Neoliberal Times Research Articles

Gender, business and human rights: Academic activism as critical engagement in neoliberal times

AbstractThis paper contributes to the debate about academic activism in organization studies through an exploration of my engagement with recent international policy‐making relating to gender, business, and human rights. It brings social movement theory to the debate to elucidate how our work as academic activists can be conceived of in terms of social movement strategies with respect to political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and strategic framing processes. The aim is to further elucidate what we do as academic activists, and how such actions might advance feminist social movement agendas through a process that is both critical AND engaged in neoliberal contexts. I conclude with a discussion of the implications for Gender, Work & Organization (GWO) scholars and the GWO journal.

Ethical responsibilities of tenured academics supervising non-tenured researchers in times of neoliberalism and precarity

ABSTRACT Neoliberal reform of the university sector has resulted in increasing numbers of academics employed on casual or fixed-term contracts. While there is an emergent body of literature on issues of precarity in the academy, relatively little attention has been paid to the roles and responsibilities of those tenured academics who employ and manage non-tenured researchers. The work involved in hiring and managing a contract researcher is rarely acknowledged or supported, and managers receive little to no training. In this paper, we draw on Dorothy Smith’s feminist sociological approach to analyse interviews with 22 non-tenured researchers to examine how managerial relationships shape the employment experiences of those working precariously. We argue that tenured academics have ethical responsibilities to provide a working environment that is fair, supports the ongoing development and wellbeing of non-tenured staff, and challenges dominant discourses of precarious academics as ‘other’.

The social question in neoliberal times

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

Portraits of teachers in neoliberal times: projections and reflections generated by shadow education research

ABSTRACT Shadow education (or private supplementary tutoring) has grown exponentially both as a phenomenon and an area of research. Based on a qualitative content analysis of international research on private tutoring published in the last four decades (1980–2018), this study explores how teachers and their teaching practices are represented in this literature and what such constructions mean for teacher professionalism. The findings reveal a variety of competing views about school teachers and the teaching profession, reflecting a partial and particular conception of the teaching profession. Influenced by the neoliberal logic, many of these projections portray teachers who participate in tutoring activities as corrupt or narrowly frame their work in terms of profit, competition, or entrepreneurship. Given that most of the reviewed research does not draw on teachers’ own perspectives, we call for more nuanced and multidimensional approaches to understanding teachers’ complicated roles and negotiations in this time of neoliberal globalisation.

Elementary School Teachers in Neoliberal Times: The Silent Voices That Make Educational Policies Work

This paper aims at showing how a bottom-up approach of the study of educational policies can shed some light on how elementary school teachers deal with educational policies to make them work. This is a partial report on a larger focus group study conducted in Bogotá, Colombia, where a group of elementary school teachers shared their opinions about educational policies. The data collected allowed us to see that teachers take actions, have their own perspectives about policies, and feel negatively treated by the national government, which give way to three categories: Teachers’ Micro-Practices, Clashing Visions About Education, and Mistreatment. We conclude that despite the pervasiveness of neoliberalism in education, which teachers are very aware of, they find ways to make policies work while being critical of the way these are designed and implemented.

Teacher professional development in times of academic neoliberalism: what nursing teachers think

RESUMO Partindo-se da premissa que o desenvolvimento profissional docente tem profunda relação com o exercício da docência, realizou-se um estudo de caso naturalístico, que objetivou analisar a percepção de professores enfermeiros atuantes em um curso de Enfermagem de uma Universidade Pública, sobre os aspectos que envolvem o desenvolvimento profissional docente e o exercício da docência. Os dados foram coletados através de entrevista semiestruturada, mediante aprovação por Comitê de Ética em Pesquisa, em que participaram 30 professores. Verificou-se que os professores enfermeiros entendem a função primordial da universidade pública como uma instituição social, consentem com a sua função hegemônica contemporânea, enquanto organização social e percebem a sua estrutura física, como elemento contribuinte para o desenvolvimento profissional docente. Compreendeu-se que o desenvolvimento profissional docente de professores enfermeiros universitários exerce influência sobre o exercício da docência.

Development policies and politics in neoliberal times: policy mixes and transformative public-civil collaboration for sustainable collective wellbeing in Spain’s regions (1980s–2010s)

In the recent decades, neoliberal policies have prioritized economic growth to the detriment of social cohesion and the environment. Within these policy tendencies, some societies have attempted to promote sustainable collective wellbeing through comprehensive policy mixes. From an institutionalist economic sociology perspective, this article compares how the four regions in Spain with the highest economic growth have dealt with social cohesion and the environment. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, two models are found: the liberal cases of Madrid and Catalonia, focused on economic growth, and the collectivist cases of the Basque Country and Navarre, aimed at comprehensive wellbeing. Each model displays a configuration of politics (institutional power relations and the organization of socioeconomic interests) and policy mix (the relations between two sets of policies: economic development policies and comprehensive wellbeing policies). The policy mix of the collectivist model has generated higher sustainable collective wellbeing driven by transformative public-civil collaboration.

A call for radical over reductionist approaches to ‘inclusive’ reform in neoliberal times: an analysis of position statements in the United States

ABSTRACT The term ‘inclusive education’ has evolved to connote various meanings and recently, neoliberalism has impacted how ‘inclusion’ is understood and enacted. In this paper, we use a disability studies in education framework to compare and contrast radical against incrementalist and reductionist approaches to educational reform related to students with disabilities. In order to accomplish this, we completed a systematic review of 37 position statement documents from education and disability advocacy organisations published in the United States from 2000 to 2019, which is the time period after the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted. We analysed the statements using a priori codes, which include: high-stakes testing, standards-based reform, and accountability. Additionally, we inductively coded the statements for emergent sub-codes and additional themes. Our findings examine how these organisations describe how students with disabilities should fit into neoliberal reform priorities as connected to our theoretical framings. We found that most professional advocacy organisations in the US recommend reductionist approaches to educational reform, and many reframe the very meaning of inclusive education.

Doing Participatory, Action, and Community-Engaged Research in Neoliberal Times: Insights, Experiences, and Forms of Resistance

Doing Participatory, Action, and Community-Engaged Research in Neoliberal Times: Insights, Experiences, and Forms of Resistance

Critical Relational Community Building in Neoliberal Times

Scholars face a paradox: How to engage in critical community building when the nature of academic engagement in neoliberal times encourages academic entrepreneurship? Competition is encouraged among scholars as they vie for citations, resources, and recognition. This article considers how qualitative researchers might build and sustain critical community through engaging in research, teaching, and service in ways that inculcate humility and a spirit of generosity toward others’ work to build coalitions among scholars who may not agree. This work is imperative for qualitative scholars as they engage in collective action to address the inequities brought about by global crises.

Elin Diamond, Denise Varney, and Candice Amich, ed.Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times. London: Palgrave, 2017, xviii + 315 pp., £67.99 (hardback), £67.99 (paperback), £53.99 (PDF ebook).

Elin Diamond, Denise Varney, and Candice Amich, ed.<i>Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times</i>. London: Palgrave, 2017, xviii + 315 pp., £67.99 (hardback), £67.99 (paperback), £53.99 (PDF ebook).

Becoming-game: an assemblage of perspectives on challenges for early career academics in neoliberal times

Our script Becoming-game is an assemblage in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the assemblage as a contingent formation of elements that could equally be separate, differently formed and/or combined with other things altogether. It comprises fragments of our distinct creative writings around the theme of games from a collaborative creative writing research project in which we – eight academics from differing backgrounds, all bearing broadly feminist and/or queer outlooks – came together to share and compare our experiences and perspectives with the aim of realising strategies we can engage to resist inequality in and beyond academia today. Performing our assemblage enriched our appreciation of the multiple themes running in and across our writings – and thus of the complex games played in and through neoliberal academia. Theatre researcher and practitioner Di Niro directed our collective in translating the creative piece to a theatrical medium. We performed Becoming-game at the JM Coetze Centre’s ‘Scholarship is the New Conservative’ Symposium on 6 September 2019. Overall, this collaborative work speaks to games of power and privilege, especially although not only those of gender and late capitalist modes of production.

Including ‘difficult’ students: counter politics, play and liveability in the primary school classroom

ABSTRACT Drawing upon Judith Butler’s conceptualisation of performativity and subjectification, this article explores the effects of different kinds of counter political action to disrupt exclusionary school practices that further marginalise children who are, often already, on the edges of school life. Firstly, tracing the impossibilities sometimes encountered when taking up a politics of reinscription, the article goes on to argue that the role of the pedagogue engaged in counter politics needs further disruption in order that children themselves have more space to determine who and how to be. Here, I explore how the rigid teacher/ student hierarchical binary can be unsettled through play. A more intersubjective relationship emerges between teacher and student which can make school feel more liveable and sustainable. Given the highly pressurised conditions in schools, globally, in this time of late neoliberalism, finding ways to make school more liveable is essential work. This article suggests that whilst moments of play, such as the one detailed here, are often fleeting, their effects can be felt afterwards. Finding opportunities for play is an important counter political strategy in schools at this time.

Rethinking nongovernmental organizations: Neoliberalism, “nonstate” actors, and the politics of recognition in the United States

AbstractThis article builds on and contributes to the scholarship on social movements and the law by revealing the critical function of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in law and policy in neoliberal times. Building on frame theories in social movement literature, this essay uses the lens of NGO‐produced advocacy for binational same‐sex couples to consider more broadly the relationship between individual experience, subjectivity, and the discourses and practices employed by NGO actors. It offers an analysis of both how NGOs developed and utilized particular messaging strategies and rhetorical frames to discursively produce a normative image of their constituency, and how constituents navigated and made use of the framing strategies developed by NGOs in their own claims to state rights and recognition. This discussion thus highlights the potentials and the problematics of the NGO model in social movements' efforts toward legal and political change.

The Joke is on Us: Political Comedy in (Late) Neoliberal Times

The Joke is on Us: Political Comedy in (Late) Neoliberal Times

The discreet habits of subtle violence: an approach to the experiences of women full professors in neoliberal times

ABSTRACT This article examines the subtle violence that women full professors experience within the National University of Colombia (NU) under neoliberal policies. To this end, it presents semi-structured interviews conducted with 24 women full professors. The content analysis of the interviews, based on grounded theory, shows that the professors are subjected to subtle violence resulting from two discreet habits: (1) infliction of moral injury (being forgotten by the neoliberal system; envy; discrediting), and (2) disruption of the academic performance (work overload; job obstruction; poaching thesis students away). The findings suggest that professors’ lives have been affected by lack of funds and peer competition. Further, there is the issue of care, as well as domestic activities, leading to a double burden, which makes it difficult to fulfil the neoliberal productivist mandates. In this way, neoliberal policies allow the continuation of reinforcing gender roles and stereotypes that result in unequal conditions for women in the academy.

Biopolítica, precariedade e educação

Este ensaio teórico busca apresentar as noções de biopolítica e precariedade mobilizadas pelos teóricos pós-estruturalistas Michel Foucault e Judith Butler. Foucault constrói sua noção de biopolítica pensando-a como a transformação das formas de poder desde o século XVIII, produzindo formas específicas de subjetividades instadas cada vez mais a uma racionalidade neoliberal. Judith Butler apresenta sua noção de precariedade - ou de vidas precárias - partindo da problematização do luto e da violência, percebendo-os como operadores de poder, produzindo formas de vidas danificadas, não passíveis de luto. Ambas as noções pensadas junto ao campo da educação evidenciam como práticas biopolíticas em tempos neoliberais produzem, inclusive na educação, formas diversas de precariedade, corpos que não importam. As contribuições desses teóricos neste ensaio, pensadas junto à educação, podem articular novos problemas ao pensamento, mobilizando, a partir de suas noções, contra-produções que incitam novas possibilidades de habitar o presente e viver uma vida vivível.

Making Her Time (and Time Again): Feminist Phenomenology and Form in Recent British and Irish Fiction Written by Women

AbstractThis article reads Ali Smith’s 2014 novel How to Be Both alongside Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (2016) and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017). Using Lauren Berlant’s conception of neoliberal “crisis subjectivity” and Sara Ahmed’s vision of feminist wonderment as an antidote to the neoliberal “promise of happiness,” it argues that each novel considers what might be salvaged and what might grow from situations in which young women become attuned to their mutual incarceration in neoliberal time’s double bind. It contends that the forced improvisation and feminist reorientation undertaken by the protagonists can be analyzed through the lens of temporality. Finally, it contemplates how the disciplinary-specific modes through which the novels’ protagonists consider temporality might be connected to the specific literary projects of their authors.

The Sociological Imagination and Media Studies in Neoliberal Times

To date, media and communication studies have mostly examined narratives either as stories that circulate in public discourse or as people’s personal narratives. In the context of deepening inequalities, the cementing of neoliberal rationality and the intensifying centrality of media and communication technologies in public and everyday life, connecting the two realms is a vital task. Drawing on The Sociological Imagination, I argue for and demonstrate the value of connecting what C. Wright Mills famously called “personal troubles” and “public issues of social structure” in the study of current media and narrative. Analysis of how contemporary cultural narratives furnish and condition our most intimate personal troubles highlights that our lives are shaped by social forces not of our own making. Yet, the intersection between media and cultural discourses and individuals’ sense-making of their experiences can open up possibilities for change and even resistance.

Making sense of the ruins: The historiography of deindustrialisation and its continued relevance in neoliberal times

AbstractThe political upheavals of recent years, including Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, have increased scholarly and public interest in the impact of deindustrialisation on working‐class communities. Building upon earlier literature reviews, this historiographical study examines the continued flowering of this interdisciplinary, transnational field of research. After briefly recounting the emergence of the field in response to the structural transformations of the 1970s and 80s, and its subsequent ‘cultural turn’, this review focuses on identifying the most promising strands of contemporary English‐language research. It notes the particularly innovative attempts to identify the ‘moral economy’ of deindustrialising societies, the growing study of the long‐term cultural legacies or ‘half‐life’ of deindustrialisation, and the renewed focus on the politics of memory and heritage preservation. Finally, it considers how scholars can constructively respond to the increasing public interest in deindustrialisation, challenge racialised and exclusionary definitions of the working‐class, and unpick the historical relationship between deindustrialisation and the social and political transformations of recent times.