Neoliberal Principles Research Articles

Sonoridades de posguerra en Baile con serpientes (1996) de Horacio Castellanos Moya

Abstract: Baile con serpientes (1996) by Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya narrates a symptomatic violence due to the emerging economic order of neoliberalism during the official transition to peace. The present study attends to the novel's sonic register to show how silence, noise, and music reinscribe the memory of the civil war in a tumultuous present. Fueled by neoliberal rationality, the main character attunes to a hyper-masculine voice as a means of participating in Central America's emerging consumerist, post-conflict society. The following draws on Sayak Valencia's concept of the endriago subject—a masculine subjectivity rooted in the exercise of violence as necroempowerment—to signal the violent transformation of the main character into a celebrity due to media attention. Sound—whether unpleasant noise or melodious music—becomes a fulcrum upon which protagonist Eduardo Sosa's neoliberal subjectivity alternately emerges and is repressed by a reactionary state. The following will demonstrate how the sonorously gory scenes described in the novel resonate with the unresolved social corruption which facilitates the persistence of violence in the neoliberal present. The textual representation of silence, noise, and music recasts Sosa's violent disruption to incorporate himself into a masculine and violent postwar era.

Living with Sjögren’s Syndrome: An Analysis of YouTube Vlogs on the Autoimmune Disease

ABSTRACT People who experience symptoms of autoimmune diseases often have to struggle for illness recognition. Women experiencing such symptoms face additional challenges as their accounts of pain are frequently treated with skepticism. This study examines experiences of people living with Sjögren’s Syndrome, an autoimmune disease which is primarily diagnosed in women, by conducting an analysis of individual vlogs posted on YouTube using the themes of gender, chronic illness and neoliberal governmentality. Sjögren’s Syndrome is the second most common rheumatic disease after rheumatoid arthritis and affects nearly 4 million people in the United States alone. An analysis of 70 vlogs posted by people living with the disease revealed the challenges faced by them including diagnostic delays and perceived attitudinal biases amongst medical professionals, especially in the context of the gender of the patients. Apart from highlighting the impact of the disease on their gendered roles, the vloggers urged viewers to conduct their own research on the disease and advocate for themselves during interactions with physicians. The study illuminates how dissatisfaction with healthcare services reinforces neoliberal rationalities such as individual advocacy, resilience and self-labor. The findings of the study delineate the role of neoliberal governmentality in making self-management of chronic illnesses such as Sjögren’s Syndrome an internalized ideal for women living with the disease. Additionally, the study provides empirical evidence of the need for addressing the medical and socio-cultural factors that contribute to delays in the diagnosis and management of Sjögren’s Syndrome.

The Allure of Transactional Intimacy in Sugar Dating

The proliferation of “sugar dating” websites, facilitating transactional relationships between a “sugar baby” and a “sugar daddy,” raises new questions about the reconfigured relationship between intimacy and economy in the contemporary Global North. By encouraging people to approach sex and intimacy through a logic of exchange, sugar dating has been claimed to represent the culmination of a broader trend towards a ”marketization” of intimacy. Based on semi-structured interviews, this article analyzes Swedish “sugar babies”’ investment in a transactional approach to intimate interactions with men, focusing on the emotional rewards that they associate with the transactional setup of sugar dating. While the participants’ transactional approach to intimacy is bolstered by the cultural dispersal of a neoliberal rationality into ever more domains of life, I argue that its deeper roots need to be sought in the precarious conditions of contemporary intimacy. Drawing in particular on the work of Eva Illouz, I claim that the women’s embracement of a transactional approach to heterosexual sex and intimacy may be read as a defensive tactic of seeking to gain control over the flows of intimate interaction in light of the (gendered) insecurities and vulnerabilities of the contemporary market of intimacy.

What does the ideal citizen look like in China’s new era? A bottom-up view

ABSTRACT China has reformed the way it nurtures a generation of citizens for the new era of the Xi administration. School curricula have been reformed and more teachers have been trained to deliver political – ideological education. While the central authorities play a crucial role in forging a vision of the ‘ideal’ citizen from the top down, the enactment of centrally promulgated policies and curricula is complicated. This study explores a bottom-up view from the perspective of a group of university teachers, the institutional actors who socialise young people into ‘ideal’ citizens on the ground. Four themes emerge in the informants’ narratives: ideological commitment, abilities, developing a global outlook, and the influence of traditional culture. The paper concludes with a discussion of the interplay between socialist, traditional, and neoliberal rationalities in the making of Chinese citizens.

The World Health Organization, physical activity and the contradictions of neoliberal health promotion

ABSTRACT This article constitutes the first holistic exploration of how neoliberalism permeates and manifests in Physical Activity Health Promotion (PAHP). It synthesises a critical analysis of neoliberalism with the sociological concepts of medicalisation and healthism and draws on three distinct phases and methods of data collection, to more adequately understand the development, prominence and largely uncritical acceptance of this domain of global public health. Specifically, it demonstrates how the World Health Organization’s (WHO) initial promotion of PAHP coincided with the organisation’s strategic re-alignment with neoliberal principles within a changing geopolitical landscape. Then, deploying a critical discourse analysis of the recent and globally significant WHO (2020) Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour, it shows how the underlying logics of neoliberalism continue to inform not only the intended policy goals but the inclusion and exclusion of certain types of evidence used to justify and evaluate policy. Subsequently, drawing on qualitative interview data and time-series survey data the article details how neoliberalism fosters the ideology of healthism, how this promotes forms of exercise which diverge from health maximising behaviours, and how this extends differences in physical activity uptake across the population, and therefore embeds the health inequalities PAHP is explicitly claimed to address. Outlining why PAHP, in particular, holds appeal for the WHO, we conclude that neoliberalism has both enabled the rapid development and broad political acceptance of PAHP, but concomitantly leads to outcomes which limit and confound the broader policy goals.

Estado e exceção econômica na periferia: acumulação primitiva e outras formas de expropriação do comum

The article seeks to demonstrate the permanence of the framework of economic exception on the periphery of capitalism, as well as the instrumentalization of State and Law to legitimize the expropriation of the “common”. It tries to understand, therefore, the actuality of concepts such as “primitive accumulation”, “formal subsumption” and “real subsumption” as appropriate analytical tools for criticizing the expropriation of social wealth, the deepening of the peripheral condition of countries like Brazil, and how the legal form and the political form are functional to this project of “plundering” that is located at the core of “neoliberal rationality” (Dardot, Laval). The discussions undertaken do not manifest automatic adherence to the authors used, but seek to build the argument presented from a critical dialogue with texts by Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Laura Nader, Ugo Mattei and, in Brazil, mainly, Leda Paulani, Paulo Arantes, Gilberto Bercovici and Francisco de Oliveira. The chosen method is dialectical materialism, which was applied to the bibliographic survey and to the tying of concepts directed to the critique of the contemporary economic exception. The usurpation of the commons is a global phenomenon, but one that evidently has a greater incidence outside the capitalist center. This justifies the focus given to Brazil as a locus for observing the phenomenon.

Made to escape: How the neoliberal rationality changed consumer escape

AbstractCurrent research on consumer escape is characterized by a paradox: when seeking to escape the structures, pressures, and obligations of modern life, consumers end up reinforcing the same structure that caused the desire to escape. We propose that this paradox can be explained by a connection between consumer escape and the neoliberal rationality, which is understood to focus on the creation of autonomous, ambitious, and aspiring individuals. Thus, in this article, we explain how the neoliberal rationality affects consumer escape. A three‐year ethnography in a community of long‐distance runners has enabled us to explain that the neoliberal rationality acts on consumer escape through three specific and interdependent dynamics: the community of performance, the entrepreneurial body, and the performance market. Together, those three dynamics change the nature of consumer escape experiences in our contemporary society, according to the main contribution of this research.

Fertile Ground

Fears of immigration and demographic change have fueled nativist, pro-natalist movements that support the reproductive, heteronormative family as a vital political project shaping their rhetoric and politics. This paper argues that right-wing populist movements can be situated within heteroactivsm, as reactionary movements positioning themselves against challenges to the heteronormative family. I suggest that understanding the populist character of these movements can help theorize why so many right-wing populists echo specific claims about gender and race. By situating their political claims in biological claims about sex, gender and race, these movements contrast themselves with abstract ideals of universal human rights, neoliberal rationality, and cosmopolitan globalism, embracing the traditional family, gender norms, and heterosexual reproduction. They encourage normative family promoted through state policy of rewarding proper families and punishing improper social reproduction—whether literal reproduction or the cultural reproduction of values. Tracing the broad outlines of a political project anchored in the reproductive bodies of women, I argue for greater attention to the ways the heteroactivist project is central to right-wing populism and its multi-scalar manifestations.

Proportionality rhetoric and neoliberal rationality in the ‘fundamental social rights’ adjudication of the Court of Justice of the European Union

Abstract This article studies the rhetorical construction of proportionality discourse in controversial social rights cases at the Court of Justice of the European Union. It argues that neoliberal rationality controls the Court’s proportionality discourse. That rationality operates through eliding social conflict and excluding egalitarian approaches to social rights, which are rhetorically re-imagined as subsidiary instruments of competition and business.

URBAN REGENERATION IN SEOUL: Alternative Urbanism or the Resilience of Neoliberal Urbanism?

AbstractPark Won‐soon, the former mayor of Seoul, put forward a new vision of Seoul as a progressive city, and one of his signatures was the promotion of a new urban regeneration policy called the Seoul‐type Urban Regeneration Model (SUR). It was first presented as a solution to compressed and profit‐oriented urban redevelopment but evolved into an alternative model which conveyed the worlding desire of the Seoul Metropolitan Government to redefine Asian urbanism beyond developmentalism or neoliberalism. In this article, we argue that the SUR demonstrates a mixture of post‐developmentalist features and the lingering impact of neoliberal rationalities. Specifically, we problematize SUR's hybrid aspirations for urban competitiveness, improved quality of life and participatory governance by articulating how the pursuit of a globally competitive city conflicts with and overrides other values and how citizen‐centered governance was exploited as an efficient mechanism of neoliberal urbanism.

Making the world open again. The US State Department's thwarted first steps towards global neoliberalization during the Great Depression and World War II

Given that neoliberal rationality implies the economic opening of state spaces in a borderless global market, this article proposes a critical reassessment of the origins of actually existing neoliberalism, with the twofold aim of addressing the empirical shortcomings of the conventional narrative and specifying the conditions of the emergence of neoliberalization. The present authors demonstrate how the US Department of State implemented a foreign economic policy between 1933 and 1947 which constituted one of the first neoliberal experiments of the twentieth century, engendering the hotbed of transatlantic neoliberalization which unfolded, albeit incompletely, in the following decades. This revisitation of the origins of neoliberalization has, in turn, enabled a theoretical reframing of the neoliberal spatiality, intersecting multiple stream framework analysis and the neo-institutionalist approach, in order to highlight the complexity of the factors responsible for the emergence of political neoliberalism in the context of the global crisis of the 1930s and 1940s.

My mum is on strike! Social reproduction and the (emotional) labor of ‘mothering work’ in neoliberal Britain

AbstractThis article will explore the ways mothers and carers use the term ‘emotional labor’ to describe the exhaustion and burnout associated with socially reproductive tasks, rather than the performance of affective labor in the workplace. Scholars of social reproduction theory claim that emotion is key to understanding the specificities of gendered alienation, yet it remains under‐theorised. This article seeks to understand how the emotional lives of carers have been transformed by neoliberal processes that have intensified labor both within and beyond the home. Drawing on interviews with participants from the 2019 ‘My Mum is on Strike’ stay and play event, alongside ethnographic insights from online mothering blogs, sometimes referred to as the ‘mamasphere’ (Wilson et al., 2017), this article seeks to contextualize the experiences of carers who narrate their reproductive labor as emotional ‘work’. Given the conditions of neoliberal rationality and the marketization of society, where every ‘field of activity… and entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is understood as a market and governed as a firm’ (Brown, 2015), emotional labor and the associated gendered expectations may begin to ‘feel like’ work, and we argue that this is felt in a specific way by those carrying out mothering labor, warranting further academic investigation.

From Social Sphere to Intermediary Association: A Critical Analysis of Civil Society’s Neoliberal Transformation

In this paper, I examine the neoliberal transformation of civil society through Mitchel Foucault’s insights concerning knowledge, power, and governmentality. The objective of this paper is to trace the evolving understandings of civil society and how they relate to governmental rationalities and technologies of power. The traditional notion of civil society as a distinct and autonomous sphere has shifted toward an intermediary associations approach under neoliberalism. I posit that the mobilization of non-governmental organizations and civil society organizations by states, international organizations, and donor agencies since the 1990s constitutes a form of governmental technology, influenced by neoliberal rationalities. This technology serves the neoliberal agenda of undermining the social state, promoting market creation, and encouraging non-partisanship. This argument suggests that the rise of civil society as intermediary associations coincides with the decline of society.

“While it lasts”

Abstract This article traces transformations of labor through an exploration of a relatively new employment sector in supervised postsocialist, postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where internationally funded, temporary, project-based contracts are the rule. Focusing on atypical white-collar precarious workers who have strung together 10 to 25 years on successive short projects in IGOs and NGOs in Sarajevo (under the umbrella of democratization, peacebuilding and EU integration agendas), I investigate their ways of strategizing to accumulate such continuity through cultivation of three kinds of assets: sector-specific competences, favorable positionality, and a disposition of optimism. I argue that their “successful” strategizing, generally in line with neoliberal rationality and mainly developed within this sector, is facilitated by similar structural conditions of overall precarity, temporariness and provisionality in wider BiH society.

The DIY careers of young classical musicians in neoliberal times

This article seeks to deepen our understanding of the do-it-yourself (DIY) careers of a younger generation of classically trained musicians in the context of the neoliberal transformation of higher music education and music labour markets. Drawing on 46 interviews with white middle-class students and graduates of the three public, state-funded higher music education institutions in Austria, we examine how these artists seek to advance their careers as orchestral musicians, soloists or chamber musicians and manage the entrepreneurialism, competitiveness and precariousness that underpin the classical music labour market. Our study shows that the musicians cultivate an entrepreneurial ethos, but also adopt alternative cultural practices that promote collectivity, solidarity and care for one another. In these processes, the DIY ethos takes on a double meaning: It is adapted by the young musicians to neoliberal rationality, while also being fundamental for initiating, organising and managing small DIY music projects, festivals and cultural initiatives.

Grassroots temporary urbanism as a challenge to the city of austerity? Lessons from a self‐organised park in Thessaloniki, Greece

AbstractThis paper traces the legacies of austerity through a focus on grassroots temporary urban interventions in public spaces. Drawing on a self‐organised neighbourhood park in Thessaloniki, Greece, it explores and analyses the politicising dynamics of these urban experiments that emerged as a direct response to state retrenchment but became a long‐term legacy of austerity with material and social consequences. The aim of the paper is to contribute to contemporary scholarly debates on temporary grassroots urbanism amidst austerity by uncovering the ambiguous nature of such urban experiments without reproducing dichotomising approaches that understand them as either a vehicle of neoliberalisation or an instrument of revolt. Through the case of Svolou I develop a twofold argument. First, regarding their social dynamics and legacies, grassroots urban initiatives that lack a politicising element of disagreement with (planning and governance) authorities result in creating parallel micro‐spheres of socialities and solidarities with a questionable long‐term impact against austerity urbanism. Although such socialities are important at the local level, they often risk reproducing neoliberal rationalities of individual responsibility and exclusions. Second, regarding their material legacies, I argue that grassroots urban initiatives produce temporary self‐organised spaces and experiment with innovative grassroots space‐making processes but they often remain entrapped at the local level without being able to develop broader contestations of the uneven urban development model emerging in and through austerity.

Neoliberal Penal Policy and Prison Privatization

The paper analyzes the relationship between neoliberal penalty transformation and prison privatization as part of neoliberal market reform. The neoliberal political and economic project characterized by deregulation, individualization, privatization, and commodification has introduced competition, entrepreneurship, and economic efficiency in areas that previously belonged exclusively to the public sector. The alleged need for greater efficiency has led to an increase in private prisons, and the results of this transformation have shown that it is more about achieving economic efficiency at the expense of quality, competencies, and outcomes of services provided in this sector. In this paper, the starting assumption is that the increase in the number of private prisons does not imply the withdrawal of the state concerning the market. In contrast, it raises the question of the regulatory role of the neoliberal state that enables the market of new fields for profit. As a consequence of the tightening of penal policy, mass incarceration is a mechanism for resolving social conflicts caused by the transformation of social policy. Therefore, private prisons are aimed at making a profit by reflecting the spread of neoliberal rationality throughout society. Withdrawal of assistance and support from the social sector and transfer of exclusive responsibility from the social to the individual responsibility of prisoners as rational neoliberal subjects lead to a reduction of rehabilitation goals. In the context of prison privatization, this transformation leads to turning prisoners into a means of earning or cheap labor.

THE TENSION BETWEEN NEOLIBERAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE RIGHT TO AN ECOLOGICALLY BALANCED ENVIRONMENT

This study aims to identify the relationship between neoliberal development and violations of the human right to an ecologically balanced environment. To this end, the research addresses the concept of neoliberal rationality, how the system presents itself today, its premises and consequences, and its relationship with the protection of the environment. In addition, the work clarifies the definition of the human right to an ecologically balanced environment, how it is recognized in modern constitutions and international treaties on the matter, and what are the contours of this human right and its importance today. Furthermore, this study presents alternatives to the neoliberal rationality and worldview, based on counter-hegemonic theories of human rights (Epistemologies of the South). The development of the study has as approach the analectic method, thought by Enrique Dussel.

Actually Existing Neoliberalism and Enterprise Formation in the Informal Economy: Interrogating the Role of Mediating Social Enterprises in India and South Africa

Scholarship on social entrepreneurship primarily reduces social enterprises in the Global South to geographic variations of an idealized concept of combining commercial imperatives with social missions. In the article, I see social enterprise practice in economies of the Global South, namely India and South Africa, as channels to engage in the ongoing theorization of the field. The article draws on the frame of actually existing neoliberalism, moving beyond macroperspectives and policy imperatives on social entrepreneurship to show how neoliberal rationalities are mobilized and regulated by emancipatory rationalities and agendas. The empirical focus is on social enterprises mediating enterprise formation to address employment concerns in the informal, noncapital domains of India and South Africa. I draw on data from the ethnographic fieldwork on mediating social enterprises collected during my doctoral research. The lived realities of practice of the two intermediaries considered in the article, Dhwani in India and EntShare in South Africa, show mediating social enterprises in ongoing negotiations with capital and noncapital domains. Understanding the negotiations explains the convergences and divergences in how neoliberal economic rationalities align with progressive and emancipatory agendas and values across India and South Africa. In doing so, the article provides an opportunity to enrich conceptual registers of postcolonial economic geography by tracing and articulating mediation processes between neoliberal and nonneoliberal rationalities not solely from one site but across contexts.

Neoliberally framed suffering in professionals and patients in palliative care settings – ’telling cases’ from an ethnographic multi-sited field study in Denmark

ABSTRACT In western countries, palliative care is a part of the formal healthcare system, ruled by neoliberal, organisational ideas. This Danish study illuminates how nurses and patients with non-western immigrant backgrounds (inter)act in relation to encounters in palliative care settings. Two ‘telling’ cases were selected, based on interviews and participating observations from a multi-sited ethnographic field study in Denmark. The results showed different care consequences of the structural framework, referring to, for example, political healthcare logics, strategies, and priorities, and illuminated how neoliberally organised healthcare systems inflicted suffering on patients and frustration amongst professionals. It did not seem that the immigrant background per se induced the challenges. The understandings of care and treatment conflicted as nurses often represented a medical, neoliberal logic of disease, treatment, and care, and patients often represented a non-medical logic of disease, formed by their lives. When palliative care took place in a general setting, (inter)actions were also influenced by a curative agenda of treatment and care. The study added to the evidence of the power of neo-liberal rationality across different forms of care and populations, regardless of ethnicity or location of that care.