiguities and ambivalences implicated in professional social work. Whether rooted in the state-based welfare or market-oriented neoliberal policy paradigms, realisation of these dynamics may expose the basic interdependencies of state, civil society and market actors implicated in the project of professional social work.

The Open Government Data Policy as a Strategic Use of Information to Entrench Neoliberalism? The Case of Italy

The philosophy of Open Government provides a new paradigm of innovation in public admin-istration built around three key words: transparency, participation and collaboration. Greater transparency of information about the PA and its way of working should help to regain public confidence in the institu-tions, motivating people to take a more active part in decision making processes. It should also encourage them to support the institutions by inputting their own knowledge and abilities, consequently engendering a widespread spirit of collaboration between different public authorities and between them and the pub-lic, businesses and non profit organisations, in order to relaunching the economic value of the Public Sec-tor Information (Huijboom, Van den Broek, 2011). The hypothesis behind this contribution, starting from an approach based on an interpretation of significant elements in public action (Moini 2013) and of their conceptual framework (Fischer 2003), is that through which open government, open data, social media, collective intelligence, and connectivity are key words in a new rhetoric of administrative innovation - summed up in the label ‘’government 2.0’’ - which refers to a form of public action easily seen to be drawn from the neoliberal paradigm (Jessop, 2002), even though subject to some variegated form at na-tional level

Higher education is not ‘for sale’: thought as sedition in a neoliberal nationalist paradigm

Higher education is not ‘for sale’: thought as sedition in a neoliberal nationalist paradigm

Competing Paradigms of Educational Justice: Parent Organizing for Educational Equity in a Neoliberal Reform Context

ABSTRACTThis article examines a grassroots parent organizing effort in a large, high-poverty, urban school district. Drawing from ethnographic field research at a community-based popular education organization, the study describes how parent organizers worked to educate and mobilize Latina/o immigrant parents on issues of educational justice and equity. It identifies three pillars of their approach—a social theory, a theory of change, and a theory of knowledge— and argues that these were not reducible to a set of practices or methods; rather, they constituted a coherent paradigm of educational justice. This paradigm differs in significant ways from the neoliberal justice paradigm that currently dominates education reform and policy. By examining points of tension between these two competing paradigms, this article seeks to accomplish two aims. First, it aims to deepen our understanding of how underlying paradigms of educational justice shape the work of educating, organizing, and reforming schools. Second, it aims to expose the cultural specificity, or non-universality, of the neoliberal paradigm in order to challenge its hegemonic status in education reform and policy.

Farm to Factory Gendered Employment: The Case of Blue Skies Outgrower Scheme in Ghana

Since the 1980s, a neoliberal paradigm has guided agricultural policy formulation in Africa with an unflinching preference for the commercialization of agriculture through the incorporation of smallholder farmers into global circuits of accumulation via outgrower arrangements. The paradigm has claimed that the promotion of integrated value chains will create jobs and enhance incomes in agrarian areas. This article assesses the manner in which men and women are positioned differentially in the outgrower value chains in terms of employment benefits. Drawing on interviews, the article explores the employment pattern in the outgrower value chain system and the structural dynamics that lead to benefits, or otherwise, for men and women in Ghana’s largest fruit-processing company, Blue Skies, and its outgrower farms. This study finds that many jobs were created along the value chain for men and women, but that men have occupied the high-earning echelon of the value chain as outgrowers, as well as more secure positions as permanent staff in the factory, women have largely been employed as disposable casual workers in these two spaces.

Enduring Values for Contemporary Issues: Integrating Buddhist and Jewish Morality Into Contemporary Management Models

In today’s multi-cultural world and global economy, attention is often focused on the diversity of cultural values and practices and the need for management approaches to take these differing cultural environments into account. While there is much to be valued in this approach, the focus is often on how to navigate through distinct cultural practices in order to achieve a singular business aim, which falls within the current neoliberal paradigm of global trade. In addition, by focusing on differences in cultural practices, rather than on similarities in underlying values, this approach fails to utilize an important way to achieve a greater degree of global integration in management. Despite striking cultural differences, it is possible to identify some enduring values that underlie what often appear to be quite discrete value paradigms, especially by looking at value paradigms that have endured for centuries, even millennia. This paper proposes to explore the values embedded in two such value paradigms or religious traditions, zen buddhism and Judaism, describing crucial core values in each and comparing and contrasting their ethical frameworks, in order to be able to evaluate their utility in today’s world and especially their significance for creating a more holistic, inclusive, and responsible management framework. The paper will begin by explicating the set of foundational values in each religious tradition. For example, zen buddhism, especially as expressed by Vietnamese monk Thich Nhan Hanh, utilizes the concepts of engaged mindfulness and inter-being to demonstrate the ways in which all global issues are linked together, and the collective responsibility that all humans bear for the state of our planet and the beings who live on it. This approach is inherently holistic and inclusive, and requires a management approach that takes into account the moral responsibility that we all carry. Likewise, the Jewish tradition, while using quite different terminology, also lays out a holistic and inclusive moral vision. Key concepts include the values of Tikkum Olam, to repair the world, and Tsedakah, which literally means justice or righteousness, but is commonly used to indicate charitable giving. The first value, to repair the world, emphasizes the collective moral responsibility to heal whatever damage has been done to the world in order to make the it a better place for all. It does not matter who has done the damage; what matters is each person’s obligation to improve the status quo, under the assumption that all our fates are linked together. The second value, justice and charity, is also considered to be a moral obligation, not simply a voluntary act of charity. The emphasis here is on anonymous giving, done in order to help others and without any expectation of receiving some benefit, such as positive publicity. As a moral obligation, it is not something that one should benefit from. Thus, the concept of tsekakah also emphasizes the inter-connectedness of all humanity. In addition, in the Torah, there are a series of rules about how to deal with others in business as well as the obligation, during harvest-time, to leave some grain in the fields for the less fortunate. In all, we see a focus on being mindful of others, on seeing our fates as interconnected, as in zen buddhism. The last section of the paper will explore some of the ways in which these moral imperatives can be utilized to undergird and buttress a more holistic, inclusive and responsible management approach. Some management models already include moral imperatives, such as corporal social responsibility, and this section will explore in greater detail how the above concepts have been more fully integrated into current management models.

'Paramedical' Healing in Hospitals: The Expansion of Spiritual Care in Seoul.

Emotional and spiritual healing stand at the center of the activity of Catholic pastoral caregivers attending to the sick in non-Catholic hospitals in Seoul. In this paper I explore how these agents understand their practice as part of a holistic human healing, positioning their work side by side with medical healing. I also examine how their role is both confirmed and challenged against the backdrop of the growing commercialization of the health care industry under the neoliberal paradigm.

Countering Neoliberalism and Aligning Solidarities: Rethinking Domestic Violence Advocacy

This article seeks to situate domestic violence in a larger analytical frame of the political economic, to extend institutional responsibility for violence beyond the criminal justice system, and to form common bonds with other social justice initiatives. It argues that improved remedies for domestic violence victims lie within the reform of the political economy. It examines the efficacy of integrating anti-domestic violence initiatives into realms of work and labor and issues pertaining to the financialization of everyday life, as a way to engage larger questions bearing on economic justice and structural social change. The relationship between domestic violence and political economy is under-theorized and constrained by prevailing neoliberal paradigms. Moreover, deepening wealth inequality in capitalist societies has produced new forms of suffering within families, which underscores the need for diverse constituencies to act in concert and in common political cause. Shifting domestic violence strategies so that they operate within the frame of the political economy may generate greater opportunities for coalition building for and with domestic violence advocates.The relevance of economic security has loomed large in domestic violence advocacy, to be sure. It has been properly identified as a critical factor that determines whether a victim can escape domestic violence. However, advocacy in this area has been often circumscribed by a narrow focus on individual circumstances, reliance on a residualist welfare state that perceives dependency on public assistance as moral deficiency. Too often economic justice initiatives designed to mitigate domestic violence have been fitted neatly within neoliberal economics that fail to provide meaningful social change. These responses have failed to challenge such policies while discounting the full impact of the neoliberal model on one’s ability to escape domestic violence.This article relies on the scholarship that considers the impact of neoliberalism on law and social justice claims to provide a contextual examination of the ways in which the constraints of neoliberalism hinder efforts to address laws gender-based violence. It describes and then critiques current economic-related strategies offered by the state and the market designed to improve outcomes for victims of domestic violence and questions the “sources of submission” by domestic violence advocates to a neoliberal pragmatic. It offers proposals to advance economic security in ways that join domestic violence advocacy with other forms of socio-economic advocacy that provide additional progressive promise, but does so cautiously as “[n]eoliberalism is everywhere and nowhere; its custodians are largely invisible.” It suggests that transforming the ways in which attention is paid to economic concerns provides a complementary if not alternative way of understanding and addressing the phenomenon of domestic violence through the broad perspective of socio-economic justice.

La universidad Latinoamericana en la encrucijada: amenazas, desafíos y soluciones

En el presente trabajo se hace un repaso de la institución universitaria en general para contraponer su universalismo fundador, al funcionalismo reduccionista al que se ve limitada, constreñida y desalentada en la elaboración de un pensamiento crítico fundamental para el desarrollo de las sociedades latinoamericanas. La investigación fundamenta su hipótesis planteando que el objetivo del neoliberalismo actual es subvertir los valores universalistas de generación de un pensamiento crítico de parte de la institución universitaria, para acomodarlo a las necesidades inmediatas de las grandes corporaciones multinacionales, donde la universidad ejercería como un mero suministrador de “capital humano especializado”.
 Metodológicamente el artículo revisa numerosas fuentes bibliográficas en busca de los objetivos planteados, contrastando los viejos modelos universitarios con los nuevos paradigmas neoliberales. Para ello la investigación se apoya en los recientes estudios de especialistas como Marvin Brown, Jean-Jacques Solomon, Mario Heler, Marta Harnecker, Francisco López Segrera, Hugo Aboites, Carlos Bustos, Imanol Ordorika, Sheila Slaughter, Larry Leslie, Pablo Gentili o Franz Hinkelammert, entre otros y al tiempo se analizan documentos como el del Instituto Internacional de la UNESCO para la Educación Superior en América Latina y el Caribe “Tendencias de la Educación Superior en América Latina y el Caribe” (Caracas, 2008) y el de “Situación Educativa de América Latina y el Caribe: Hacia la educación de calidad para todos al 2015”, publicado en 2013 por la Oficina Regional de Educación para América Latina y el Caribe (Santiago de Chile, 2013).

On the Neo-Liberal Paradigm of Higher Education: An Apprehensive Note

The present paper consists of a modest attempt at tracing the trajectory of the post-war dominance of neo-liberal economic perspective on higher educational policy and finance with its far-reaching ramifications with respect to contemporary trends in educational outcomes and standard. It is argued that rapid expansion and vocationalisation of higher education, two complementary trends, which have been among the foremost post-war offshoots of the human capital philosophy of education, have had grave potential for degenerating standard, rigor and mainspring higher academic education.

The Practice of Changing the Rules of Practice: An Agonistic View on Food Sovereignty

What does it mean to “do politics”? On the one hand, political practices have to be considered as part of the large mesh of interrelated everyday practices. On the other hand, they are reflective “practices of freedom” that aim at changing the rules of practice. We will make a case for agonistic theory that takes democracy to be a constant struggle over the setting up and the different interpretations of rules and use practice theory as our entrance point to empirically address the tension between the constituted power that rules exert on our practice and the constituent power, i. e. the power to set up or change the rules. Empirically, we will have a closer look at the paradoxes and the practice of food sovereignty, a political concept that emerged as a counterpart to the dominant neoliberal paradigm of globalist food production and was taken up by leftist Latin American governments and social movements alike. By analyzing two concrete situations that emerged during our field work in Bolivia we will show that actual “practices of freedom” can appear to be quite ordinary and mundane.