Neoliberal Turn Research Articles

Solving the problem of abundance: venture capital and the making of asset-driven inequalities

The 2010s were an era of abundant capital for investors but limited opportunities to put it to profitable use. This paper traces the origins of dealing with the ‘problem’ of having to convert large accumulations of cash into appreciating assets. It puts venture capitalists in the US at the center of this history. Charting venture capital’s 1950s emergence, 1960s formalization, and 1970s institutionalization, I show how early venture capital investors built a financial infrastructure that safeguarded the appreciation of their assets. Venture capitalists’ influence increased as institutional investors (as funders) and startup employees (as investees) became enrolled in this infrastructure and oriented their actions toward its imperatives. I argue that in their handling of abundance, venture capitalists constructed and deepened asset-driven inequalities. Empirically, the paper makes a contribution by demonstrating that vast accumulations of (personal) wealth played a decisive role in this process and highlights the importance of stark inequality well before the neoliberal turn or quantitative easing. Conceptually, I show that venture capitalists’ solution to a personal problem became useful at a much larger scale. The paper argues that we should read this influence as conditioned on elite surplus and access to a financial infrastructure.

On Pipelines and Precarity: Competing Narratives on the Roles and Functions of Postdocs in South African Higher Education

It is broadly understood that postdoctoral research fellows (hereafter postdocs) play a significant role in higher education’s research outputs, teaching and learning, and the rating and ranking of an institution. Largely shaped by the neoliberal turn(s) in higher education from the late 1970s and 1980s, postdocs have become an indispensable yet precarious labour force that higher education institutions have come to rely on. In the South African context, research on postdoc fellowships is relatively new, with limited scholarship focusing on the narratives and voices of these marginalised scholars. In this article, I purposively recruited and interviewed 23 former and current postdocs in three research-intensive universities in South Africa as well as a university vice dean of research, and a former senior official of the Department of Higher Education and Training. I also consulted and analysed various South African higher education policy documents and ministerial articulations regarding postdocs in the country. Through the use of in-depth semi-structured interviews, two competing narratives emerged from the data—that is, the deeply rooted and entrenched idea of the postdoc system as a pipeline for novice researchers to transition into established scholars, and the idea of the postdocs as precarious scholars whose academic labour is insecure, unstable, and exploited in the university. I conclude the article with some broad systemic implications on the role and function of postdocs in South African higher education, and the need for more research to understand these marginalised scholars.

BEYOND THE ‘WILD SHEPHERD’: HOW GLOBAL CAPITALISM HAS RESHAPED PASTORALISM. SUGGESTIONS FROM A MEDITERRANEAN ISLAND

This article shows how, from the modern era up to the present day, Sardinian pastoralism has been increasingly incorporated into global capitalism, despite essentialising narratives about the primitiveness and backwardness of shepherds that have been propagated from the mid-eighteenth century to the present neoliberal phase. The case-study considered in this article illustrates how capitalism works as a ‘food regime’, producing the ‘conversion of agriculture and food to commodity-type relations, which, in addition to cheapening food, also incorporates agricultures and foods into investment strategies’ (McMichael 2013: 21). First, a reconstruction of the embedding of Sardinian pastoralism into the global capitalist chain from the modern age to the early twentieth century is presented. Then the changes in pastoralism from the post-World War II period to the 2000s and the neoliberal turn of the last twenty years are considered. The aim is to analyse how pastoralists coped with the uncertainties arising from being part of the global market, the volatility of milk prices and the resulting contradictions that have emerged. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .

Is Economic Development Really Becoming Sustainable?

This paper provides a contextualisation of the sustainable development discourse within the framework of the neoliberal turn and its impact on economic debates. The prevailing belief asserts that prioritising economic aspects contributes to overall wellbeing, the attainment of social goals, and increased allocation of resources towards ecological objectives, thereby fostering sustainable development. However, several authors have contested this perspective, arguing that relying on the dominant economic policy framework does not lead to sustainable outcomes. These critical voices advocate for a comprehensive approach that integrates social and ecological dimensions into the economic development framework, rather than treating them as separate entities. This paper demonstrates that achieving sustainable development requires more than the mere inclusion of ‘sustainable goals’ in the conventional understanding of economic development. It does so by critically analysing relevant literature and examining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the concept of a circular economy. This necessitates substantial changes in our understanding of the economic system, emphasising its embeddedness and embracing a normative concept of justice.

Homo sovieticus and the Neoliberal Legacy of Polish Dissent

Democratic backsliding in eastern Europe has been often cast in terms of the uncivility of local political culture inherited from the past. For the postwar period, the figure of homo sovieticus has embodied that inheritance, and its continued allure owes a lot to its dissident pedigree. This essay presents an intellectual history of the uses of that theme across the 1989 divide and questions its relevance today. The preoccupation with homo sovieticus signaled a neoliberal turn in addressing the dilemmas of democratic transition from Communism, which I analyze in reference to A. O. Hirschman’s typology of reactionary rhetoric. While Solidarity in 1980–1981 championed a vision of democratic citizenship in which social, political, and civil rights were mutually supportive and indivisible, after martial law these different rights came to be seen as conflicting and incompatible, and the theme of homo sovieticus proliferated as the indexical figure of that conflict. This new standpoint, which supported the neoliberal transition from Communism, brought about a critical reassessment of Solidarity’s legacy and a new understanding of the role of the dissident vanguard in the transition process, which I call pre-emptive Thermidorianism. It provided the glue that held together the liberal center, made up of self-professed neoliberals as well as the ex-revisionist Left, whose acquiescence to the neoliberal turn was instrumental. Pre-emptive Thermidorianism was disastrous both for the liberal center and for post-1989 political culture more broadly, and that is why homo sovieticus stands today as the self-defeating intellectual legacy of Polish dissent.

Promoting culture and creativity in Ghana: bottom-up strategies for creative industries development

ABSTRACT The neoliberal turn in the cultural and creative industries has led to two distinct bodies of work. Global North scholars focus on the tension between the emphasis on the creative industries as an engine of growth and the unequal access to the means of cultural production and consumption that neoliberalism presents. Global South scholars face a different reality; the increasing inability of governments to provide institutional support, particularly finance, for growing these industries. This article documents grassroots alternatives to financial support from the state for growing a cultural and creative industry in the global South. Drawing on data generated from multiple sources about the work of two private institutions in Ghana, this article shows how private institutions and individuals can fundamentally shape the creative and cultural industries in ways that allow them to make their mark globally, even in the absence of financial support from the government.

Do higher government spending, financial development, and trade reduce income inequality in low‐income countries? A Bayesian perspective

AbstractWe employed the Bayesian method to investigate the impact of government spending, financial development (measured by bank credit), and trade on income inequality reduction in 66 low‐income countries (LICs) across Africa, Asia, America, and Europe from 2000 to 2018. Controlling inflation and unemployment, our results indicate that trade and inflation exacerbate income inequality in LICs, while financial development and government spending have no impact on reducing income inequality in these countries. Furthermore, the findings show that real GDP per capita reduces income inequality in LICs. To ensure the robustness of our results, we also conducted frequentist quantile regression, which yielded consistent findings that financial development, government spending, and trade do not reduce income inequality in LICs. We further discuss the potential channels through which trade, financial development, inflation, and government spending contribute to income inequality in LICs, and provide policy implications based on the empirical evidence.Related ArticlesAdegboye, Alex, Kofo Adegboye, Uwalomwa Uwuigbe, Stephen Ojeka, and Eyitemi Fasanu. 2023. “Taxation, Democracy, and Inequality in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Relevant Linkages for Sustainable Development Goals.” Politics & Policy 51(4): 696–722. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12547.Asongu, Simplice, and Nicholas M. Odhiambo. 2023. “The Effect of Inequality on Poverty and Severity of Poverty in Sub‐Saharan Africa: The Role of Financial Development Institutions.” Politics & Policy 51(5): 898–918. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12558.Polacko, Matthew. 2023. “Turning Off the Base: Social Democracy's Neoliberal Turn, Income Inequality, and Turnout.” Politics & Policy 51(4): 538–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12550.

China's Infrastructural Capitalism and Infrastructural Power of Labor: The Making of the Chinese Working Class

This article anticipates a political project that underlines China's infrastructural capitalism and the infrastructural power of labor in the making of the Chinese working class. This project embarks a re‐departure of the left movement after the Jasic struggle, which inspired a rebirth of global Marxism and Maoism that attempts to confront the failure of the first wave of socialist movements and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism. Meeting this historical conjuncture, this project is situated in the legacy of the Chinese Revolution and its firmly held belief in the class struggles of the working masses who fought for a vision of communism since the early 1920s. As part of a global project in preparation for the new wave of emancipatory movements, this project is also located in a global anti‐capitalism movement and attempts to overcome the parochial and nationalistic approach of existing Chinese Marxism. Specifically, the author conceives that Chinese capitalism has entered a new age of monopoly supported not only by new phases of high technology but also, more importantly, by state power in constructing infrastructural bases such as building projects, new economic zones, highways and high‐speed railways, digital platforms, and logistics, both internally and externally, to reproduce expanded capitalism, resulting in fierce imperial battles among global powers. The article conceptualizes this historical process not only as “infrastructural capitalism,” a term that vividly embodies the materiality of expanded capitalism, but also the infrastructural power of labor to take root.

Cracks within capitalism: Alternative rental practices and a politics of care among small-building owners in Chicago

ABSTRACT The United States is currently in the fourth decade of an ongoing, and worsening, affordable housing crisis, due in part to neoliberal financialization and the retrenchment of social safety net programs. Research has illuminated the role that landlords play in maintaining, and profiting, from this neoliberal turn in the housing market. Meanwhile, low-income renters and other marginalized people have engaged in strategic resistance and activism, drawing on a politics of community care and collectivism that runs counter to neoliberal market ideology. It is within this wider context—a housing market where neoliberal and collective care politics clash—that I analyze the viewpoints and rental practices of a unique group of housing market actors: resident landlords, or people who live in the same buildings as their tenants. Among a wider sample of 52 owner-occupants, I interviewed 22 owners who held anti-oppression viewpoints, and who attempted to put their politics into practice by adopting atypical rental practices. Drawing on Black radical and feminist traditions in urban political economy, I theorize these activities as political decisions that created sites of opportunity, where building owners and residents attempted to reconfigure their relationships under capitalism, providing a window into possibilities for more caring housing arrangements.

Marketizing education: a microanalytic account

ABSTRACT The neoliberal turn has driven attempts to marketize education, but how does marketization occur? In this article I draw on ethnographic and linguistic-ethnographic methods to investigate marketization through a microanalytic lens. My investigation focuses on a team of educational professionals, who participated in a workshop led by an organizational consultant named Eric. During the workshop, Eric successfully encouraged the educators to adopt some key business terms that he imported from the high-tech sector. My findings indicate that the marketization of education was not straightforward. Rather, the process encountered some resistance and sowed confusion before a business discourse ultimately took hold. The process of marketization became entangled with the power dynamics shaped by group members’ positioning vis-à-vis one another; and furthermore, it required the group to negotiate the meaning of some key terms. Marketization was ultimately mediated by a cognitive device called the Business Model Canvas and it relied on some pre-existing neoliberal tendencies among the workshop’s participants.

Youth Work in a Warm Climate: Navigating Good Practice in Australia Under Neoliberalism

ABSTRACT We write as Australian youth work educators. We consider some of the ethical challenges involved in teaching youth work ‘in a warm climate’, situated in the diaspora of English youth work but where youth work also has a uniquely Australian character, placing us in an ethically liminal space in our teaching between an understanding of youth work that is robustly defended as being both ‘good’ and ‘true’, and what we do, which is different from this, and has its own character and strengths. We situate this in the policy history of youth work in Australia, particularly in the ‘neoliberal turn’ that this has taken in the last four decades which has created ethical challenges for us, just as it has for those elsewhere. Two guiding questions shape this paper. The first is, given our differences, what challenges do we face in maintaining connections with ‘good’ youth work and its value base as traditionally defined and defended in England, and relatedly, given that policy and funding regimes in the UK seem to be aligning more with an Australian model, is there anything that the youth work community in the UK can learn from the Australian experience?

Gender Inequalities in Academia: Multiple Approaches to Closing the Gap

This special issue aims to contribute to the debate on gender inequalities in academia and the gender equality policies that address them. In this introduction we offer an overview of the debate and of the main research issues and theoretical perspectives, showing how a multiplicity of approaches are needed for both understanding and transforming higher education institutions. Macro, meso and micro level approaches illuminate the gendered individual, cultural and institutional factors that constrain and enable academic life, with special attention paid to how the neoliberal turn, and its organizational consequences, exacerbates gender inequalities. Women, gender, care, and intersectionality approaches allow scholars to focus on the different gendered or intersectional relationships within academia. Policy-oriented approaches allow us to analyse and assess progress in institutional efforts to close the gap on gender inequalities in academia. Actor-centred studies expose the power struggles between actors that oppose or promote gender equality policies in academia.

Calibrating the Parallax View: Understanding the Critical Moments of the Yugoslav Post-Socialist Turn

In this article, we seek to provide a new line of sight referring to specificities of the neoliberal turn in post-socialist societies and corresponding transformations of space. By employing the methodological approach that side-by-side explores two mutually exclusive strategies of analytical and empirical survey, we intend to tackle the question of irreducible antinomies pertinent to architectural research methodologies. Block 23 of the Central Zone of New Belgrade, designed by Branislav Karadžić, Božidar Janković, and Aleksandar Stjepanović (1968), has been widely recognised and aptly studied as one of the highlights of modern urban planning and design, conceived and realised in the period of late socialism in Belgrade (Serbia, former Yugoslavia). Featuring a notion of a “parallax gap,” we presume that the reading of Block 23 through two close yet clearly distinctive perspectives can bring a new scope of knowledge and point to the gap inscribed in the buildings themselves. The first point of view is empirical, centred on the notion of everyday life, and concerns the interpretation and use of space by its inhabitants. The second one is analytical, determined by the work of the architect and architectural theoretician, Branislav Milenković. We start from their point of contact and seek to find a shift in the diverging discursive positions producing a parallax gap. By way of architectural drawing, we explore and theorise new possibilities opened up by the actual buildings: interstitial, intermediary, transitional spaces, and spatial in-betweens. We hope to demonstrate the pursuit of both meticulously planned and dynamically conceived spaces open for the unpredictable was not only a way to respond to specific Yugoslav socio-political realities, but that it fostered the capacity of architecture to accommodate the future population and socio-economic transformations.

Combative Genealogies of Tricontinentalism: Re-Presenting the Southern Struggle for Historical Justice in Latin America and Beyond

Abstract Tricontinentalism, the radical ideational universe of the Global South so important in the 1960s and 1970s, lost much of its original thrust with the neoliberal turn, and its contribution to global history has long been obscured. Recently, however, historians, political theorists and others have been studying its take on global justice and the multiple impacts of its political strategies, ideological rhetoric, identity formations, as well as its many transnational connections: traces still recognisable in the repertoire of social movements today. By unearthing these strands and constellations of global history, and by sometimes cooperating with activists, these scholars act as Foucauldian genealogists, laying bare sediments of historical agency that the hegemonic memory formation of neoliberalism had all but buried. Such efforts constitute a form of counter-history in the competitive field of political memory. This paper applies elements of mnemonic hegemony theory (mht) to analyse Tricontinental memory, with a particular focus on Latin America.

‘Teachers have to take the responsibility for everything’

This article focuses on the challenges and difficulties faced by the Lithuanian teaching profession in primary schools. It asks how the post-Soviet educational reforms in Lithuania have affected teachers and what the gendered implications for the teaching profession are in Lithuania. Two theoretical approaches were used: the first is a critique of neoliberalism, and the second is a feminist perspective concerned with the feminisation of primary school teachers. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with female Lithuanian primary school teachers with 25–45 years of professional teaching experience. The data reveals an intensification of teachers’ jobs, increased accountability and performativity, marketisation of student school placements, and job precariousness. Also, the study findings imply that low teachers’ salaries reduce the attractiveness of the teaching profession, yet the interviewees also found their jobs meaningful. The findings also reveal the perception of primary school teaching in Lithuania as a women’s occupation due to deeply engrained gender norms. The study, therefore, suggests that the neoliberal turn in education has harmed the Lithuanian teaching profession, undermining the role of teachers as professionals. The results underline a need to reconsider widely spread neoliberal educational developments for teachers to gain a greater sense of professional independence.

A virtuous debtor: South Korea in the Eurocurrency market, 1969 – 1984

This article examines the case of South Korea, in which the external private debt management leveraged the symbiosis of the authoritarian regime and the neoliberal policies in a less-developed country. In the pursuit of post-war growthamship, against the meddling of allies with official loans, the military government turned to the Eurocurrency market, an offshore market for major currencies to meet the triple goal of diversifying foreign reserve sources, financing the heavy-chemical industrialization, and underpinning the diplomatic struggle against North Korea. The dependence on the Euro-capital empowered technocrats at the Economic Planning Board to manage the sovereign borrower’s external indebtedness. Against the neo-mercantilist policy, they introduced price stability measures and maintained low debt-service-ratio so as to appease international banks and international financial organizations. Their success enabled the military government to eschew the debt crisis of 1982 and bolstered the legitimacy of the military government. In return, the technocrats resorted to the authoritarian rule to implement market-oriented policies against the labor the neo-mercantilist interests. Drawing on multi-archival sources, this article engages to the burgeoning scholarship on the relations between international banks and authoritarian regimes by analyzing the external debt-driven neoliberal turn in the developing world.

How Culture Displaced Structural Reform: Problem Definition, Marketization, and Neoliberal Myths in Bank Regulation

We use content analysis to show that the diagnosis of the financial crisis of 2007–2009 shifted significantly from a focus on the need for structural change in the banking industry to an emphasis on culture and reform at the organizational level. We consider four overlapping subsystems in which this shift in problem–solution clusters played out—political, regulatory, legal, and consulting—and show that the “structural reform agenda,” which was initially strong and publicly prominent in the political arena, lost attention. Over time it was displaced by a neoliberal managerialist turn, which watered down or abandoned structural solutions and instead played up a new “culture and conduct reform agenda.” We explain this shift in terms of the marketization of regulation, which—following Mautner (Language and the market society, 1st ed. Routledge, 2010)’s model of interdiscursive alignment—we detect in the shifting language of financial-services reform across the four subsystems in scope. We argue that a neoliberal turn took place with a discursive closure that made the structural reform alternative gradually unsayable and, in the end, unthinkable. At the same time, the discourse turned to embrace the neoliberal agenda, built on the myth of self-regulating actors and markets, manifest in the culture problematic. This managerialist turn was able to mobilise, and be operationalised by, an industry of consultants, whereas structural change came to be seen by regulators as too risky to implement. We claim that these dynamics reveal how a form of “collective strategic ignorance,” based on powerful institutional myths, was systematically oriented to ignore and reject structural sources of crisis. Finally, we suggest that the observed pattern of displacement—whereby initial calls for structural change become later displaced by managerial and procedural solutions—is common to other social issues, such as audit reform and corporate social responsibility.

Of “Realities and Possibilities”

This essay addresses Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) in relation to three moments: the time of its writing and publication; that of the next major global political epoch, the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and 1990s; and our current moment, when compounded crises bound up with the afterlives of colonialism—coming to a head in the form of planetary climate catastrophe and its attendant sociopolitical degradations—have rightfully renewed demands for a decolonization of the contemporary world. The three orientations that guide the essay—the conflict between Indigenous spatio-temporalities of life and experience as they underwent forced conformity with a homogeneous, “empty” time and space underpinning Eurocentric ideas of capitalist progress as well as the advancement of communism/socialism; a critique of unilinear Development models; and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa as a predecessor to contemporary decolonial theory—signal an approach to alternative modes of knowing for generating new possibilities for life.

How Blair killed the co-ops: Reclaiming social enterprise from its neoliberal turn. By Leslie Huckfield

Book review

Blaming the victim or structural conditioning? COVID‐19, obesity and the neoliberal diet

AbstractThe energy‐dense part of the neoliberal diet and obesity made for an explosive combination upon the arrival of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Energy‐dense foods lie at the root of comorbidities associated with complications of the COVID‐19 pandemic: overweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and so forth. Multiple medical studies have demonstrated the causal impact of overweight and obesity on more severe or lethal infections. Focusing on the case of Mexico, I will show that inequality strongly conditions what people can eat, so the issue is not simply a matter of personal choice or responsibility. My argument is twofold: (1) Mexico enjoyed its own ‘traditional’ diets through the mid‐1980s, which included widely accessible fruits and vegetables. But (2) the neoliberal turn in the form of trade liberalization and deepening inequality caused a substantial reshaping of the diet in favour of energy‐dense foods with lower nutritional value. The energy‐dense segment of ‘the neoliberal diet’ has turned a large portion of Mexicans into a vulnerable population. But this is a class‐differentiated diet with its healthy and nutritious components increasingly less accessible to the working classes. Recovering healthy diets in Mexico will require the recuperation of food sovereignty through the regeneration of its countryside and its peasantry. Agroecological methods of food production will also be needed to alleviate the climate change emergency.