ABSTRACT This article uses social care provision in Botton Village as a case study to show how neoliberalism renders alternative institutional forms structurally unintelligible. Botton, an intentional community founded in 1955 in the UK as part of the Camphill movement, operated for decades on non-market principles. These principles were consistent with a relational model of social care, underpinned by a non-individualistic conception of the self, whereby residents with and without learning disabilities lived together, pooled resources, and organised work around communal need rather than wages or contracts. In the 2010s, regulatory and legal pressures forced a partial restructuring of the community to align it with mainstream neoliberal norms. This article argues that this transformation advances our understanding of how neoliberalism operates not only through markets or policy but as a hegemonic rationality that defines which institutions are thinkable, fundable, and legally sustainable. Unlike most case studies of neoliberalism’s influence, which trace its encroachment into domains where market principles have long exerted some influence (such as education or healthcare), this article examines a community organised entirely around a non-neoliberal rationale. The pressures it faced thus offer a uniquely clear lens through which to observe how neoliberal governance renders alternative institutional forms structurally illegible.

ABSTRACT Is it possible to create a space that resists capitalist notions of time? In a world of ever-increasing busyness, it can feel as if time is under constant intensification. We examine what it means to step out of time in land-based communities. Using real-world examples drawn from empirical data, we consider ways in which these communities prefigure post-capitalist lifeworlds that challenge neoliberal rationalities. This paper explores how collective reworkings of time, shared tasks, and activities, enables eco-communities to adopt practices that align with seasonal rhythms and non-linear temporalities. We explore these reworkings through three examples in practice; the generation of collective time, the role of rhythm and pace, and experiences of non-linear transformations. Through the collectivizing of tasks, it is possible to observe how shared time can be experienced differently. As land-based communities build connections with the land, seasons, and non-human temporalities, they create alternative rhythms which in turn influences how time is prioritized and ‘spent’. We examine the tensions and contradictions and question the narrative that these reworkings necessarily always entail a ‘slowing down’. Time in eco communities is complex and non-linear, creating openings for prefigurative and hopeful relations with time.

ABSTRACT Investment in transport infrastructure has been a key driver of Turkish economic growth over recent decades. The market has expanded considerably in relation to the state, with the transfer of public goods and services to the private sector and thereby the creation of new spaces of accumulation. This paper engages critical political economy to the analysis of infrastructure failures, assessing transport infrastructures during the massive 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, with reference to public private partnerships (PPP) and public procurement processes. It focuses on three representative cases from the airway, highway and railway sectors to offer insights to connections between the changes in the public procurement policies over time, restructuring of the state-market relations and the impact of this restructuring on infrastructure failures during construction and reconstruction phases. Based on a comprehensive historical empirical inquiry, the paper argues that the infrastructure failures during the earthquakes were driven by: (i) neoliberal market mechanisms of cost- and time-efficiency in prioritising infrastructure investments for development; (ii) new developmentalist goals prevailing the neoliberal principles of transparency, fair competition and impartiality in public procurement processes and (iii) economic patriotism overruling environmental, geotechnical and economic feasibility in projects.

ABSTRACT This study reinterprets market discipline within European economic governance as a neoliberal idea and rhetorical tool rather than merely a mechanism for constraining national fiscal policies. It examines how market discipline is employed in discussions surrounding the eurozone’s economic challenges before, during, and after the euro crisis, drawing on literature about neoliberal resilience and the rhetorical function of ideas in policymaking. Analyzing speeches from European monetary authorities and international business journalism reveals that market discipline is repeatedly proposed as a solution to governance issues, despite ongoing doubts about its effectiveness. A key contradiction arises as monetary authorities recognize the limitations of market-based governance to justify policy interventions during the euro crisis while continuing to endorse the market’s disciplinary power in other contexts. These findings suggest that economic ideas serve as a rhetorical smokescreen, allowing actors to project adherence to neoliberal principles even when their actions contradict those beliefs.

ABSTRACT Despite extensive research on academic employment, most studies focus on academic careers after hiring. Academic job advertisements as key texts that shape access to academic positions remain underexplored, particularly outside Western contexts. Existing studies largely rely on large-sample quantitative analyses of Western job advertisements. Addressing this gap, this study employs qualitative analysis to examine how top-tier Chinese universities construct desirable academic identities and institutional priorities in their online job advertisements. The findings show that these advertisements function as Foucauldian technologies of governance that shape academic subjectivities by embedding norms rooted in neoliberal rationalities while reflecting distinctive Chinese sociopolitical and cultural priorities. Specifically, hiring discourses discipline neoliberal academic labor by emphasizing productivity, competitiveness, and adaptability, while also situating academic readiness within the Chinese context through expectations related to physical fitness, moral character, and ethical conduct. By revealing how global academic norms intersect with local governance imperatives, the study advances understanding of how hiring discourses operate as gatekeeping mechanisms in evolving academic labor markets, particularly in underexplored contexts such as China.

The article addresses a central problem in contemporary sociology: the inadequacy of classical approaches to power in explaining how expert knowledge currently organizes forms of domination in societies marked by the expansion of expertocracy, neoliberal rationality, and algorithmic mediation. Although traditions such as critical theory, the sociology of power, and Foucauldian genealogy have analyzed the relationship between knowledge and domination, a conceptual gap persists regarding the mechanisms through which knowledge simultaneously operates as legitimation, normalization, and a technology of governance. The aim of the study is to conceptually rearticulate the nexus of knowledge-power in order to explain how expert knowledge structures authority, organizes conduct, and administers populations in late modernity. The theoretical framework integrates contributions from Weber, Bourdieu, Gramsci, and critical theory with the Foucauldian perspective on power-knowledge and governmentality, while also incorporating insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge and Science and Technology Studies (STS), particularly in relation to expertise, quantification, and sociotechnical infrastructures. Methodologically, the research was conducted as a documentary study with a theoretical-conceptual orientation, based on a genealogical analysis of foundational and contemporary texts. The procedure involved comparative reading, critical problematization, and typological reconstruction of the mechanisms through which knowledge produces effects of power. The results identify three interdependent mechanisms that articulate the power of knowledge: legitimation, through the production of epistemic authority; normalization, through the establishment of metrics, standards, and classifications; and governance, through the integration of these infrastructures into population management devices based on data and algorithms.

ABSTRACT In discussing the crisis of neoliberal female subjectivity, it is essential to interrogate the rhetoric of positivity that structures it. By analysing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019) as a case study, this article proposes a binary framework of “over-excitement/shapelessness” to describe this form of ambivalent subjectivity: outwardly over-excited while (unconsciously) shapeless within, and ready to fit into any socially expected template in the context of neoliberal rationality. Reading Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) as a shapeless neoliberal feminist subject, the article contributes to scholarship on affective dissonance and mental health issues in contemporary women-centric television. Drawing on “uncomfortable television” (termed by Hunter Hargraves), which encourages critical reflection through discomfort, and “the unruly woman” (termed by Kathleen Rowe), who disrupts normative femininity via parody or masquerade, the article analyses both the ambivalence and agency of Rebecca’s problematic subjectivity as manifested through parodying and subverting narrative tropes. Moreover, by examining how the series challenges rom-com genre expectations, the article critiques how neoliberal feminism generates cruel optimism and promises paradoxical happiness, where the pursuit of happiness through neoliberal scripts is questionable, and precarity has become the new normal.

Abstract This study critically examines the school and work experiences of Vocational Training Centre (VTC) students in Türkiye, situating these experiences within debates on neoliberal rationality, vocational education policies, class reproduction and child labour. Drawing on Man van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the research analyses 14 dialogue‐based interviews with students to explore how working‐class identities and subjectivities are constructed through the intersection of schooling and early labour. Van Manen's existential themes of lived space, lived body, lived time and lived human relations guided the interpretive analysis, allowing for a nuanced understanding of students' experiences within socio‐cultural, economic and institutional contexts. Findings reveal four central themes. First, ‘Negotiating Vocational Belonging’ highlights the internalization of vocational identities alongside early labour participation, often under exploitative conditions. Second, ‘Fragmented Trajectories’ emphasizes educational inequalities and institutional marginalization shaping discontinuous career paths. Third, ‘Structural Compulsions’ demonstrates that vocational education often reflects socioeconomic necessities rather than choice, reinforcing class hierarchies through a ‘vocational habitus’. Finally, ‘Hope Amid Precarity’ illustrates the tension between students' aspirations and the risks of early labour exploitation. By foregrounding the lived experiences of VTC students, this research contributes to international debates on vocational education, revealing how neoliberal policies and structural inequalities intersect to shape youth subjectivities. The study highlights the critical need for reforms that prioritize students' rights, agency and holistic development, offering insights for policy and practice in contexts of labour‐oriented vocational education while emphasizing the ethical imperative to protect young learners.

This study examines how Brazilian Olympians internalize, negotiate, and at times resist neoliberal discourses while navigating meritocratic ideals and the pressures of high-performance sport. Drawing on qualitative semi-structured interviews with eight athletes from Santa Catarina who competed in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, we analyze how neoliberal rationalities shape both their practices and subjectivities. Interviews conducted between 2021 and 2022 explored athletes’ career trajectories, Olympic participation, and reflections on their experiences at Rio 2016. Grounded in Foucauldian theory, the analysis develops three interconnected themes. The first examines how athletes engage with neoliberal values, particularly the entanglement of meritocracy and performance that frames the Olympics as the pinnacle of sporting achievement. The second theme mobilizes Foucault's notion of neoliberal governmentality and Christiaens’ (2019) expansion of the “entrepreneur of the self” to show how athletes embody entrepreneurial traits such as disciplined rationality, alertness to opportunity, and strategic tolerance of uncertainty. The third theme considers how athletes internalize high-performance values by framing their trajectories through merit and self-reliance in constructing their Olympian identities. Together, these findings reveal an ambivalent interplay between neoliberal conditions and individual agency, demonstrating that athletes’ subjectivities are shaped through both the reproduction of and resistance to neoliberal discourses.

Abstract Since 2021, Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) provide finance to middle-income countries (MICs) whose energy profile is largely powered by coal—those countries with what we call the “power to pollute.” Using the case of South Africa’s JETP, the most mature of all such agreements, we assess whether the JETP model in fact enables MICs to pursue industrial policy innovations that parallel emergent “post-neoliberal” policy paradigms of rich countries. We draw on analysis of semi-structured interviews with South African policy-makers, policy documents, white papers, and pronouncements at public events between 2021 and 2024. We argue that JETP financing is unlikely to enable the rise of green industrial policies typical of “post-neoliberal” approaches in rich countries, despite the hopes of recipient countries entering into these agreements. This type of financing is instead becoming a mechanism to constrain domestic policy flexibility—and domestic politics—for carbon emissions mitigation, often reinforcing neoliberal principles in practice.

ABSTRACT This paper presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of 10 English Language Education (ELE) policy documents published in China after 1978. Using the Text as a Critical Object (TACO) framework, the study examines how neoliberal principles are gradually embedded in ELE policies and how they contribute to the construction of students as neoliberal subjects. The analysis of the policy documents identifies two major themes. The first theme, the instrumentalisation of English, highlights the contradiction between treating English as a tool for competitiveness in the neoliberal market and the need to construct socialist collective ideas. The second theme addresses the transition from ideological education to ‘humanity’ in ELE, showing how policies strategically use the collective ideas to integrate personal development through learning English with national neoliberal goals. Based on these findings, this paper argues that ELE policies in China discursively construct students as neoliberal subjects who are expected to balance market-oriented skills with nationalist ideals. This reveals how ELE policies legitimise market-oriented objectives with nationalism, providing implications for understanding how neoliberalism governs individuals through educational policies. This study contributes to the broader debates on how neoliberalism shapes and manages individual behaviour with market-oriented values in the field of education globally.

This article investigates how Turkish cinema transformed under neoliberal restructuring following the 1980 military coup, proposing “Neoliberal Realism” as a new conceptual framework to describe the cinematic narratives of the 1980s. While Turkish cinema from 1960 to 1980 was shaped by collective struggles and social realism, the post-1980 era witnessed a departure toward individualized narratives marked by alienation, moral compromise, and economic survival. The research aims to analyze how neoliberal logics redefined narrative structures, character formations, and symbolic capital in Turkish cinema between 1980 and 1990. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of field, habitus, and cultural capital, the study offers a close reading of selected films—such as The Naked Citizen, The Wheel, and The Honest One—to decode how characters navigate a commodified social reality. The findings show that neoliberal realism replaces revolutionary cinema with depoliticized storytelling, where social mobility is no longer tied to labor or merit but to media visibility and spectacle. This shift also illustrates how cultural capital becomes devalued under economic liberalization. The article contributes to the literature by bridging cinema studies with sociology, offering a multidisciplinary analysis of Turkey’s cinematic and ideological transformation. This article introduces the original concept of Neoliberal Realism to explain how Turkish cinema of the 1980s internalized and reflected neoliberal rationalities through narrative and character transformation. By shifting the analytical focus from comparative periodization to the symbolic consequences of economic liberalization, the study offers a novel contribution at the intersection of film studies and political sociology.

Purpose This paper aims to critically examine how Japan’s higher education internationalization policies shape intercultural identities. Drawing on a discursive framework, it interrogates the extent to which policy promotes neoliberal conceptions of transnationalism through language policy, institutional branding and credentialism. Design/methodology/approach By analyzing policy documents, rhetoric and reform initiatives, the authors trace the discursive construction of global human capital and examine how market logics influence educational values. Findings Findings reveal that Japan’s global human resource agenda privileges economic utility and elite mobility over inclusive intercultural engagement. Top Global University Project, for instance, promotes a prestige-driven model of internationalization that reproduces inequality and marginalizes alternative linguistic identities. Practical implications This study suggests that Japan reorients its internationalization agenda by integrating English as a lingua franca and expanding inclusive pedagogical models, such as collaborative online international learning. Social implications Reform efforts should prioritize intercultural reciprocity to promote more just and accessible forms of global engagement across Japanese higher education. Originality/value This paper contributes to the literature on intercultural education by offering a critical, Japan-specific analysis of intercultural identity formation within the context of higher education reform. Specifically, it reframes globalism not as a culturally responsive subjectivity, but as a policy construct aligned with neoliberal rationalities and the accumulation of symbolic capital.

ABSTRACT: This article proposes a Foucauldian genealogy of uselessness and argues that uselessness can function not only as a mechanism of exclusion within neoliberal governmentality but also as a potential tool of resistance. Neoliberal rationality constructs uselessness as the negative counterpart of productivity, efficiency, and measurable performance, drawing on two liberal regimes of truth: the juridico-deductive logic, which frames the useless as a parasitic element of the social body, and the utilitarian logic, which disqualifies what produces no quantifiable effects. While neoliberalism intensifies these logics through governance by numbers and New Public Management, the article contends that uselessness occupies a paradoxical position at the margins of governmentality. Precisely because it lies outside dominant regimes of value, uselessness can be reinterpreted as an impolitical category that exposes the contingency and violence of neoliberal norms. When reappropriated under specific material and political conditions, uselessness becomes a critical lens and, potentially, a site of resistance against productivist and functionalist imperatives.

Digital platforms have increasingly become arenas for cyber anti-intellectualism, where academic expertise is actively devalued by the public. This study investigates the linguistic construction of this hostility through a case study of the viral backlash against Dr. Ally Louk on Twitter (X). Employing Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the research analyzes a corpus of 50-high-engagement replies to identify how anti-intellectual sentiment is textually produced and socially legitimized. The findings reveal that this backlash was not a series of random insults but a structured ideological performance driven by five discursive strategies, predominantly Hostile Populist Rhetoric (48%) and Mockery (46%). The analysis demonstrates that these strategies function to enforce a “market audit” on higher education, where a potent alliance of neoliberal rationality and cultural populism delegitimizes humanities research as economically “wasteful”. Furthermore, the study uncovers a distinct gendered dimension, where patriarchal norms are weaponized to reframe female intellectual labor as socially deviant. The study concludes that digital anti-intellectualism is infrastructurally amplified by platform affordances, underscoring the urgent need to shift the narrative of higher education from economic utility to civic necessity to counter the algorithmic amplification of populist resentment.

This study investigates the multifaceted challenges faced by tenure-track women scholars in China as they navigate the pursuit of intellectual leadership within a neoliberal academic system. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 12 women and 5 men tenure-track academics, the research highlights how institutional policies, gendered expectations, and managerial reforms intersect to create systemic barriers for women. The findings reveal how China’s tenure-track reforms, modeled on neoliberal principles of competition and audit culture, intensify precarity for women. Women scholars face heightened scrutiny with time constraints under performative metrics, gendered role expectations, and a lack of institutional support for work-life merge. Notably, the study identifies emergent coping strategies, including self-censorship and fragmentation of research into “publishable” units, which undermine long-term intellectual leadership. The analysis critiques the paradox of tenure as a managerial tool: while ostensibly promoting meritocracy, it reinforces masculinist norms and marginalizes alternative forms of scholarly contribution. Three primary obstacles emerge. First, policy dyssynchrony reflects the misalignment between extended age limits for grant applications and rigid tenure-track age caps, forcing women to reconcile career advancement with biological and caregiving timelines. Second, ambiguity in rewarding mechanisms disproportionately disadvantages women by undervaluing their contributions to teaching, mentoring, and service—tasks often framed as “academic housework”—while privileging quantifiable research outputs in promotion criteria. Third, the veneer of gender-neutral rhetoric obscures structural inequalities, attributing disparities to individual choices rather than systemic biases, such as male-dominated academic cliques that control resources and networking opportunities. The study calls for policy synchronization, transparent reward systems, and accountability frameworks addressing systemic—not just individual—barriers. By centering the experiences of women scholars, this research contributes to global debates on gender equality in academia, the erosion of intellectual autonomy under neoliberalism, and the need for institutional reforms to foster inclusive intellectual leadership.

This study examines surveillance capitalism as an evolution of Foucauldian biopolitics, where power shifts from state-centric population management to corporate-driven algorithmic control. It argues that digital surveillance transforms individuals from biological subjects into commodifiable "data-producing assets." By synthesising critical theory from Foucault, Deleuze, and Heidegger, the research explores "algorithmic governmentality" and neoliberal rationality. Through qualitative case studies on Big Tech health surveillance and COVID-era controls, the paper illustrates how digital platforms function as a modern panopticon. Ultimately, it highlights the erosion of autonomy and democracy in a world dominated by profit-driven behavioural modification.

This paper examines the rise of technoliberalism as a political, economic and cultural order shaped by digital platforms. Drawing on Tiziana Terranova's After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common and later writings, it traces the shift from open, peer-to-peer networks to the dominance of the Corporate Platform Complex (CPC). Platforms such as Meta, Amazon and Palantir now act as quasi-state actors, embedding neoliberal principles into algorithmic governance. Technoliberalism fuses deregulation with technological solutionism, normalising surveillance, behavioural control and the erosion of the commons. Platforms are transforming governance and becoming new states. Yet, Terranova also points to alternatives: decentralised infrastructures, data reclaimed as commons and cooperative economies. The paper argues that resisting platform monopolies requires reimagining democracy and community in response to the expanding technopolitical power.

This research critically analyzes the concept of development, highlighting its limitations when rooted in modern, colonial, and neoliberal rationalities. We start by recognizing that the hegemonic model of development, solidified by Western institutional frameworks, has narrowed into a logic focused solely on economic growth, disregarding the structural oppressions affecting historically marginalized bodies and territories. In this context, this work seeks to answer the following question: Can a development model that ignores the intersectional oppressions of race, gender, class, and territory truly be considered just and emancipatory? The defended hypothesis is that the traditional paradigm reproduces inequalities by invisibilizing peripheral knowledges and experiences, demanding its reconstruction from the system's margins. Methodologically, the research is purely theoretical, exploratory in nature, employing a deductive method, a qualitative approach, and utilizing content and conceptual analysis resources. We examine development in its economic, political, epistemic, and territorial dimensions. Ultimately, we conclude that a development model that disregards intersectional oppressions and peripheral knowledges perpetuates exclusion and coloniality, and therefore cannot be recognized as just, democratic, or emancipatory.

Abstract Amid the ever-greater encroachment of neoliberal principles in education – including marketisation, ranking and teaching to assessment – this article serves as a reminder that educators possess agency to resist and mount a successful defence of democratic, child-centred education. The case study presented here reports and reflects on an instance of informal adult learning at community level. It occurred between 2011 and 2014 in Sandefjord, a small town in the south of Norway. The municipality is affluent and was governed at the time by the two most right-wing parties in Norway, the liberal-conservative Høyre [The Right], and the populist-libertarian Fremskritts-partiet (FRP [Progress Party]). The local politicians wanted their schools to be the best in the county, preferably in the whole of Norway. For them this meant achieving the top grades in the national exams in Years 5, 8 and 9, so they introduced a strict half-yearly grading scheme in all municipal schools, starting with six-year-old children in Year 1. They ignored the fact that the Norwegian Education Act specifically forbids the grading of children in the first six years of schooling. One teacher refused to comply, arguing that this represented an inhumane ranking of his pupils. He was joined, first by one other teacher, and later, after the municipality hired a law firm to enforce their compliance, by 38 others. Parents wrote to newspapers in support of the protesting teachers. The entire community studied the legal regulations on the grading of young children. The “Sandefjord case” gained nationwide media coverage, the protests were successful, and the scorecards were done away with. On 13 January 2015, the original two protesting teachers were awarded the prestigious Zola Prize for civil courage. Ten years after this victory, the author of this article presented this case study at the 2024 conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), whose thematic focus was “The power of protest”. The Sandefjord case is of universal relevance, demonstrating the power of informal adult education, of protest, and of solidarity among members of a local community.