The Arc of Neoliberalism Centeno, Miguel A.; Cohen, Joseph N.
Annual review of sociology,
01/2012, Volume:
38, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
For three decades, neoliberalism dominated the global political economy. Defined as an explicit preference for private over public control, neoliberalism represented a dramatic break from postwar ...policies. This article examines the historical development of neoliberalism through three perspectives: as an economic policy, as an expression of political power, and as an ideational hegemony. We reject the notion of neoliberal inevitability and suggest how it came to dominate all other possible alternatives. The review emphasizes the critical importance of political preferences and influences as well as the central role ideas played in defining policy paradigms.
Racializing Affect Berg, Ulla D.; Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y.
Current anthropology,
10/2015, Volume:
56, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Despite the recent boom in scholarly works on affect from a range of disciplines, scant attention has been paid to the intersection of affect and racialization processes, either historically or in ...contemporary contexts. This paper situates the diachronic articulation of race and affect—particularly in terms of the historical everyday lives and the political, economic, and material contexts of populations from Latin American and Caribbean backgrounds—in anthropological studies of “racialization” and the “affective turn.” Drawing on a broad reading of both scientific and popular constructions of affect among Latin American and US Latino populations, we propose the concept of “racialized affect” to account for the contradictions embedded in the study of race and affect, both separately and at their intersections. We highlight what we see as the two cornerstones of our theoretical intervention: on the one hand, a conception of “liable affect” results in a simplified, undermined subjectivity of populations racialized as Other, and, on the other hand, a conception of “empowering affect” perpetuates the privileged and nuanced affective subjectivity frequently reserved for whites in the United States and for self-styled “whitened” elites in Latin America.
This article challenges the liberal, contractual theory of the corporation and argues for replacing it with a political theory of the corporation. Corporations are government-like in their powers, ...and government grants them both their external “personhood” and their internal governing authority. They are thus not simply private. Yet they are privately organized and financed and therefore not simply public. Corporations transgress all the basic dichotomies that structure liberal treatments of law, economics, and politics: public/private, government/market, privilege/equality, and status/contract. They are “franchise governments” that cannot be satisfactorily assimilated to liberalism. The liberal effort to assimilate them, treating them as contractually constituted associations of private property owners, endows them with rights they ought not have, exacerbates their irresponsibility, and compromises their principal public benefit of generating long-term growth. Instead, corporations need to be placed in a distinct category—neither public nor private, but “corporate”—to be regulated by distinct rules and norms.
The article analyses the UK government's plans to create a social investment market. The Big Society as political economy is understood as a response to three aspects of a multi-faceted, global ...crisis: a crisis of capital accumulation; a crisis of social reproduction; and, a fiscal crisis of the state. While the neoliberal state is retreating from the sphere of social reproduction, further off-loading the costs of social reproduction onto the unwaged realms of the home and the community, it is simultaneously engaging in efforts to enable this terrain of social reproduction to be harnessed for profit. Key to this process are specific government policies, the creation of new financial institutions and instruments and the introduction of the metric of 'social value'. Policies ostensibly aimed at resolving the crisis in ways that empower local communities actually foster further financialisation and a deepening of capitalist disciplinary logics into the social fabric.
Media increasingly accuse firms of exploiting suppliers, and these allegations often result in lurid headlines that threaten the reputations and therefore business successes of these firms. Neither ...has the phenomenon of supplier exploitation been investigated from a rigorous, ethical standpoint, nor have answers been provided regarding why some firms pursue exploitative approaches. By systemically contrasting economic liberalism and just prices as two divergent perspectives on supplier exploitation, we introduce a distinction of common business practice and unethical supplier exploitation. Since supplier exploitation is based on power, we elucidate several levels of power as antecedents and investigate the role of ethical climate as a moderator. This study extends Victor and Cullen's (1988) ethical climate matrix according to a supply chain dimension and is summarized in an integrated, conceptual model of five propositions for future theory testing. Results provide a frame of reference for executives and scholars, who can now delineate unethical exploitation and understand important antecedents of the phenomenon better.
Argues that sustainable development emerged as a part of a neoliberal counter-critique of modernisation strategies of development which, rather than undermining the authority of liberalisms economic ...reasoning, gave it a new even more powerful footing. IBSSMB
In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter-century is a response to rising social insecurity, not ...criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive "workfare" and expansive "prisonfare" are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carcerai system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu's concept of "bureaucratic field" to revise Piven and Cloward's classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault's vision of the "disciplinary society," David Garland's account of the "culture of control," and David Harvey's characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of "individual responsibility." This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.
Neoliberalism is generally understood as a system of ideas circulated by a network of right-wing intellectuals, or as an economic system mutation resulting from crises of profitability in capitalism. ...Both interpretations prioritize the global North. We propose an approach to neoliberalism that prioritizes the experience of the global South, and sees neoliberalism gaining its main political strength as a development strategy displacing those hegemonic before the 1970s. From Southern perspectives, a distinct set of issues about neoliberalism becomes central: the formative role of the state, including the military; the expansion of world commodity trade, including minerals; agriculture, informality, and the transformation of rural society. Thinkers from the global South who have foregrounded these issues need close attention from the North and exemplify a new architecture of knowledge in critical social science.
The term public pedagogy first appeared in 1894 and has been widely deployed as a theoretical construct in education research to focus on processes and sites of education beyond formal schooling, ...with a proliferation of its use by feminist and critical theorists occurring since the mid-1990s. This integrative literature review provides the first synthesis ofpublic pedagogy research through a thematic analysis of a sample of420 publications. Finding that the public pedagogy construct is often undertheorized and ambiguously presented in education research literature, the study identifies five primary categories of extant public pedagogy research: (a) citizenship within and beyond schools, (b) popular culture and everyday life, (c) informal institutions and public spaces, (d) dominant cultural discourses, and (e) public intellectualism and social activism. These categories provide researchers with a conceptual framework for investigating public pedagogy and for locatingfuture scholarship. The study identifies the needfor theoretical specificity in research that employs the public pedagogy construct and for empirical studies that investigate the processes of public pedagogy, particularly in terms of the learner s perspective.
Lacking property and stocks passed down through generations and burdened by greater reliance on consumer credit, Black and Latino/a borrowers were less able to weather the sudden decline in home ...values.2 Foregrounding their predicament, the incomprehensible task of affording the consequences of not-paying what the lenders knew were unpayable debts allows questions that challenge the assumption that the failure to meet an obligation should necessarily lead to punishment when the lender's profits are secured by betting and spreading the risk globally, against the "high-risk" borrower.3 In considering the unpayable debts as a trigger for the current financial crisis, this special issue highlights the racial and colonial logic of global capitalism. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Roland Robertson, and other early theorists of globalization have called attention to the significance of risk.4 Few of these scholars, however, anticipated that racial/ cultural difference, as an element of representation, would enter into risk calculations in the ways it did during the boom phase of the housing market. ...subsequent research on the "circulation of risk," shifting the analytic focus away from the postindustrial North, revealed that "unregulated flows of capital are engendering a turbulence that is undermining the lives of even peoples who inhabit territories incomparably distant and different from the landscapes of metropolitan capital.
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