Neoliberal Processes Research Articles

Regional pathologies of late-stage neoliberalization: The case of Japan in East Asia

The ‘polycrisis’ of global capitalism has regional and national particularities that are worthy of exploration. In the case of East Asia, we see rising military, political and economic tensions which mirror global trends, but take a specific concrete regional form. We offer an explanation for these tensions in East Asia that highlight their roots in developments within the national models of capitalism that make up the region, in this case from the perspective of Japan. Drawing on a regulation theory framework, we show how Japan’s faltering national regime of accumulation has been through a constant process of neoliberalization since the early 1990s. This has prompted a number of institutional shifts, one of which includes increasing integration within the East Asian region. This, however, has produced a number of new problems, which we might consider to be general pathologies of late-stage neoliberalization and that are typically experienced at the regional level. In particular, we identify four interconnected and mutually reinforcing pathologies: heightened national economic and political rivalries; heightened market competition; increased vulnerability to disruption to region-wide commodity chains; and declining popular support that is being met by political attempts to adopt nationalist legitimation strategies. Such an account allows us to understand the obstacles and tensions preventing moves towards a smoother process of accumulation in the case of Japan in East Asia, and more generally throughout the contemporary global political economy, as well as offering a more complete account of the complexity and contradictions associated with the growing assertiveness of the Japanese state.

Challenging the role of resilience and vulnerability in narratives of well-being

We analyse prevailing discourse on resilience and vulnerability amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on well-being. This involves a critical review of the Australian Governmental National Mental Health and Wellbeing Pandemic Response Plan, and the enforced lockdown of inner-Melbourne public housing tours by the Victorian Government. We explore these issues within the framework of neoliberal processes that responsibilise individuals for their own well-being. We suggest that Contemporary forms of discourse on resilience are actually unable to address the core issue they seek to confront; vulnerability. We argue that locating responsibility for resilience and well-being with individuals may well exacerbate their vulnerability and ignores any sense of collective responsibility for the well-being of marginalised groups. We propose that the connection between vulnerability and well-being is a moral concern that should be incorporated into political agendas and policies. These should affirm collective responsibility for well-being. Drawing on relational autonomy theorists, we assert that vulnerability is intrinsic to human flourishing, shaped by relational dynamics. Instead of using vulnerability as a tool to justify neoliberal agendas, we advocate for a transformation in our shared narrative of well-being. This shift should focus on embracing vulnerability as an integral part of well-being in relationships, rather than fixating on resilience and well-being as an individual responsibility.

Is There a Global Narrative for Kinesiology?

At the National Academy of Kinesiology’s annual meeting in 2023, four International Fellows shared their insights into whether there is a global narrative for kinesiology. Panelists comprising Fasting (Norwegian, sport sociology), Jacobs (Canadian, exercise physiologist), Macdonald (Australian, pedagogy), and Tsung-Min Hung (Taiwanese, sport and exercise psychology) spanned both subdisciplines and continents. This paper represents a synthesis of their thinking, complemented with more incidental views from a range of scholars who accepted an invitation from Macdonald to contribute brief perspectives. Framing the paper are the concepts of globalization and its tethered process of neoliberalization, the latter argued to be a dominant ideology in many Western democracies that shapes the priorities of educational institutions. We conclude that the term “kinesiology” is not universally deployed to reference the discipline, although global narratives related to program priorities, knowledge status, metrics, and professionalization in the four continents represented exist.

Mobile Keynesianism: Linking policy mobility and state transformation in New Zealand, 1930–70

AbstractThe study of policy mobility has revealed the rich geographical life of policy, demonstrating the very real ways in which policy enacted in one place often references policy enacted elsewhere, and how in doing so, it changes and evolves as it is constantly adopted and adapted. One of its contributions has been the elaboration of neoliberalism as an interconnected process of neoliberalisation producing its variegated geography. But the policy settlement that neoliberalism replaced in the capitalist world, Keynesianism, is still approached in comparative or institutional terms rather than as a process. Applying a policy mobility lens to the study of Keynesianism is an opportunity to correct this. But this historical case is also an opportunity to consider policy mobility anew. Drawing on the relational urbanism that also contributed to policy mobility studies, this paper builds on topological approaches to argue for analysing mobile policy as a consequence and cause of the reworking of relations between and within policy territories. Using the Keynesian policy shift that occurred in New Zealand between 1930 and 1970 as a case study, it shows how relations were transformed but ongoing, and these transformations are both driven by and a consequence of mobile policies; that Keynesianism as an international phenomenon was a reworking of relations necessarily both between and within territories; and that Keynesianism produced a space of technical expertise and authority that continues to shape policy today.

From Patronage to Commodification: The Urban Policies of the True Path Party in The Neoliberal Era

In the study, the urban policies of the centre-right in the struggle to establish neoliberal hegemony in Turkey, which became clear in the 1980s, were examined by focusing on the True Path Party (TPP). Thus, it is aimed to reveal the change in the urban policies of the Party in the neoliberal process. In order to achieve the stated purpose, historical comparative research method was used in the study. It is thought that a comparative examination of the period from the establishment of the Party to Demirel's Presidency and the period when Çiller was Chairman of the Party can reveal the discontinuities, dilemmas and continuities experienced between the two periods in the Party's land policies, depending on the neoliberal perspective. It has been concluded that in the Party's discourses about the city in the period until Demirel's Presidency, it highlighted the patronage-based populist policies that were widely implemented during the Justice Party period, rather than the commodification process implemented by Motherland Party. During the Çiller period, TPP's urban policies went hand in hand with capital accumulation based on marketization and were based on the exploitation of non-commodified urban spaces, similar to the Özal period. However, while Özal was able to gain the consent of both the urban poor and the capital for a long time in sharing urban rent with the policies he implemented, Çiller could not achieve the balance between these two interest groups competing on urban land with the new property and zoning regulations she implemented. Thus, Çiller broke the Party away from Demirel's discourse, which made abundant references to welfare policies, and this caused the support of the urban poor, whose importance was increasingly increasing in the transforming social structure of the country, to shift towards new political movements. As a matter of fact, the Party lost the support of the most urban voters among its voter base and could not win any metropolitan municipality in the 1999 local elections.

Estado, ilegalidade e a produção do espaço de Culiacán, Sinaloa, México

Abstract This article aims to analyze the configuration of urban space in the city of Culiacán, state of Sinaloa, Mexico, characterized by neoliberal processes of urban production, the private governance model, and an illegal economy. Based on interviews, newspapers articles, searches in local public archives, and a bibliographic review, it is shown that the urban-spatial evolution of Culiacán is subordinated to the introduction of illegal capital into the local and regional economic dynamics, to the urbanization demands of a global city model, and to the strategies and tools generated by criminal governance. This has produced spaces that allow us to see the hybridization of legal and illegal forms based on which the city has been constituted and reproduced.

The Geography of Dispossession: Race, Bankruptcy, and Foreclosure in a Deep South US County

ABSTRACT Scant attention has been paid to the racial impacts of bankruptcy and foreclosure in the United States. This article examines the links between bankruptcy, housing loss, and “risk responsibilization,” a neoliberal process in which consumers rather than lending institutions are held responsible for debt management. We used data sequencing, and Geographic Information Systems Mapping (GIS) to analyse 1,057 cases of home foreclosure and related bankruptcies from 2016 to 2019 in a Deep South US County. We found housing vulnerability to be a racialized process, with Black homeowners more likely to face foreclosure and less likely to receive a fresh start through bankruptcy. In foreclosure, Black-owned homes were more likely to convert to rental property. The study provides sequential and spatial evidence of connections between risk responsibilization, systemic racism, and housing loss in the geography of dispossession.

The Function of Right Populism in the Subject Management Process of Neoliberalism: Escape from the Class Plane

Neoliberalizmin bünyesinde yer alan siyasal kültür ve rasyonalite; toplumun ve öznenin hayatının her zerresine etki eden önemli dönüşümleri gerektiren bütüncül bir anlayışı temsil eder. Öyle ki, söz konusu dönüşümler geleneksel ahlakçı bir düzlemde hiyerarşik ve dışlayıcı bir kültürü ihtiva emekle birlikte özneye, “özgür” ama sistemin oluşturduğu toplumsal riskleri yüklenen girişimci bir sermaye rolüyle kolektiviteden yoksun bir konumlandırmayı betimler. Bu yönetimsellik anlayışı zemininde öznenin örgütlenme ve mücadele etme potansiyeli elinden alınmakla birlikte sorumluluk özneye yüklenir. Finansal sermayenin akışkanlık ve sorumluluk alanında özgürleşmesi, pazar alanının genişlemesi ve emeğin yerelleşerek yalnızlaşmasıyla oluşan eşitsizlik temelli sorunlar, sınıfsal düzlemden popülist sağın ahlaki-geleneksel söylemine aktarılır. Bu sayede sisteme yönelik eleştirel yaklaşımın önü kapatılır. Bir başka ifadeyle, ulus devletin otoriterleşerek, sermaye odaklı sorumsuzluğu besleyen tavrı, neoliberal rasyonalitenin toplumsal dayanışma ve mücadele potansiyeli üzerinde yarattığı tahribatı derinleştirir.

Governing for a safe and just future with science-based targets: opportunities and limitations

ABSTRACT This paper reflects on the work of the Earth Commission and the Global Commons Alliance to include climate and environmental justice in establishing biophysical targets to stabilize the Earth system. Targets include those for global temperature (e.g. 1.5°C), biodiversity (e.g. % protected or natural land), surface and groundwater and nutrient pollution (e.g. phosphorus load). We discuss whether and how to define Earth system justice in relation to planetary targets and related levers of transformation, how we identify measures of what is just, and reflect on whether target setting itself is a neoliberal process. We examine how science can identify targets that subsequently inform policies that may inadvertently increase, rather than decrease, inequalities, such as those associated with neoliberal policies of commodification, privatization, top-down conservation and globalization. Can the operationalization of targets enable deep transformations needed to stabilize the Earth system and ensure just access for all, or will they be used for business as usual? We draw on collaborations with members of the social science working group of the Earth Commission to focus not only on possibilities for just targets but on radical transformations for a safe and just planet where harm is minimized and access to wellbeing is possible for all.

Tourism and neoliberalism

While tourism has been a core feature of the global economy for more than a century, over the past several decades, it has been a central component of a worldwide process of neoliberalization in particular. Neoliberalization describes a political-economic programme of ‘free trade’ embodying interrelated principles of deregulation, decentralization, marketization, privatization and commodification. Grounded in a critique of the post-war welfare state, it was first introduced into public administration in the US and Western Europe in the 1980s, then spread worldwide in the next decade via structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) incorporated into international development planning. As one of the world’s largest industries, tourism development has been a key component of this process. In this way, tourism policy in many places has been progressively neoliberalized, while in turn tourism development has thus served as a key component of neoliberalization more generally, helping to progressively bind the world within a single integrated economy. Hence, tourism can be understood not only as a key site of neoliberalization, but a central means by which neoliberalization spreads as well. In the process, tourism development has played a key role in helping to stabilize a neoliberal capitalist economy riddled with fundamental contradictions that subject it to periodic crises. This article explores how this dynamic developed, where it stands at present, and how it is likely to evolve in the future as the contradictions underlying neoliberal capitalism continue to unfold.

Rethinking housing inequality and justice in a settler colonial city

This paper brings the housing studies literature into conversation with scholarship on settler colonialism to consider questions of housing justice in settler colonial societies. It begins from an understanding of Indigenous dispossession as not simply an historical context but an ongoing process in which housing is deeply implicated through its embeddedness in colonial land and property regimes. Furthermore, processes of exclusion, neoliberalisation, financialisation and gentrification have made housing central to the production of racial inequality in (and beyond) settler colonies. Liberal notions of inequality that dominate most housing policy and some scholarship are, therefore, inadequate; what is required is research and intervention oriented towards housing justice – the meaning of which is best understood through intellectual and practical engagement with movements struggling for it. In this spirit, the paper presents the story of a prolonged struggle in so-called Sydney, which suggests how housing initiatives and campaigns led by Indigenous people are iteratively reconstructing existing political and economic structures in ways that address commodification, dispossession, exclusion, and displacement. This story points to a need for housing justice scholarship to engage with concepts of reparations – an engagement towards which this paper, in its final section, makes some small but hopefully helpful steps.

‘Good morning Metro shoppers!’ Food insecurity, COVID-19 and the emergence of roll-call neoliberalism

From April 2020 to December 2021, the Canadian federal government earmarked $330,000,000 through the Emergency Food Security Fund to address food insecurity during the COVID-19 global pandemic. These funds were disbursed through a handful of national and regional emergency food and food justice agencies to smaller front-line organizations for the purchase of emergency food provisions and personal protective equipment, and to hire additional workers. We theorize these dynamics within the broader processes of neoliberalization and argue that the Canadian federal government was conscripting food justice and community development organizations into its efforts to address dramatically increasing rates of food insecurity across the country through charity emergency food provisioning. Within Peck and Tickell’s stylized conceptions of the destructive (roll-back) and creative (roll-out) moments of the process of neoliberalization, we frame the crisis of COVID-19 as exposing a form of recalibration (roll-call) neoliberalism. We focus on this dynamic specifically within the context of household food insecurity in Canadian communities and argue that the federal government’s funding regime during the global pandemic effectively directed food justice organizations (and by extension, the populace in general) away from a more ambitious social change agenda towards the more acceptable strategy (in neoliberal terms) of emergency food provisioning services.

The Haitian Neoliberal State

This work attempts to understand the contemporary Haitian state, which is a paragon of the neoliberal state model. Haiti’s neoliberal state is a colonial state impoverished to serve American global capitalist hegemony under the auspices of a Haitian comprador bourgeoisie and oligarchy composed of professionals, managers, intellectuals, and business elites in Haiti and the diaspora. However, unlike Chile, which the West points to as the success of the neoliberal model and process, Haiti’s model is a complete failure, similar to the attempt to neoliberalize Russia post the fall of the Soviet Union. Whereas Russia, under Vladimir Putin, was able to combat the deleterious effects of the neoliberal process, Haiti is unable to do so. The work posits that Haiti’s failures rest on its colonial experiences under mercantilist and liberal capitalism and the embourgeoisement of its population on the island and the diaspora.

Emotional distance, detachment, compassion and care: The affective milieu of academic management in the neoliberal university

Based on interviews with Finnish deans, this study examines the affective milieu of academia. The neoliberalisation process in universities has strengthened centralised leadership and increased the power of managers. Simultaneously, the market-driven competitive ethos has deepened the binary between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ at all levels of academia, giving rise to an affectively tense atmosphere. Due to their increased power, managers play a key role in shaping the affective milieu of academia. By using an affective-discursive approach, I analyse what kind of emotions deans rely on while constructing their relation to employees. This study traces three management discourses: strong, paternalistic and collegial. Together, these discourses with their affective orientations construct a polarised affective milieu. On the one hand, the deans’ affective relationships with employees embody gentleness, care and compassion; on the other hand, affective relationships manifest the inducement of guilt, sternness, conventionality, distance and detachment of employees. I argue that current neoliberal academia leaves little space for deans to demonstrate compassionate collegial management.

PROPERTY‐LED INFORMALITY: Shifting Informal Land Development from Popular Housing to Middle‐Class and Elite Speculation in Belo Horizonte

AbstractRecent decades have seen a rising interest in the peripheral nature of urbanization processes. While research has put the spotlight on large‐scale, transnational and financialized real estate actors, less attention has been paid to informal land developers. Addressing that knowledge gap, this article underscores the key role of land developers in informal urbanization through a case study of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. A mixed‐methods approach provides new evidence of the widespread, variegated and spatially uneven development of irregular and clandestine subdivisions over the last two decades, revealing a heterogeneous landscape of informal developers. The study shows that informal development has been shifting from the typical popular and peripheral subdivision, which provided precarious yet affordable housing for working‐class families, to new forms of speculative investment for the middle and upper classes, such as country homes and gated communities in peri‐urban and rural areas. I argue that this shift is explained by both national and local changing regulatory frameworks and processes of economic restructuring, urban neoliberalism and housing financialization in the periphery. In light of this, I propose the notion of ‘property‐led informality’ to refer to a regime of informal urbanization increasingly dominated by commodified, rentiership and speculative land dynamics in the sprawling metropolises of the global South.

More debtfare than healthcare: business as usual in the Multilateral Development Banks’ COVID-19 response in India

Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have been a vital source of funds for the global South in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the healthcare sector. Prior to the pandemic, the big MDBs’ approach to healthcare reflected the post-Washington Consensus, that is a largely neoliberal agenda perpetuating the expansion of private healthcare markets through financialization mechanisms, though with some emphasis on a minimal level of universal healthcare. We studied the MDBs’ approaches to healthcare in India to evaluate whether the pandemic resulted in: (a) a re-evaluation of their healthcare models to ensure they were fit for a pandemic; (b) a business-as-usual approach; or (c) a disaster capitalism response exploiting the current socio-economic milieu to further neoliberalization processes. We found that the MDBs adopted an inadequate business-as-usual approach that is intensifying the financialization of healthcare in projects using interventions at the micro through to the macro level. This path dependent approach emphasizing multi-scalar financialization has long-term implications for human well-being. Further, we contend that MDB lending is deepening ‘debtfare’ through its healthcare and other support, a term Susanne Soederberg (2014, p. 3) conceived to describe the way neoliberal states ‘mediate, normalise and discipline the monetised relations that inhabit the poverty industry.’

Gender-Based Violence in Bosnia From Conflict to The Post-Conflict Setting

This review article aims to investigate gender-based violence in wartime and post-war Bosnia. While the existing literature exclusively focuses on the relationship between gender and nationalism, this article rather addresses the psychological and economic violence against women in Bosnia. By adopting a continuum approach, this study uncovers how different forms of violence against women interact with each other from the conflict to the post-conflict contexts. Through a literature survey, this study depicts how gender-based violence has been reproduced from past to present in the case of Bosnia. In discussing gender-based violence, it dwells upon the intersections between mass rapes, forced pregnancy and traumatization. As the main argument, this article contends that sexual violence during the war triggered the spiral of violence and further led to stigmatization and marginalization of these women in the post-war context. It is especially argued that the persistent public stigma is the most blatant manifestation of psychological violence against female rape victims. In addition, it is shown that the overlapping processes of conflict, patriarchy and neoliberalization have led to a series of economic injustices, such as, in the form of the dispossession, poverty and exclusion of women in Bosnia. This article overall suggests establishing linkages between sexual, psychological and economic violence against women during the conflict and post-conflict processes.

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.

Settling land, unsettling people: Living with and contesting land, social change and grand schemes in rural central Jordan

ABSTRACT In this article I consider how changing legal and social conceptions of land usage and ownership in rural central Jordan offer ethnographic purchase on broad questions of historical change and political economy. Yet equally, I show how this topic shows the limitations of such broad questions, and how reducing local processes into them can obscure historically contingent but enduring practices and patterns of land relations. I consider how reforms stemming from different visions of history and of modernity, in the face of colonial, post-colonial and neoliberal processes of land registration and settlement, and of mass-migration and urban expansion, have combined and clashed, leaving partially fulfilled grand projects and palimpsest-like marks on local political economy, but also how they have been adapted, contested, resisted, and reproduced by rural Jordanians. I particularly consider how the imposition of neoliberal land reforms since the 1980s has coincided with the rise of the hijjah; the trade and sale of semi-legal deeds of protection and cessation over tracts of tribal land, left in an ambiguous state of registration by successive modernist state-building schemes. This has enabled a kind of commoditization to emerge, but one which runs against the grain of official thinking on land tenure, and which partakes instead in very different notions of authority, legitimacy and sovereignty.

National Development and News Media: Constrained Frames of Labour Relations in India

This article narrates the conditions with which industrial workers in India have to contend with when bargaining for labour rights. It trains attention on restructuring of automobile manufacturing processes in India in the neoliberal phase and the erosion of labour rights through the recently introduced labour codes. The framing of labour action and protests as law and order problems in the public sphere, primarily through the news media, aided delegitimisation of unions and securitisation of labour relations, which, in turn, mounts steep challenges for workers’ strategies to start a social dialogue and force negotiation around labour rights and social security. The article scrutinises the political economy of media attention and the impact this has on the politics of protest. It argues that neoliberal processes and the discourse of national industrial development have inscribed tensions into the choice of protest strategies, making collective bargaining ineffectual.