Poverty is a complex phenomenon that affects millions of people around the world. In Brazil, menstrual poverty is an aspect of this condition, evidenced by newspapers and dividing opinions. It is the ...lack of access to products, services, and other social goods, such as: pads, i nformation, basic sanitation. The study aimed to contribute to the discussion on the issue of menstrual poverty and social policies in the context of neoliberalism. We used a clipping of an article published in Folha de S. Paulo. Based on the theoretical-analytical Analysis of Discourse inaugurated by Pêcheux, we demonstrate that, when it comes to menstrual poverty, there is a long way to go in women's struggle to achieve social rights in the neoliberal context. This problem shows how much the State, in a recent governmental administration, is absentfrom serving the interests of the working class, silencing the causes of menstrual poverty.
Research on intensive parenting norms still lacks a systematic framework to account for the ways these translate into everyday childcare practices and underlying logics and ideals. Based on in-depth ...interviews with 42 middle-class Israeli parents, we delineate a folk model of intensive parenting associated with ideals of self-fulfillment. The model comprises two parenting approaches, each differentiated into practices, logics, and cultural discourses. The first approach is characterized by “going-with-the-flow” practices stressing expressive bonding geared toward the child’s desires. It points to a logic of aspiration development grounded in therapeutic discourse. The second approach is associated with practices of “getting-things-done” by “activating” the child to accomplish goals and reflects a logic of capability enhancement grounded in neoliberal discourse. By deconstructing contemporary parenting, we show that therapeutic and neoliberal values converge at the discursive level but are experienced as contradictory in everyday practice, thus accounting for the tensions of intensive parenting.
Influenced by the global neoliberalization of higher education, academic entrepreneurialism has become a new paradigm of university development and has brought about profound changes in various types ...of university discourse. Against this backdrop, this study investigates the transformations in the visual depiction of academics in the annual reports of six major universities in Hong Kong during the past two decades. Drawing on critical visual analysis, the study shows that the communicative purposes of the images have shifted from reporting the research process to promoting research outcomes. The visual identities of academics have shown clear transformations of becoming increasingly individualized, entrepreneurial and self-promotional. With a higher degree of social interaction and closer social distance with viewers, they are playing an increasingly important role in building public relations. The study enriches the social analysis of neoliberalization as a process through the quantitative and diachronic lens. It demonstrates how a visual analytical method applied to the critical analysis of identity construction and university discourse can provide an explicit understanding of the visual manifestations of neoliberalism in higher education and its diachronic change.
This article argues that special and inclusive education policies in Nepal have been influenced by neoliberal policy reforms. The study employs discourse analysis as a theoretical perspective to ...analyse the effects of market-based schooling practices on students with disabilities in Nepal. The findings of this study are informed to some extent by the outcomes of the doctoral research project (Thapaliya, 2018). Data was collected through policies and documents. A selection of key education policies and documents between 1990 to 2020 were examined and analysed. One core theme and five sub-themes were identified from the data analysis. Disability as a resource management issue was a main theme. (i) Managing resources; (ii) resource allocation criteria; (iii) professional experts deciding resource funds; (iv) competing for limited resources; and (v) competition and school choice were sub-themes. The available evidence signals that the marketisation model of education does not assist students with disabilities adequately. The findings of this study reveal that the current policy and practice signal changes in government structure rather than working to fulfil these commitments in the everyday practice of students with disabilities. The limitations of the study and recommendations of this research are also discussed.
With neoliberal ideologies having inspired social policies for families across the world, the discourse on childrearing as the sole responsibility of individual parents has become dominant. The ...neologism 'parenting' refers more and more to a decontextualized performance, with targets to be reached, and necessary competences to be learned. Currently, discourse on parenting thus entails what has been defined as 'parental determinism' which in turn leads to blaming parents, often described as incompetent and in need of guidance. It is, therefore, not surprising that parents' voices have seldom been considered and systematically explored. This paper presents a qualitative study, carried out in a northern Italian province, which compared representations of childrearing in different contexts by mothers and fathers, on the one hand, and by practitioners involved in various capacities with parents, on the other. In total, 55 mothers and fathers and 49 professionals were interviewed. The resulting data enabled the identification of common views, as well as clashes in perspectives and instances of parental resistance to dominant discourses on parenting.
Hadjimichalis C. and Hudson R. Contemporary crisis across Europe and the crisis of regional development theories, Regional Studies. This paper explores the prima facie puzzling issue of why so much ...contemporary theory in economic geography and regional planning - specifically New Economic Geography (NEG) and New Regionalism (NR) - has so little to say about the causes of the current post-2007 crisis and its geography globally and in Europe. It is argued here that this reflects its obsession with the regional 'success stories' of the 1970s and 1980s, its failure to appreciate the onset of crisis and the reasons for it in these regions in the 1990s, and its failure to appreciate the nature of capitalism as a crisis prone social system of combined and uneven development. Thus, the current economic crisis pushed dominant regional development theories into a homologous deep theoretical crisis. It is concluded that the time is ripe for a paradigm shift in theory and that this should involve a reconsideration of earlier theoretical approaches that fell out of fashion for a variety of intellectual and political reasons and of current radical social movements.
Accounting for crime in the neoliberal world Ala, Alessandro S.; Lapsley, Irvine
The British accounting review,
September 2019, 2019-09-00, Letnik:
51, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper examines the recent European public sector accounting reform which introduces controversial calculative practices for the recognition of criminal activities in national accounts. Namely, ...accounting for unlawful drug production and drug trafficking, and accounting for prostitution. Challenging the presumption of accounting neutrality, this study analyses this “accounting for crime” policy from a semantic and an epistemological view point as a cognitive system of creation of meaning and formation of knowledge. The analysis reveals the polyhedrality of neoliberalism, and the way it exerts its influence on society through its circuitous discursive process of social construction and transfiguration of reality which flows crosswise its multiple dimensions. At the macro level this policy operates as a ‘hegemonic project’: It bonds together the economic and political interests of different ‘historical blocs’, making the implementation of these practices a matter of ‘common sense’. At the micro level this policy functions as an ‘apparatus of governmentality’: It encapsulates the cognition of crime within a panoptic logic of economic rationality, transforming its outcome into a contributory value of a country's prosperity. In this context, this study outlines the centrality of accounting practice as a pivotal tool of the neoliberal ideology: It permits extending the realm of calculative methodologies to the commodification of human weaknesses, addictions, and sexuality, in a rational process of accounting to balance the supply and demand of sex and drugs, between prostitutes and clients, pushers and addicts.
•Renewable energy technologies have shown limited growth in Australia.•Recent changes in the climate policy regime have failed to institutionalize.•A failure to integrate climate and energy goals has ...led to ad hoc and contradictory policy pathways.•This has constrained Australia’s sustainable low-carbon energy progress.
This paper considers Australia’s climate and energy policies over the period 1988–2013 and assesses the degree to which these two policy domains have co-evolved to define Australia’s low carbon energy trajectory. It finds that climate policy and energy policy have largely been dissociated from one another. This failure of policy coordination and integration has been caused in part by attempts to reconcile clashing and competing neoliberal and weak ecological modernization discourses, and is reflected in the diverging goals and paths of each policy domain. The inability of Australian governments to define and articulate a coherent narrative around a low-carbon energy future has consequently constrained Australia’s sustainable energy transition and led to contradictory and disjointed outcomes.
Neoliberal discourse has undergone substantial changes over the last years, taking a status as if it were a natural given. In this article we analyse the naturalisation of neoliberal discourse in ...higher education in post-dictatorship Chile. Based on discourse analysis of two Chilean higher education policy reports, we examine the reconfiguration of the dimensions of the public and the private and identify three discursive prerequisites for the naturalisation of neoliberalism in Chilean higher education: first, the silencing of the dictatorial origins of the system; second, the idea of neutrality as a means to present public and private higher education as if they were equal; and third, the role of social democracy in a 180 degrees' inversion of meanings of the public and the private. We finally look into recent developments in Chilean society such as the Chilean students' movement from 2011 that triggered the questioning of the naturalisation of neoliberal discourse.