Rise Of Neoliberalism Research Articles

Authoritarian innovation in the United States: the role of dual subnational systems of labor governance

I apply Curato and Fossati's (2020) concept of “authoritarian innovation” to analyze historic changes in labor governance in the United States that have undermined democratic participation in the workplace and in the polity. Drawing from comparative political economy and welfare state theories, I argue that since the 1930s the U.S. has had not one unified, national labor regime but two competing, subnational regimes: the New Deal and its legacy in the industrialized North and West Coast, and a counter-regime based initially in the former Confederate Southern states. The more anti-union, anti-welfare, and anti-democratic Southern regime survived the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, gained ascendance nationally with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, and expanded its boundaries in the 2010s into the deindustrialized Midwest. The “dual regime” analysis highlights critical transitions and divergent paths in the reshaping of American democracy.

Sistem Ekonomi Pancasila, Keadilan Sosial, dan Neoliberalisme Global

This paper explores the paradigm shifts in global economic policy over the last two decades, mainly focusing on the rise of neoliberalism and its effects on economic disparities. Neoliberal policies, which prioritize market mechanisms as central to economic governance, are critiqued for exacerbating income inequality and diverging from the principles of social justice foundational to Indonesia's constitution and Pancasila ideology. In contrast, the Sistem Ekonomi Pancasila (SEP) offers a framework that emphasizes social justice, equitable wealth distribution, and the welfare of all Indonesians, aligning economic activities with the nation's ideological foundations. The SEP challenges the neoliberal assumption that labor market flexibility is the sole solution to unemployment, instead highlighting the roles of industrial and regional development in addressing structural unemployment. Furthermore, the paper critiques the focus of monetary policy solely on price stability, advocating for a broader approach that integrates macroeconomic stability with social welfare. Incorporating the principles of Pancasila into economic policies is crucial for achieving an equitable economic democracy, where the government balances market interests with its priority for social welfare. The paper concludes with a proposal for the drafting of a Pancasila Economic System Act to institutionalize these principles into Indonesia's economic governance, ensuring that economic policies promote not only growth but also fairness and social justice for all Indonesians.

Fritz Bartel, The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism

Fritz Bartel, The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism

The Human Services: Practitioners’ Experiences of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s & 1990s

ABSTRACT This article draws on four social work practitioners’ and a sociologist’s reflections on the political environments that influenced Australian social work and the human services from the 1960s–1990s. Utilising collective and mixed autobiographical-ethnography with a purposive sample, we examined the social forces and politico-economic contexts that have shaped social work practice. We focused on the impact of feminism, First Nations activism, and the rise of neoliberalism on policy, legislation and professionalism. The article also traced the evolution of service provision in Australia through key moments in the professional experiences of four of the authors who practiced during these respective periods. It offers unique reflections on the political and human histories that have shaped this sector. The recollection of the racist and sexist attitudes that at times predominated and the associated progressive struggles illustrated the interplay between dominant ideologies and the human services. These reflections highlighted the messiness and dynamism of social work practice within the services and its embeddedness in the social constructs of the time. They remind colleagues of the political nature of their work and the need to embed practice wisdom in the literary record for the benefit of the profession and future workers. IMPLICATIONS Change and advocacy for social justice from the 1960s onwards have moulded, shaped and transformed the nature of social work practice. Recalling the history of social work and the lived experiences of practitioners enriches our understanding of practice during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and can add to the historical record. It is relevant for all social workers to reflect on how contemporary social work practice has evolved alongside broader social and politico-economic trends.

Teaching Note—Innovating the Curriculum: Bringing History Back Into Social Work Education

ABSTRACT History, the major storehouse of information, informs us about the important relationship between people and society and increases our understanding of basic societal values and institutional arrangements. A recent New York Times op-ed described “The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession.” Likewise for historical content in social work education, exacerbated by the 1970s‘ rise of neoliberalism and the profession’s long marginalization of historical research and teaching. The Social Welfare History Group renews its call to bring historical content back into social work education and to correct its deep-seated race, class, gender, and colonizing distortions. To ensure that all social work courses include history, we can revive the value historical knowledge; prepare a cadre of historical researchers and instructors; financially support emerging scholars and develop a pipeline of history-informed faculty to teach the next generation of social workers.

Southern responses to Northern-led sustainability certification: Promoting and hindering new fisheries governance in The Gambia, West Africa

Ocean governance is constituted by a range of institutions and actors across nation-states, markets, civil society and communities. As government-led management of commercial wild capture fisheries came under increased scrutiny following the rise of neo-liberalism and overfishing in the late 20th century, many non-governmental organizations and businesses turned to market and consumer-oriented approaches such as eco-labels and certification systems to define and reward sustainable fisheries and to incentivize change in others. However, our understanding of how small-scale fisheries in the Global South engage with these systems over time remains limited, particularly in the African context. This paper seeks to improve understanding by examining the interactions between diverse actors working to achieve Marine Stewardship Council certification for a small-scale fishery in The Gambia, West Africa, one of the earliest in Africa to engage the program. Situating the study within social science research on inequities and power imbalances in Southern engagements with Northern-led sustainability certifications, the case study analyzes qualitative data from documents and from 16 key-informant interviews. The data was organized using a social science approach which enables the analysis of factors promoting or hindering governance interactions and of who and what drives outcomes. Taking multiple factors into account, this paper argues that Southern interest in, and accessibility to, certification is dynamic, and influenced by the uneven distribution of regulatory resources, capacity, power and benefits. Promised but nebulous benefits clashed with arduous and recurring appraisals, exacerbating institutional factors leading the fishery to repeatedly fall short of certification. While important improvements can be gained from the pursuit of certification, Southern producers, managers and policy makers should have opportunities to be better informed about the diverse factors impacting: i) governance interactions and capacity building, ii) paths towards, and barriers to, improvements, and ii) the likelihood, or not, for achieving equitable access and social development benefits, especially for marginalized producers. The role and significance of sustainability certification in future ocean governance will be shaped fundamentally by such knowledge.

Of Iron Men and the Beer: Democratization and Commercialization in the Triathlon History

This paper on the social and economic history of triathlon restores the past that has been overshadowed by the International Triathlon Union and the World Triathlon Corporation narratives. It is based on documents from the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on the USA, the paper explains how two processes shaped triathlon. The first was democratization which formed mass-participation sports. Triathlon, with its inclusive features, was born out of the fitness, running, swimming, and masters sports movement of the 1970s. Key ideas of this mass-sports originated from ‘left-wing’ sports movements of the 1930s. The second process was the commercialization and commodification of endurance sports in the 1980s. It was connected with the elimination of the Amateur Athletic Union’s governing role in amateur sports. The commercialization of triathlon was started thanks to interests of Kona-Kahaua tourism, and mostly American Budweiser Light advertising. It gave support to two leading for-profit organizers, which instigated the commodification of triathlon as a whole. A five-fold increase in entry fees over five years has led to the morphing of a classless triathlon into a sport only for the wealthy. The root cause is the loss of amateurism in sports governance, that was provoked by the rise of neoliberalism in economic policy.

Bell Pottinger: Pre-Digital Fake News During the Rise of Neoliberalism

This article will follow the rise of Bell Pottinger, a PR company whose emergence coincided with the rise of Thatcherism in the 80s and was instrumental in promoting neoliberal ideology to the public in the U.K. and globally in the late 20th century. Discourse on the “fake news” phenomenon is often centered around the prevalence of disinformation proliferated on social media and the internet by actors willing to push political agendas. Less attention has been placed on the activity of similar actors engaging in the spreading of political propaganda before the widespread adoption of the internet by the masses. An analysis of Bell Pottinger’s operations in the pre-digital era show a pattern of support for neoliberal politicians and regimes, going so far as to carry out political propaganda campaigns for autocratic actors.

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

Towards a posthumanistic knowledge production. Multimedia artistic research during the rise of neoliberalism in Mexico

ABSTRACT Although for the government officials who inaugurated the state-run Centro Multimedia (CMM) in 1994 in Mexico City it had less to do with artistic experimentation than with the promotion of a neoliberal agenda of national modernization and competitiveness, CMM has come to embody a reformulation in artistic research and education via new media. Focusing on one specific form of knowledge production that CMM promoted – the Biomediations Festival and its proposal of an open-ended Living Book – this article will conceptually frame CMM as a space of artistic research that appropriated and circulated academic knowledge. It will also argue that the way in which it translated that knowledge has strengthened the path towards what shall be termed posthumanistic knowledge circulation. CMM’s paradoxical relationship with the neoliberal agenda in which it originated made room for a posthumanistic ethos that has challenged acquired notions of author, knowledge, and ownership that are the backbone of the hegemonic global copyright laws prevailing since the rise of neoliberalism during the 1990s.

Autosociobiography: A Travelling Form

In Germanophone and Francophone literary spaces, a genre by the name of autosociobiography has recently been the subject of increased attention, with texts by Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon, Christian Baron, Richard Hoggart and others frequently being mentioned in this regard. While individual cases, such as the French reception of Richard Hoggart, have been studied before, this essay takes a broader approach and examines English-, French- and German-language texts in order to trace the complex itinerary of autosociobiography and sketch out the history of this emerging form in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition, we explore how the emergence of autosociobiography relates to international and supranational developments such as the expansion of higher education, economic recession and the rise of Neoliberalism after the Trente Glorieuses. Autosociobiography – so runs our thesis – is an attempt to reinstall a logic of the general in a ‘society of singularities’. Finally, our essay discusses the methodological problems that will be encountered in the study of autosociobiography as a travelling genre.

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

The right to collective action in Belgium

The right to collective action in Belgium1 Jan Buelens (bio) Although the right to freedom of assembly and association has historically been labelled as rather inviolable in Belgium, the coming into office of a right-wing government in 2014 heralded a shift to the detriment of this right. Since then, restrictions on collective action have been piling up, by law and by case-law of the courts. At this moment, a ban on demonstrations is also being debated. Many social and democratic achievements of the labour movement are under increasing pressure. This contribution seeks to provide a brief overview of the contemporary attacks on the right to collective action in Belgium, after discussing how this right has emerged and evolved in Belgium. Historical context To understand the legal framework of the right to collective action in Belgium, we need to start with the Belgian revolution of 1830 and the Constitution of 1831. As a result of uprisings, in which the working class played an important but neglected role, the bourgeoisie took control of power and broke with the "Ancien Régime". Civil and political rights were enshrined in the Constitution, among which the freedom of association. However, the bourgeoisie never wanted to provide for the working class, but solely for themselves,. The promised freedom was thus in fact for the factory owners. In order to consolidate its own power, the bourgeoisie made use of the most powerful legal instrument at his disposal – the penal code. In flagrant contradiction with the Constitution, this Napoleonic Code provided for a prohibition of association, particularly in case of demanding higher wages. It was punishable as well to call for lower wages, but the bourgeoisie had three ways to ensure that factory owners were never sanctioned: the provision had a slightly different wording, the judiciary was at their side, and, of course, employers would collude more covertly than the working class. The latter would be heavily sanctioned for taking the streets, with sentences ranging from a fine to imprisonment. Bullet shots were used to curb demonstrations. The nascent labour movement understood that it had to work for the abolition of this penal provision, as it touched its very existence. Hence, from the beginning, its action was an amalgamation of social and democratic demands: the 8-hour working day, universal suffrage, and the abolition of the ban on association. In 1867, the ban was abolished, but another penal provision saw the light of day. The infamous Article 310 prohibited all assembly near factories, thus making strikes in any form impossible. It was not until 90 years after the creation of Belgium, in 1921, that this article was abolished. The 1921 tipping point came amidst a lot of pressure. The general strikes in the years before the war had left their marks in the collective memory. After the First World War, Europe experienced revolutionary uprisings. In light thereof, universal (male) suffrage and the 8-hour working day were introduced. Another law of the same day recognised the freedom of association and trade union freedom. From then on, striking was no longer a criminal offense. But even though 24 May 1921 was a milestone, strikers remained at risk of seeing their employment contract being terminated and hence being fired. Moreover, the police would not shy away from using heavy-handed methods to crack down on pickets, even after the trade union freedom was enshrined as a fundamental right in international treaties after World War II. This would not change until 1981. After the dismissal of a union official in an Antwerp petroleum company, a weeks-long solidarity strike broke out in the entire sector. The Court of Cassation subsequently ruled: dismissal for strike reasons is not allowed. It was the last great achievement of the labour movement with respect to collective action. Contemporary attacks on the right to collective action After World War II, the workers' movement was quite strong and managed to achieve great social progress. This is when individual and collective labour law were conceived. However, the balance of power shifted toward capital after the economic crisis in the 1970s and with the rise of neoliberalism. The consequences of this shift did not occur right...

Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist

Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist

From the Welfare State to the Carceral State: Whither Social Reproduction?

Historical, feminist scholarship demonstrates that the welfare state underwrote the work of social reproduction, enabling procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out by families and other public and private social institutions, social reproduction includes making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption; ensuring the health and productivity of the current and future labor force; providing for people too old, too young, or too sick to care for themselves; and socializing family members. Historically, social reproduction includes both women's unpaid labor in the home and low-paid labor in the market and converts the wages of paid workers into the means of subsistence for the entire household. The economic crisis of the mid-1970s marked the end of the “golden age” of capitalism, and yielded neoliberal politics that sought to undo the redistributive elements of the New Deal and the Great Society. It called for a smaller state, greater reliance on market forces, and reduced expenditure on family maintenance. This article, a reprint of a 2017 book chapter, explores the crisis in social reproduction in the United States that surfaced with the rise of neoliberalism and the “carceral state.”

An Epidemic of Virtue: A Review of Social Work's Complicity in “Prostitution” Interventions

This article engages with the field of social work's role in humanitarian and criminal legal responses to sex work in the United States over the last century. Our historical review reveals that, through interdisciplinary collaboration in the criminalization and rehabilitation of sex workers, social workers have contributed to the transformation of “prostitution” from an issue of sex workers’ rights to a psychological, criminal legal, and medical phenomenon. This has exacerbated the harm and stigma experienced by sex workers. In exploring social work interventions on sex work from the Progressive Era through the rise of neoliberalism, this article places its modern iteration, prostitution diversion programming, within the context of social work's carceral history with sex workers. We choose these periods not for their chronicity, but rather for the salient themes in these historical interventions that characterize modern diversion programming: power and control, punitive service provision, patriarchal rescue, and carceral feminism. To align with social work's mandate for social justice and client self-determination, this article offers policy and practice implications grounded in the decriminalization of sex work and divestment from the police and courts. Alternative service approaches spearheaded by sex workers are explored and placed within the context of labor, racial, gender, and immigration justice.

Taking Off the Neoliberal Lens: The Politics of the Economy, the MIT School of Economics, and the Strange Career of Lawrence Klein

Over the last decade, a narrative centered around the rise of neoliberalism has become the dominant framework for explaining recent US, and often global, history. Although this neoliberal lens has repeatedly proven its value, it also obscures major continuities running across the twentieth century. This article highlights one striking example of continuity that becomes easier to see after taking off the neoliberal lens—namely the commitment to discretionary management of the macroeconomy, often short-handed as Keynesianism. It begins with a survey linking the development of a politics centered around managing the economy to the making of what Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek have termed a “policy state.” Next it considers the role of economists within the policy state, paying particular attention to what it calls the MIT school of economics. Then it uses the career of Lawrence Klein, an exemplary product of the MIT school, to illuminate the politics of the economy in a supposedly neoliberal age.

Looking towards plurilingual futures for literacy assessment

This paper furthers the understanding of literacy being developed through this Special Issue by bringing a pluralistic, complex account of literacy into conversation with assessment. The rise of neoliberalism in education—and its related focus on standards, accountability, and efficiency—has seen literacy positioned as the “core business” of contemporary education systems and, accordingly, a construct that must be rendered readily measurable, benchmarked, and accounted for. Through a critique of current literacy assessment practices in Australia relying on standardized testing to achieve such accountability using National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy and Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education as examples, we argue that the resulting dominant account of literacy is both reductive and deficient. On the one hand, we show how standardized literacy testing fails to recognize students’ actual potential, in terms of the diverse and varied plurilingual and cultural meaning-making resources that many students now bring to literacy, beyond using Standard Australian English alone (and as a monolingual speaker would use SAE as an isolated language system). On the other, we show how standardized tests can render the assessment of literacy as effectively meaningless, given difficulties discriminating between test-takers’ full range of literacy skills in meaningful ways. We conclude by considering alternative practices with potential to more accurately assess learners’ literacy capabilities from a plurilingual perspective, and implications for education policy.

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's Solaris korrigert

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's <i>Solaris korrigert</i>

“Dear Professor”: Exploring Lay Comments to Milton Friedman

While previous research on the rise of neoliberalism has focused on elite networks of economists, politicians, journalists, and business leaders, this article investigates the attractiveness of Milton Friedman's ideas at the time of the neoliberal breakthrough from a bottom-up perspective. A close reading of mostly favorable letters by two hundred viewers in response to the 1980 television documentary series Free to Choose indicates that neoliberalism's popular legitimacy was based on a broad yet fragile coalition. Four different and in many ways contradictory viewer narratives can be distilled from the letters: (i) a conservative narrative, (ii) a reactionary narrative, (iii) a left libertarian narrative, and (iv) a populist narrative. Although in 1980 Friedman was, and today still is, perceived as a conservative economist, the letters show that under the surface of public debate his reach as a public intellectual far exceeded the realms of postwar conservatism as Friedman was supported by people who were situated further to the right and the left. Perhaps more than the elite sources of the neoliberal project, Friedman's lay reception thus highlights neoliberalism's complex and contradictory history in a plastic manner.