Neoliberal Pressures Research Articles

Which UHC? Features for Equity and Universalism Comment on "Universal Health Coverage for Non-Communicable Diseases and Health Equity: Lessons From Australian Primary Healthcare".

Equity and universality are implicit in universal health coverage (UHC), although ambiguity has led to differing interpretations and policy emphases that limit their achievement. Diverse country experiences indicate a policy focus on differences in service availability and costs of care, and neoliberal policies that have focused UHC on segmented financing and disease-focused benefit packages, ignoring evidence on financing, service, rights-based and social features that enable equity, continuity of care and improved population health. Public policies that do not confront these neoliberal pressures limit equity-promoting features in UHC. In raising the impetus for UHC and widening public awareness of the need for public health systems, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) presents an opportunity for challenging market driven approaches to UHC, but also a need to make clear the features that are essential for ensuring equity in the progression towards universal health systems.

In pursuit of primary teachers’ work motivation amid increased external neoliberal pressure in education

ABSTRACT This study explored factors that were important to primary teachers’ motivation due to increased pressure caused by changes associated with a global neoliberal movement. A questionnaire (n = 243) was conducted to gain an overview of factors causing pressure on teachers. Interviews (n = 13) were conducted to reveal factors relevant to teachers’ motivation in the past, present, and future. The study indicated that teachers, regardless of type of motivation, felt the same extent of external control and experienced similar reasons for pressure. The study showed that autonomous motivation was more present than controlled motivation, and that the teachers emphasised support rather than external pressure. The study also found that a type of motivation could change due to the application of a variety of coping strategies. Therefore, when teachers experience external pressures, they benefit from consistent support.

Developing a context-appropriate framework for measuring quality in initial teacher education

Against a backdrop of increasing pressure globally to enhance the quality of teacher preparation, and a corresponding push to ‘measure’ this performatively, we present a context-specific framework for identifying the quality of initial teacher education (ITE). The framework derives from a project involving all Scottish ITE providers. It adopts a vernacular globalisation perspective, drawing on international literature and local knowledge to create a mutually agreeable framework. In sharing the process, as well as the product, we offer a unique perspective on how one jurisdiction has reconciled global neoliberal pressures with a national educational ideology which values democratic approaches to schooling.

Vital Philology: On How to Foil the Immanent Extinction of Critique

Using the motif of the hipster to consider the arrival of the concept “Anthropocene” into the orbit of critical theory, this essay establishes the grave existential consequences that issue from the infatuation with, and rapid, uncritical uptake and circulation of, concepts in a philosophical market overcome by neoliberal pressures. These epistemic habits align with political commitments that unwittingly controvert the original intents of critique—and this paradox requires remediation. This essay, thus, argues for a recalibration of epistemic praxis by reclaiming a retro, critical, vital form of philology—figured as both a scholarly practice and a way of life. The hope is to counter the stultifying force of the late-capitalist praxis of commodification, consumption, and hyper-production of concepts spawned by the fatal lure of progress narratives and the fetishization of innovation and originality they entail. Accordingly, we might resolve the tension between habits and politics and account for vital differences and resistances not revealed by the mutation of critique inherent in contemporary strategies. Thus, not only might epistemic politics evolve, but critical theory may also avert extinction by revitalizing it as a dynamic life practice.

Precarity and Resistance: A Critique of Martha Fineman's Vulnerability Theory

AbstractContemporary feminist theory by and large agrees on criticizing the traditional, autonomous subject and instead maintains a relational, dependent self, but the vocabulary used to describe the latter remains contested. These contestations are seen in comparing the approach of some feminist legal theory, as demonstrated by Martha Fineman, to the approach of some feminist theory that draws on continental philosophy, as demonstrated by Judith Butler. Fineman's concept of vulnerability emphasizes the universality of vulnerability in the human condition, arguing that a “responsive state” is most conducive to producing subjects who are “resilient” in the face of neoliberal pressures. We argue that vulnerability, as an existential as opposed to a political description, is a limited rubric under which to organize against neoliberal forces. Further, we contend that Fineman's rhetoric of resilience risks reiterating a neoliberal logic of individualized self-management. In response, we look to Butler's concept of precarity, which underscores particular social conditions, as opposed to universal ontological vulnerabilities, that debilitate certain subjects. At stake is how we respond to neoliberal forces today: a vocabulary of precarity poses a more effective challenge than one of vulnerability, for it opens onto not merely individual or institutional resilience but grounded, communal resistance.

Urban Megaprojects as Disorderly and Unruly Endeavors

Megaprojects have multiplied around the world as an urban response to the pressures of neoliberalism and globalization in favor of development, competitiveness and innovation. The protagonists of the megaprojects adopt a narrative of international competitiveness, framing a discourse dominated by the rhetoric of economic survival. The response has been urban transformations in which governments and private sector actors have struggled to position their cities and services within a global socio-political division of labor, production and consumption, and to coordinate their local networks with the requirements perceived or real aspects of an increasingly deregulated and neoliberal international economic system. It seems clear, then, that the phenomenon of megaprojects is intrinsically linked to the logic of growth, development, qualitative urban transformation, wealth creation, competitiveness and prosperity. One of the consequences of this overall framework is that megaprojects usually evolve from an orderly planning project to a disorderly an unruly endeavor. The complexities of construction, operation, management and governance of large projects entail a series of stochastic processes where risk and unpredictability become fundamental components of urban economic life.

Positioning, Principles, and Parrhesia: From Ranting to Activism

This paper examines issues of positioning and its relationship to professionality and principled, ethical, and responsible practice. As academics and practitioners, we find ourselves working in dislocated, fragmented, and contested cultures and contexts, which can appear increasingly unfamiliar, disturbed, and disturbing. In such contexts in which professionality is enacted, it is posited that the imperative to be authentic and accountable to the academy and humanity is paramount. The process of managing tensions between the pressures of neoliberalism, performativity, and a more principled, individualized but connected professionality is explored with reference to parrhesia. This enacted professionality is viewed and refracted through a prism of regarded acts of resistance and exertions of the micro-physics of power; as a dynamic and contextually appropriate response to hegemonic discourses of acting professionally. This offers qualitative inquirers, academics, and professional practitioners a framework or reference point for activism in present and future contexts; an urgency to commit to focused, authentic, and congruent action, rather than just engage in ranting, which can only exacerbate feelings of frustration, disillusionment, and exhaustion. This paper explores processes of parrhesiastic alignment and authentic positioning through my own writing too—as a late career academic practitioner and an early career researcher.

How Change Unravels: The Failure of Ideal-centered Organizational Change at Regional Comprehensive Universities

ABSTRACT This multiple-case study examined the factors promoting or impeding ideal-centered change efforts focused on reclaiming the founding civic commitments of three Regional Comprehensive Universities. Findings showed that successful change agents engaged detractors in defining the ideal and shaping the change while assessing change efforts and recalibrating their approach as needed. Successful change agents also initiated ongoing cultural engagement with the ideal early on and ensured that it was present throughout the change process. These findings contrast prior research portraying cultural change as the final stage of organizational change, not as an ongoing process. This study is significant because it exposes how postsecondary institutions might enact ideal-centered change focused on reclaiming founding civic commitments despite neoliberal pressures that conflict with these ideals.

Lumbung Nation

ABSTRACT Indonesian food security policy suffers from a fundamental internal contradiction – between neoliberal pressures towards more integration into the global market-based food system geared towards profit and an intractable residual belief in national self-sufficiency in staple foods. While this contradiction presents itself in technical and economic terms, it is fundamentally a matter of culture and ideology. The article addresses this contradiction by way of a study of key metaphors of food security, among which the most central is lumbung – the traditional rice barn. Lumbung of various kinds have been a central pillar of food security across the archipelago since ancient times and still serve in many contexts as a metaphor for food security at various levels. While this ‘lumbung culture’ may have ‘hindered’ attempts to integrate Indonesia more fully into wider circuits of market exchange, it has to some extent protected the Indonesian food system from the growing vulnerabilities of climate, resource/environmental stresses, and pandemics.

Covid-19 Enters College but to What Degree?

This article considers the potential long term implications of university emergency responses to Covid-19. While empathetic responses are important in a time of crisis, emergency measures should not necessarily entail the infringement of or the abandonment of rights articulated in existing policies, procedures, collective agreements, or contracts. Areas of particular vulnerability include academic freedom, faculty workload, and intellectual property rights. The author also suggests that crisis responses by higher education may be seen as more of an intensification of neoliberal pressures than as signaling new pressures from the pandemic alone.

In situ: using timescapes as a post-qualitative pedagogical methodology to deepen explorations of long-term higher education teaching/mentoring

ABSTRACT Using an interdisciplinary, post-qualitative, pedagogical methodological (Burke, Crozier, and Misiaszek 2017) practice of timescapes (Adam 1998, Burke 2018a), I explore my longest teaching/mentoring relationship, spanning two decades. I conceptualize this process as a post-qualitative encounter (Davies et al. 2013). The first half of the paper explores higher education teaching/mentoring through this timescapes practice, incorporating studies across higher education, gender, gerontology and the humanities. In the second half, I present four critical conjunctures in this teaching/mentoring relationship. Ultimately, I argue that expanding what is understood by the concept of a ‘teaching/mentoring relationship’, particularly through studies of long-term relationships and through practices such as timescapes encounters, is a powerful counter-hegemonic tool in the face of neoliberal pressures and measures of impact in teaching in higher education.

Teacher Educators in Neoliberal Times: A Phenomenological Self-Study

In Sweden, and most Western countries, pervasive neoliberal policies have dramatically transformed the entire education sector in a matter of decades. As teacher educators, we have experienced how neoliberal currents have pushed Swedish teacher education towards a teacher training paradigm which may risk undermining the foundations for professional judgement. Moreover, the Bologna Process and the introduction of New Public Management have had significant consequences for what it means to be a teacher educator. In this study, we present our everyday experiences of being teacher educators, immersed in a teacher education culture in Sweden which has evolved under the pressures of neoliberalism. To address these complex lived experiences we engaged in a phenomenological first-person account. Three main themes emerged from an analysis of lived experience descriptions: (a) Alignment Slaves; (b) Audit Puppets; (c) Techno Phobes. These themes reflect different lived dimensions of being teacher educators confronted with neoliberal agendas. The paper concludes with a call for resistance to bring about change within teacher education.

Resisting the Detrimental Effects of Grade Inflation on University Faculty and Students through Critical Communication Pedagogy

Despite university faculty’s efforts to maintain rigor and high expectations in their classrooms, grade inflation continues to rise. While numerous factors exist to explain this problem, the primary contributor is the ubiquitous pressure of neoliberal forces on the university. Neoliberalism has inculcated society, namely undergraduate students, to resist the belief that the university is a place in which they collectively gather to learn, think, be challenged, grow through failure, and build character. Rather, students now largely believe that they university is merely a business from which they purchase a product—a degree. This producer-consumer mindset has created a deleterious situation for both students and faculty. Students believe that they are merely purchasing a degree; and, they demand that high grades accompany that degree. To them, high grades, coupled with their degree, are the currency with which they purchase a career. Because of this prevalent ideology, faculty are placed in a perilous position because they feel internal and external pressure to reduce the rigor of their courses and/or artificially inflate the grades that students earn. Although all faculty feel the pressure to conform to this neoliberally driven practice, it is especially troublesome for tenure-track, non-tenure track, and other contingent faculty because their continued employment is, often to a large extent, dependent of student ratings of teaching effectiveness. This chapter will address these issues through the lens of critical communication pedagogy (CCP) by offering ways in which faculty can resist the neoliberal pressure to engage in grade inflation by teaching students about the neoliberal system which has inculcated them to believe that profit, success, and individualism are the only measures of a meaningful life. Following CCP, I will discuss how instructors can challenge students to resist neoliberal hegemony, hold high academic standards for themselves, and tie learning to outcomes that affect their futures—power and their response to it. Overall, I will argue that in order for tenure-track and contingent faculty to be able to resist the pressure to inflate grades, they must work to teach students to resist neoliberal ideology that instills the thought processes that lead to grade inflation. In so doing, students may begin to learn to engage in resistance behaviors to neoliberal power structures that marginalize them.

Becoming an expert empowered parent

Purpose: It remains the responsibility of health professionals to support parents to access, understand and make practical use of relevant information and resources, with the aim of empowering them to take up their role as central partners, collaborators and decision-makers in the provision of care for their child; however, it appears this is far from straightforward. With unclear guidance, health professionals need to try to match the legislation-championed ideals of family-centred care with the neoliberal pressures for standardisation/monetisation of healthcare. Moreover, this needs to be achieved whilst embracing the perceived perils of handing over power and control to parents. This study aims to develop a better understanding of how parents successfully engage with information and resources, providing practical suggestions for how this might be effectively supported by health professionals.

Beyond deficit assessment in bilingual primary schools

ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyze the harm that high-stakes standardized tests in the U.S. render to maintenance-oriented dual-language bilingual primary schools and, in particular, to minoritized bilingual learners. We argue that these schools must resist the negative incentives and prevailing logic that passing standardized tests is crucial for students’ future success and act to mitigate the potential harm to their school missions and pedagogy that this form of assessment presents. The alternative anti-deficit qualitative approaches to assessment we describe here rely on assessments of student learning and knowledge that are strengths-based, culturally aware and mindful, and seek to motivate students to accomplish ambitious, albeit differentiated, goals. These assessments carry a tone of empowerment and cultural affirmation and foster positive academic identity development of emergent bilingual children. We hope here to persuade that these assessments will assist dual-language bilingual primary schools to resist the neoliberal pressure to tie high-stakes decisions to standardized testing, which impair the cultural, educational, and personal development of their most vulnerable students.

LGBTQ + community organizations under neoliberalism in Ontario, Canada: Contradictions and disconnects

This study examines the impact of neoliberal policy—which introduces competition for funding and pressure to professionalize and bureaucratize—on the working conditions and precarity of a purposive sample of southern Ontario (Canada) organizations dealing with LGBTQ + health. Findings from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 community-based organization stakeholders and government bureaucrats confirmed that neoliberal policy pressures these organizations to professionalize and bureaucratize, while restricting political advocacy. Queer Liberation Theory’s three central tenets of anti-assimilationism, solidarity across movements, and the political economy of queer health are used to understand the situation and possible futures for third-sector organizations within the LGBTQ + movement.

Explaining a reverse gender gap in advanced physics and computer science course‐taking: An exploratory case study comparing Hebrew‐speaking and Arabic‐speaking high schools in Israel

AbstractIn the past three decades in high‐income countries, female students have outperformed male students in most indicators of educational attainment. However, the underrepresentation of girls and women in science courses and careers, especially in physics, computer sciences, and engineering, remains persistent. What is often neglected by the vast existing literature is the role that schools, as social institutions, play in maintaining or eliminating such gender gaps. This explorative case study research compares two high schools in Israel: one Hebrew‐speaking state school that serves mostly middleclass students and exhibits a typical gender gap in physics and computer science; the other, an Arabic‐speaking state school located in a Bedouin town that serves mostly students from a lower socioeconomic background. In the Arabic‐speaking school over 50% of the students in the advanced physics and computer science classes are females. The study aims to explain this seemingly counterintuitive gender pattern with respect to participation in physics and computer science. A comparison of school policies regarding sorting and choice reveals that the two schools employ very different policies that might explain the different patterns of participation. The Hebrew‐speaking school prioritizes self‐fulfillment and “free‐choice,” while in the Arabic‐speaking school, staff are much more active in sorting and assigning students to different curricular programs. The qualitative analysis suggests that in the case of the Arabic‐speaking school the intersection between traditional and collectivist society and neoliberal pressures in the form of raising achievement benchmarks contributes to the reversal of the gender gap in physics and computer science courses.

Discourses of Resistance of Coastal Intellectuals from La Araucanía and Los Ríos Regions (Chile) against States Policies of Maritime Division

This study analyzes the dissident discourse of a group of leaders of coastal communities in La Araucania and Los Rios Region respectively, concerning their socio-environmental conditions, social organization, identity, history, and vision of the future related to the state-imposed division of access rights to local ocean waters through the Ley de Pesca (Fisheries Act). A workshop/meeting was analyzed along with 15 interviews with local leaders. The results indicate the existence of an emerging organic intellectual that works for the well-being and development of their communities and sustains a hybrid-transformational discourse formed by aspects related to both hegemony and resistance. Elements identified include criticizing and resisting conditions of domination, valuing the organization and bonds of solidarity as tools for liberation, community self-knowledge and self-discovery. These results invite a rethinking of local communities as active and empowered agents who can confront the pressures of neoliberalism and thus undergo rapid economic and environmental changes in their social and cultural systems.

Student Wellbeing Through Teacher Wellbeing: A Study with Law Teachers in the UK and Australia

Research confirms law students and lawyers in the US, Australia and more recently in the UK are prone to symptoms related to stress and anxiety disproportionately to other professions. In response, the legal profession and legal academy in Australia and the UK have created Wellness Networks to encourage and facilitate research and disseminate ideas and strategies that might help law students and lawyers to thrive. This project builds on that research through a series of surveys of law teachers in the UK and Australia on the presumption that law teachers are in a strong position to influence their students not only about legal matters, but on developing attitudes and practices that will help them to survive and thrive as lawyers. The comparative analysis reveals several differences, but also many similarities with law teachers in both countries reporting negative effects from neoliberal pressures on legal education programs that impact their wellbeing, performance as teachers and ability to adequately respond to student concerns.

Languages in public policy, and constraints in academia

AbstractThe article explores evidence of public policy ignoring scholarly recommendations, and describes instances of this in the field of language policy at both supranational and national levels. One significant contemporary influence is that university autonomy and academic freedom are being constrained by neoliberal pressures. Evidence of this in the United Kingdom and Denmark is described. These trends are connected to the wider context of the transition from the practices and ideology ofterra nulliusto legitimate colonisation and global Europeanisation, and the concomitant dispossession of the territories of others, to global Americanisation processes, the universalization of acultura nulliusin commerce, the media, academia, and domestic life. This dovetails with the promotion and establishment of English as alingua nullius,a language that should be learned by all worldwide, as if it serves the interests of all inhabitants of the globe, and is disconnected from the causal factors behind the expansion of the language. One speech by Winston Churchill argues for the maintenance of university autonomy and historical awareness. Another pleads for Anglo-American global dominance, including the promotion of English as a ‘world’ language. These competing pleas have had different outcomes: academic freedom and traditions are currently at risk, whereas US dominance and the promotion and expansion of English have thrived. The governments of the five Nordic countries have acted to ensure the maintenance of national languages as well as competence in ‘international languages’. This is exemplified by a description of how universities should assure parallel competence and thereby a healthy balance between English and national languages. Soft power is never far from economic, political, and military power, all of which entail language use. China and Chinese are well launched on a comparable trajectory to the expansion of English.