This paper argues that spatial planning in England needs to be analysed as a form of neoliberal spatial governance, underpinned by a variety of post-politics that has sought to replace antagonism and ...agonism with consensus. Conflict has not been removed from planning, but it is instead more carefully choreographed and in some cases displaced or otherwise residualised. This has been achieved through a variety of mechanisms including partnership-led governance arrangements and inclusive though vague objectives and nomenclature around sustainable growth. Other consequences include the emergence of soft space scales of planning often deploying fuzzy boundaries that blur more concrete policy implications and objectives. Opposition to this post-political form of planning has led to new avenues for dissent that challenge spatial planning and its consensual underpinnings, ironically paving the way for the radical 'rollback' planning reforms of the Coalition government.
There is little doubt that China's international reemergence represents one of the most significant events in modern history. As China's political economy gains in importance, its interactions with ...other major political economies will shape global values, institutions, and policies, thereby restructuring the international political economy. Drawing on theories and concepts in comparative capitalism, the author envisages China's reemergence as generating Sino-capitalism—a capitalist system that is already global in reach but one that differs from Anglo-American capitalism in important respects. Sino-capitalism relies more on informal business networks than legal codes and transparent rules. It also assigns the Chinese state a leading role in fostering and guiding capitalist accumulation. Sino-capitalism, ultimately, espouses less trust in free markets and more trust in unitary state rule and social norms of reciprocity, stability, and hierarchy. After conceptualizing Sino-capitalism's domestic political economy, the author uses the case of China's efforts to internationalize its currency, the yuan or renminbi, to systematically illustrate the multifarious manner in which the domestic logic of Sino-capitalism is expressed at the global level. Rather than presenting a deterministic argument concerning the future international role of China, he argues that China's stance and strategy in the international political economy hew quite closely to Sino-capitalism's hybrid compensatory institutional arrangements on the domestic level: state guidance; flexible and entrepreneurial networks; and global integration. Sino-capitalism therefore represents an emerging system of global capitalism centered on China that is producing a dynamic mix of mutual dependence, symbiosis, competition, and friction with the still dominant Anglo-American model of capitalism.
In recent years, TESOL scholars have offered both explicit and implicit critiques of language ideologies developed within nationalist frameworks that positioned monolingualism in a standardized ...national language as the desired outcome for all citizens. These scholars have used insights from both the social and the natural sciences to call into question static conceptualizations of language and have reconceptualized language pedagogy in ways that place the fluid and dynamic language practices of bilingual students at the center of instruction. This dynamic turn in TESOL has informed the emergence of plurilingualism as a policy ideal among language education scholars in the European Union. This article argues that this shift in the field of TESOL parallels the characteristics of the ideal neoliberal subject that fits the political and economic context of the current sociohistorical period—in particular, the desire for flexible workers and lifelong learners to perform service-oriented and technological jobs as part of a post-Fordist political economy. These parallels indicate a need for a more critical treatment of the concept of plurilingualism to avoid complicity with the promotion of a covert neoliberal agenda. The article ends with a framework for TESOL that works against the grain of neoliberal governance.
This paper explores how the so-called Bilbao effect and Barcelona Model are diffused internationally through what may be called urban policy tourism: short trips made to Bilbao and Barcelona by ...policy-makers to learn from their regeneration in the past 15 years. The paper reveals for the first time the substantial extent of this practice and contextualises it within a wider phenomenon of urban policy transfer and the international 'motion' of urban policies. Although both models are internationally known for a set of elements, this research shows that in fact the messages mutate and shift as they circulate through the policy circuits. Ultimately, however, the popularity of the Bilbao and Barcelona models suggests a process of global urban policy convergence.
When women work in male-dominated professions, they encounter a "glass ceiling" that prevents their ascension into the top jobs. Twenty years ago, I introduced the concept of the "glass escalator," ...my term for the advantages that men receive in the so-called women's professions (nursing, teaching, librarianship, and social work), including the 'assumption that they are better suited than women for leadership positions. In this article, I revisit my original analysis and identify two major limitations of the concept: (1) it fails to adequately address intersectionality; in particular, it fails to theorize race, sexuality, and class; and (2) it was based on the assumptions of traditional work organizations, which are undergoing rapid transformation in our neoliberal era. The glass escalator assumes stable employment, career ladders, and widespread support for public institutions (e.g., schools and libraries)—which no longer characterize the job market today. Drawing on my studies of the oil and gas industry and the retail industry, I argue that new concepts are needed to understand workplace gender inequality in the 21st century.
Using southern theory Connell, Raewyn
Planning theory (London, England),
05/2014, Volume:
13, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Recent work in social science challenges managerial assumptions about homogenous knowledge domains, and traces the effects of a world economy of knowledge structured by the history of colonialism and ...current north-south global inequalities. The differentiation of knowledge rests on the very different histories and situations of metropolitan, creole, colonized and post-colonial intelligentsias. Different knowledge projects have been constructed in global space, which feed back on our understanding of knowledge itself. Less recognized, but increasingly important, are uses of southern and postcolonial perspectives in applied social science, in areas ranging from education to urban planning. Some implications of these applications are discussed: southern theory is not a fixed set of propositions but a challenge to develop new knowledge projects and new ways of learning with globally expanded resources.
Neoliberalism as language policy Piller, Ingrid; Cho, Jinhyun
Language in society,
02/2013, Volume:
42, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article explores how an economic ideology—neoliberalism—serves as a covert language policy mechanism pushing the global spread of English. Our analysis builds on a case study of the spread of ...English as a medium of instruction (MoI) in South Korean higher education. The Asian financial crisis of 1997/98 was the catalyst for a set of socioeconomic transformations that led to the imposition of “competitiveness” as a core value. Competition is heavily structured through a host of testing, assessment, and ranking mechanisms, many of which explicitly privilege English as a terrain where individual and societal worth are established. University rankings are one such mechanism structuring competition and constituting a covert form of language policy. One ranking criterion—internationalization—is particularly easy to manipulate and strongly favors English MoI. We conclude by reflecting on the social costs of elevating competitiveness to a core value enacted on the terrain of language choice. (English as a global language, globalization, higher education, medium of instruction (MoI), neoliberalism, South Korea, university rankings)*
This study proposes that promarket reforms positively affect firms' profitability in developing countries because the accompanying improvements in external monitoring decrease firms' agency costs. We ...also argue that firms benefit unequally from promarket reforms because their agency problems are affected differently, proposing that promarket reforms improve profitability more for domestic state-owned and domestic private firms than for subsidiaries of foreign firms. Analyses of the 500 largest firms in Latin America from 1989 to 2005 support the arguments, suggesting that, contrary to the views of many critics of globalization, domestic firms are the main beneficiaries of promarket reforms in developing countries.
In this paper I stage an encounter between two concepts that have become popular placeholders for a broad concern with a politics of life: affect and biopower. Through engagement with Antonio Negri's ...writings on the 'real subsumption of life' in contemporary capitalism and Michel Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism, I show that understanding how forms of biopower work through affect requires attending to three relations: affective relations and capacities are object-targets for discipline, biopolitics, security and environmentality; affective life is the outside through which new ways of living may emerge; and specific collective affects (including 'state-phobia') are part of the conditions for the birth of forms of biopower. In what is simultaneously a departure from, and an affirmation of, recent work on affect, I argue that attending to the dynamics of affective life may become political as a counter to forms of biopower that work through processes of normalisation. The consequence is that understanding how biopower works on and through affect becomes a precondition for developing affirmative relations with affective life.
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