Neoliberal Pressures Research Articles

Bring Out Yer Dead

This article reviews three recent books about challenges facing contemporary labor movements. Clawson’s argument that U.S. labor unions ought to seek a fusion with 1960s social movements to build a broad challenge to neoliberal politics reflects the seriousness of labor’s crisis in the United States; his argument is an important one but does not adequately explore the obstacles and difficulties involved in such a fusion. The contributors to Michael Gold’s volume are much more optimistic aboutlabor’s future in Europe, but the contributionof neoliberal restructuringto widening cracks in Europe’s social pacts and a gradual weakening of labor’s position there are evident. Contributors to Cornfield and McCammon’s volume raise doubts about European labor movements’long-term ability to resist neoliberal pressures and demonstrate how in the global South neoliberalism has paralyzed some countries’ labor movements and sparked grassroots resistance in others.

Agricultural trade liberalization, multifunctionality, and sugar in the south Florida landscape

This paper explores the applicability of the concept of “multifunctionality” to the south Florida sugar-producing region. Multifunctionality is being promoted in the European Union in response to neoliberal trade pressures in agriculture. It is seen as a way to address social and ecological concerns such as farm abandonment and biodiversity loss through domestic agricultural policies that conform to the GATT/World Trade Organization. I have two objectives in this paper. First, I seek to investigate multifunctionality as one response to neoliberal pressures for agricultural reform. In doing this, I identify two types of multifunctionality, a “weak” and a “strong” version. Second, I want to explore the possibility for multifunctionality to serve as a vehicle for resistance to GATT/WTO in other regions. I do this through a study of arguably the most maligned agricultural zone in the world, the sugar-producing region of south Florida. The specific geographic focus is the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA), the federally designated, 700,000-acre zone south of Lake Okeechobee that is home to the Florida “Sugar Bowl.”

Particularizing the Global: Reception of Foreign Direct Investment in Slovenia

Exploring the relationship between global forces and local practices, this article examines the reception of global investment flows in an East European transition country, Slovenia. Using content analysis of legal regulations and policies, the article investigates how global pressures impact the official foreign investment policy regime in Slovenia. Examples of foreign investment transactions illustrate economic practice. The analysis shows that yielding to the universalizing pressures of neoliberalism creates convergence in official foreign investment policies. In practice, however, economic actors involved in foreign investment transactions resist and particularize global processes on the basis of their network ties, political alliances and cultural affinities. Overall, the study emphasizes the social and political embeddedness of economic processes and substantiates how the decoupling of formal policies and local practices sustains the coexistence of uniformity and diversity.

After the Revolution: Gender and Democracy in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala

After the Revolution: Gender and Democracy in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala

School-level Education Policy under New Labour and New Zealand Labour: A Comparative Update

This article compares the school-level education policies of the Labour-led coalition government elected in New Zealand in late 1999 with those of New Labour in England. It illustrates that the policies being introduced by the Labour coalition have been generally less managerial and market-oriented than New Labour's even though neo-liberal pressures are likely to constrain what appears to be a shift to the left in New Zealand. The difference between the two settings is explained through reference to party political and contextual factors and policy and research implications are also discussed.

Neoliberal globalization and domestic accommodation: Combining efficiency and legitimacy

Globalization is not a unique issue. The market economy has been constantly globalized since its formation in Europe in the late fifteenth century. However, its neoliberal nature is very contemporary. At the international level, measures to open more markets and to liberalize trade have been negotiated and incorporated into the rules of the WTO, the IMF, and the regional bodies of economic cooperation. At the domestic level, neoliberal reform packages have been tried or imposed externally particularly in East Asian countries after the financial crisis in the late 1997. This study defines the nature of neoliberal globalization and identifies its limitations and pressures upon domestic political economy. It also reviews briefly the ‘third way’ politics in Europe and another ‘third way’ experiment in China to find some critical lessons in responding to neoliberal reform pressures.