Neoliberal Governance Research Articles

Persistent Vulnerabilities in the World of Work and Contemporary Capitalism: Some Reflections on India.

The onslaught of COVID-19 has been catastrophic for India’s world of work. While it was a bolt out of the blue, its impacts on employment need to be located in the context of a long-term and ongoing structural crisis of (un) employment and systemic vulnerabilities (and subsequent burgeoning of ‘labour reserves’) that have tended to worsen during the neo-liberal regime. Using the various EUS and subsequent PLFS rounds for roughly the last two decades, the paper seeks to highlight selected aspects of the vulnerabilities and inequities that have plagued India’s world of work. These include participation rates, vulnerable employment, composition of workforce and access to certain aspects of decent work such as social security, paid leaves, and written contract. An important issue that the paper investigates is ‘income-vulnerability’ of the employed at the present juncture. Further, inequities across gender and social groups have also been assessed as regards these variables using the most recent data.

Reflections on the 50th anniversary of the freeing of the Pentonville dockers

This paper considers the background to the Industrial Relations Act 1971 and how the law attempted to weaken trade union structures, collective bargaining and the right to strike. The purpose was to diminish workers’ wage share and transfer wealth to the rich. The imprisonment of the dockers in 1972 under the act, released after the threat of a general strike, is dealt with. The paper considers this to be a turning point in the strength of the organised working class after resort again to a neoliberal industrial relations legal regime established under the Thatcher government from 1979 onwards has relentlessly driven down wage share, equality, security and the prosperity of the working class. A few positive thoughts are offered for the future.

“How to Live a Good Life”

This article provides an ethnographically informed critique of the humanitarian self-management model that informs reproductive health trainings for young urban refugees in Kampala, Uganda. It draws on interviews with 16 adolescent refugees, as well as policymakers, aid workers and health care professionals in Kampala in April 2019. We found that reproductive health education training sessions are a site of gendered learning where displaced boys and girls gain an understanding of what it means “how to live a good life” and how to become marriage material. Their focus on self-control also reflects a wider shift in humanitarianism toward female empowerment as a tool of neoliberal governance. In a low-resource context, however, “self-managing” one’s reproductive health takes on a different meaning, as displaced adolescents weigh up opportunities for short-term income from transactional sex with imagined reproductive futures elsewhere.

Go (Away) West!

Go (Away) West!

Digital Educational Technologies: Market Ends or Means at the Service of Critical Learning?

This essay intends to show that digital technologies have their own goals since their creation and that some possible consequences of their indiscriminate use in education are misinformation, solipsism, loss of privacy and labor rights, the instrumentalization of reason and life, generating benefits for a few companies and business people that promote them to accumulate riches concentrated in few hands. From this reality, we propose that their use be revised so that their application does not follow parameters issued by big companies, financial entities, or neoliberal governments, that they be used critically, ethically, and politically to benefit those that have fewer opportunities, nature itself, those that are unprivileged, and social justice to reach an ethical, aesthetic, and transformative learning.

English as an index of neoliberal globalization: The linguistic landscape of Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan

Examining the linguistic landscape of the new capital city of Kazakhstan, Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana), this article demonstrates the sociolinguistic transformations following adoption of neoliberal economic policies during the post-Soviet period. The study uses ‘neoliberal governmentality’ as a conceptual lens to examine how neoliberalism as an economic policy evolves into a form of governance reinforcing the logic of the market in peoples' linguistic behaviors. Drawing on a photographic survey of the linguistic landscape and ethnographic interviews, the study shows that liberalization and flexibilization of the linguistic market has allowed English and Latinized brand names in several foreign languages to occupy a substantial space, frequency, and prominence in the LL. English appears to challenge the decades old dominance of the Russian language as it evidently wields remarkable visibility as the most valued marketing tool. Glimpses of Latinized Kazakh signboards indicates a gradual bottom-up shift to Latinization of the Kazakh language. By situating language as a socially grounded practice, ethnographic analysis of linguistic landscape can provide valuable theoretical insights about different manifestations of neoliberalism, particularly showing how neoliberal governmentality shapes mental linguistic hierarchies, mobilizing peoples' subjectivities to associate language (s) with the quality of goods/products, their prices, bargaining strategies, lifestyles, and social standing.

Neoliberalism, English, and spoiled identity: The case of a high-achieving university graduate in Hong Kong

AbstractNeoliberalism has permeated every sphere of social life, including education and language learning, seeking to produce a particular kind of subject,homo economicus, with the dispositions required to manage the self as an economic project. This article unravels the workings of the unfulfilled promise of neoliberal English education and its damaging consequences on a high-achieving female university graduate in the context of contemporary Hong Kong. Combining Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives, while simultaneously drawing on Goffman's concepts of stigma and spoiled identity, our analysis is informed by positioning theory and captures the impact of what we have termed the English language gaze on our informant's sense of self. Seen through a Foucauldian lens, the data reveal the extent, but also the limits, of her assimilation of neoliberal governmentality, while the Marxist lens allows us to account for her plight in terms of alienation and the resulting stigma of a spoiled identity. (Neoliberalism, governmentality, alienation, stigma, spoiled identity, English learning, English language gaze)*

Gender labor inequalities in the public sector: the interplay between policy and micro-politics

PurposeThis paper aims to describe and explain women's labor participation in the public sector, particularly at the local level. The paper analyses the representation of women employees in the public sector through a case study of a city council in a mid-sized Spanish city. The authors delve into the extent of gender labor discrimination in public administration, exploring a diversity of situations, experiences, and perceptions of women workers in female, neutral, and male-dominated areas in the local administration.Design/methodology/approachThe authors have applied a combined methodology of quantitative analysis based on an exhaustive analysis of the list of job posts, and qualitative analysis from the narratives of women workers in biographical interviews, in women-dominated, neutral and male-dominated areas.FindingsThe authors conclude by providing a clear description of women's representation in local administration. Despite the institutional efforts in applying gender equality norms and public policies in administration, employment and labor market, this article shows the persistent inequality in employment within the administration. The paper demonstrates that public administrations can be seen as gender regimes that tend to reproduce inequality by formal and informal dynamics. This inequality gender reproduction in a supposedly gender-neutral administration reflects discrimination in a labor market. The paper details phenomena relating to horizontal occupational segregation, glass ceilings, sticky floors, and the undervaluing of women's work, among other phenomena.Practical implicationsThe administration should consider two essential factors that endanger gender equality: (1) the demonstrated regression of gender mainstreaming and the effects on women's employment as a consequence of the crisis, and (2) neoliberal governments and extreme right-wing parties (or neoliberal governments and extreme right-wing parties' support, as is the case with the current Andalusian regional government), whose agenda includes the fight against what neoliberal governments and extreme right-wing parties call “gender ideology”.Social implicationsThe gap between the effectiveness of gender legislation and actual working practices within the administration has been highlighted. This fact should be a wake-up call for the administrations to strictly comply with gender legislation, given that local administrations are the closest to the citizens. Future research should focus on changes to detect any regression and to prevent losing the improvements already achieved, which can still be very much strengthened.Originality/valueThis article helps to fill the gap in the literature on gender discrimination in the labor market, which often omits the public sector, especially in local administration, which is the closest administrative structure to citizenship respecting public policies. The article contributes to highlighting the need for an egalitarian labor market in order to achieve optimal performance, commitment and efficiency in egalitarian labor relations in local administration.

Worker Representation in the Regulation of Occupational Health: Explaining the Shift to Knowledge Activism

This paper explains the origins, features and impacts of ‘knowledge activism’ as an emergent form of collective OHS resistance. Coupling labour process theory with Pierre Bourdieu‘s concepts of capital, the analysis connects transformations in production, management, technology, and neoliberal governance to shifts in labour/management power relations, both within the joint committee and the workplace more generally, as defined by the relative social, cultural and symbolic capital accumulated and mobilized by worker representatives.

Why is progressive policy reform in Kosovo uncertain, despite the accelerated power shift to the left?

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the arrival in power, for the first time, of a left-wing majority in Kosovo. Nowhere in the Western Balkans and Europe was the impact of the pandemic on politics so salient and extensive. The power shift created an unlikely opportunity for progressive social policy change. However, as shown by policy responses during the first year of the pandemic, substantial policy change is still uncertain. Although political parties have begun to matter more in policy choices, expansive change is constrained by the broader unfavourable conjuncture involving, among others, the existing neo-liberal welfare regime, its feedback on policy learning, mobile right-wing actors with influence in state institutions and global organisations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and European Union – all of which may rather favour the status quo.

Macho populists versus COVID: Comparing political masculinities

This article uses a feminist lens to examine Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and former United States President Donald Trump’s responses to COVID-19. It argues that both populist leaders mobilised masculinity as a resource in statecraft. Both initially responded to the pandemic with dismissiveness and denialism. For the rest of his term, Trump diminished the harms of COVID and emphasised ‘protecting the economy’. Duterte, however, eventually embraced the fear of COVID, imposed a strict lockdown, and secured emergency powers. This article first analyses differences in the masculinities the two politicians performed. It then explores how this performance of masculinity contributed to structuring public discourses in relation to the pandemic and situates it in neoliberal governance more broadly. For example, the performance of invincibility constructed others’ vulnerability and illness as an individual weakness rather than socially and relationally produced. Trump’s co-optation of the language of freedom encouraged protests against health measures and positioned medical experts as the ‘real threat’. In contrast, Duterte’s securitised approach made it difficult for citizens to protest repressive laws enacted by his government. Duterte’s ‘war on COVID’ was marked by his demand for obedience and discipline, thereby constituting anyone who questioned the harmful effects of a police-led lockdown as a threat to national security. Finally, the article reflects on the ways China’s growing role in global politics affects notions and practices of populist masculinities. Both leaders flexed diplomatic masculinity differently in relation to China: Duterte touted his personal closeness to China as a path to securing resources for the Philippines, while Trump’s vilification of China constructed COVID as a ‘foreign enemy’ as opposed to a crisis he was responsible for. Ultimately, these masculine responses undermined dissent and centred muscularity, either in the form of individual resilience or securitisation and policing, as the solution to the pandemic.

‘Demarginalising’ a territorially stigmatised neighbourhood?: The relationship between governance configurations and trajectories of urban change

Gentrification and territorial stigma are understood to be closely linked, yet the workings of the governance networks which underlay this relationship have seldom been explored in depth. This paper seeks to develop understandings of this relationship by showing how the interactions which occur in decision-making processes at the local level culminate in particular strategies for regeneration. It draws on interviews and document analysis to map out and examine networks of governance in Middlehaven, a territorially stigmatised area of Middlesbrough, UK, which has been targeted for regeneration, and indicates the methodology used for tracing the emergence of regeneration strategies in order to reveal how gentrification emerges as a policy response to territorial stigma. In doing so, this paper highlights the relationship between institutional arrangements, governance networks, and approaches to urban change in the context of a territorially stigmatised space in a post-industrial town, and indicates how neoliberal governance occurs in practice at the local level. By highlighting how particular strategies of gentrification which gain traction are embedded in local governance configurations, the paper challenges policy approaches to territorially stigmatised spaces which frame gentrification as an inevitable outcome.

Thinking outside the neoliberal box? The discursive potential of national climate legislation for the local governance of climate change

ABSTRACT In recent years there has been a renewed interest in subnational levels of governance as sites of potential and renewed ambition on climate change. One recent challenge to dominant neoliberal discourses of climate governance is legislation enacted in Wales, which places sustainable development as the central organising principle of local government. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis, supplemented by stakeholder interviews, this research analyses the discursive potential of this legislation in reshaping local governance of climate change. The findings show that the introduction of new legislation can foster the emergence of collaborative structures and collective language, but is limited in its ability to broaden climate governance discourses. This research highlights how seemingly progressive legislation is hampered in its potential through its hybridisation with already-existing neoliberal climate governance discourses and structures. It also demonstrates the importance of discourse analysis in identifying subtle narratives at work in the governance of climate change.

Responsible Muslims and Normalizing Islam

In this article, I take up the “Muslim Question” in relation to neoliberalism and the Dutch government through a community approach focusing on the responsibilization of citizens. Based on fieldwork that I have conducted over the last 15 years, I will argue that, in order to understand the Muslim Question, we have to explore how Muslims respond to the “neo-liberal Muslim Question.” I will explore how the paradoxes and tensions that co-constitute the neoliberal Muslim Question, create opportunities for some Muslims to be able to find, then enlarge and navigate a space for themselves as responsible subjects within a particular framework which also, simultaneously, targets them as potentially unruly subjects. In doing so I show how Muslims engage with the neoliberal governance of themselves and demonstrate how their approach is informed, shaped, enabled and challenged by the racial neo-liberal discourse of the Muslim Question.

The senses/sensing relationship in physical literacy: generating a worldly (re)enchantment for physical education

ABSTRACT In this article, we entangle Margaret Whitehead’s physical literacy (PL) that promotes intrinsically derived movement ethics in Physical Education (PE), with Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy of speculative empiricism to promote relationally derived movement practices in PE. Troubling neoliberal governance that positions the individual in linear trajectories of autonomous, independent, individualized, and self-determined agency, our goal in this article is to conceptualize PL within ideas of relational agency that is inherent in moment-to-moment movement encounters. We take up cartographic and diffractive storytelling in poems interspersed throughout the text, to show how we, as a researcher/teacher in PE, (re)emerged as humans-in relation with the world through the senses/sensing relationship enacting continual, dynamic, and reiterative becoming-withs. As bodies and movement are no longer seen as separate and detached, questions change from definitions of PL, or how to ‘obtain’ PL, to a focus on how movement does relationships. This has vast implications for PL, because through affective, aesthetic, sensory, and nonrational ways of moving, PL is actualized in ways that are contextualised, emplaced, and specific to the child’s (micro) politics of location. In turn, this provides the conditions of possibility for a worldly (re)enchantment in PE.

Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability and Political Violence in Turkey

ABSTRACTThe honorific term gazi has a significant place in right‐wing politics in Turkey as a key symbol of Turkish nationalism and Islamism. Historically a title associated with Muslim warriors and Ottoman and Turkish sovereigns, it has gained a renewed visibility in everyday life and politics since the 1990s, when the Turkish state began to bestow this title on disabled veterans returning from the counterinsurgency war in Kurdistan. As the war's toll rose, thousands of young, lower‐class men who were badly wounded during their mandatory military service ended up joining the ranks of the gazis, and their injured lives and honored status would go on to become an important point of nationalist rhetoric and action. In Sacrificial Limbs, Salih Can Açıksöz takes his readers deep into the world of Turkey's contemporary gazis, chronicling diverse aspects of their lives – from their memories of war and traumatic experiences of injury, to their everyday struggles in the intimacy of their homes, at healthcare institutions, at work, and on the streets. Traversing disabled veterans’ social and political networks, Açıksöz lays bare a dangerously fragile masculinity and its constitutive interactions with state sovereignty, neoliberal governmentality, and ultranationalist politicization.

Situating in Place Indigenous Engagements in Capitalist Market Relations

We use a decolonial approach to political economy and a social conceptualization of space to examine how Indigenous cultural understandings and knowledge mediate market rationalities in context. Indigenous Awajún notions of tajimat pujut (life in abundance) and their horticulturalist practices are embedded in a relational ontology that situates humans as part of the ecosystem in the Peruvian Northwest Amazon. As the Awajún are increasingly incorporated into market economies, these notions and practices interact and, at times, converge with the instrumental rationalities of neoliberalism and notions of sustainability and equity that are embedded in local agricultural support programs. We detail these interactions by drawing on ethnography and secondary sources. In the case of the Awajún, we find that Indigenous rationalities are not entirely subsumed by neoliberalization. To the contrary, Awajún values of tajimat pujut and their relationship with the Amazonian territory mediate, transform, and delimit neoliberal governmentality practices. These discourses and relations coexist in tension with an emerging marketization of the Amazon, and are being reworked through contradictions that shape Indigenous productive decisions and impact the sustainability of the forest. Marketization creates opportunities for the native population to obtain income while promoting capital circulation in neighboring markets and amplifying nascent inequalities. Tajimat pujut resonates with discourses and policies relating to pro-poor sustainable local development, producing an Awajún preference for small crop production and aversion to forest depletion, contrary to mestizo preferences for intense monoculture. In this way, neoliberalization is rendered incomplete even as market relations are increasingly incorporated into Awajún economic practices.

Great Expectations: A Critical Review of Interorganizational Relationships in Amateur Sport

The study of interorganizational relationships in amateur sport has developed significantly over the past 30 years alongside rising expectations for multisector integration between sport organizations and other partners. This stems from sport organizations seeking innovative ways to achieve their mission and neoliberal government policies adding institutional pressure for interorganizational cooperation. This review paper discusses the wider cultural and political forces that shape the drive for legitimacy through partnerships across sector boundaries and outlines the theoretical influences on interorganizational relationship research in amateur sport between economic and behavioral paradigms. In addition to considering how prevailing frameworks and findings inform the current body of knowledge in sport management, we critically reflect on implicit assumptions underpinning this work given that partnerships now saturate the discourse of sport management policy and practice. Our review questions whether reality lines up with our “great expectations,” and explores what limitations and opportunities remain for future interorganizational relationships research in amateur sport.

Communal self-governance as an alternative to neoliberal governance: proposing a post-development approach to EU resilience-building in Central Asia

ABSTRACT In the European Union’s (EU) new Strategy for Central Asia, which was launched in May 2019, boosting the resilience of Central Asian societies is singled out as a key priority. Drawing on post-development thinking, this article argues that if the EU is serious about promoting resilience to empower ‘the local’ and contribute towards a truly sustainable future for the societies of Central Asian countries, then the EU will need to embrace a de-centred, post-neoliberal approach to resilience. This implies that the EU would have to accept ‘the other’ – in this case, the Central Asian societies – for what they are and advocate home-grown self-organization based on a deep understanding of the local meaning of good life and local knowledge about the available resources. Empirical illustrations to substantiate this claim are drawn from a concrete case, namely the mahalla in Uzbekistan.

Respectable outness: Examining the coming-out narratives of Latin American Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual YouTube celebrity vloggers

Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual YouTube celebrities have come to the limelight of popular media culture. This article explores how 10 of the most popular and influential YouTubers from three Latin American countries (Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico) have come to occupy lesbian, gay, and bisexual subject positions in their coming out vlogs. We argue that through the entwinement of YouTube’s political economy of celebrity and performances of respectability, these vloggers were able to turn their coming-outs into a form of emotional labor that positions them as exemplary models of queer success within the neoliberal economy and cultural regime.