neoliberalism Archives

Remaking Welfare in the Netherlands

Across Europe, welfare reforms are reshaping not only systems of support but the very terms of citizenship and state care. Alongside conditional regimes designed to move citizens off benefits, another formation is emerging: the intimate welfare state – a mode of governance that operates through proximity, collaboration and personal engagement.

Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with Amsterdam’s Parent and Child Teams, Remaking Welfare in the Netherlands examines how this intimate welfare state is imagined and enacted by frontline professionals. The book attends to the fantasies, ethical commitments and everyday dilemmas that animate these reforms, including the negotiation of race within ostensibly universalist frameworks of care.

The book argues that this emerging formation has a psychic life of its own: animated by aspirations toward a friendly, caring and accessible state, yet haunted by enduring fears of bureaucratic intrusion and state violence. Bringing ethnographic insight into conversation with debates on welfare and social policy, the book offers a fresh perspective on contemporary transformations of governance in the Netherlands and on the political futures now being forged across Europe.

Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives

In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. Two years later the Soviet Union disintegrated. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union discredited the idea of socialism for generations to come. It was seen as representing the final and irreversible victory of capitalism. This triumphant dominance was barely challenged until the 2008 financial crisis threw the Western world into a state of turmoil.

Through analysis of post-socialist Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as of the United Kingdom, China and the United States, Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives confronts the difficulty we face in articulating alternatives to capitalism, socialism and threatening populist regimes. Beginning with accounts of the impact of capitalism on countries left behind by the planned economies, the volume moves on to consider how China has become a beacon of dynamic economic growth, aggressively expanding its global influence.

The final section of the volume poses alternatives to the ideological dominance of neoliberalism in the West. Since the 2008 financial crisis, demands for social change have erupted across the world. Exposing the failure of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom and examining recent social movements in Europe and the United States, the closing chapters identify how elements of past ideas are re-emerging, among them Keynesianism and radical socialism. As those chapters indicate, these ideas might well have potential to mobilise support and challenge the dominance of neoliberalism.

Re-Centring the City

What is the role of monumentality, verticality and centrality in the twenty-first century? Are palaces, skyscrapers and grand urban ensembles obsolete relics of twentieth-century modernity, inexorably giving way to a more humble and sustainable de-centred urban age? Or do the aesthetics and politics of pomp and grandiosity rather linger and even prosper in the cities of today and tomorrow?

Re-Centring the City zooms in on these questions, taking as its point of departure the experience of Eurasian socialist cities, where twentieth-century high modernity arguably saw its most radical and furthest-reaching realization. It frames the experience of global high modernity (and its unravelling) through the eyes of the socialist city, rather than the other way around: instead of explaining Warsaw or Moscow through the prism of Paris or New York, it refracts London, Mexico City and Chennai through the lens of Kyiv, Simferopol and the former Polish shtetls. This transdisciplinary volume re-centres the experiences of the ‘Global East’, and thereby our understanding of world urbanism, by shedding light on some of the still-extant (and often disavowed) forms of ‘zombie’ centrality, hierarchy and violence that pervade and shape our contemporary urban experience.

Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment

Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment offers a comparative critical study of contemporary fiction. It intervenes in discussions about contemporary fiction in its literary-historical relationship to postmodernism and in its socio-historical relationship to neoliberalism. It argues that contemporary literature is dominated by affective questions that are rooted in, but not fully subsumed by, neoliberalism: ‘How can I experience reality (as real)?’; ‘How can I feel attached to someone?’ This ‘affective dominant’ signals a diachronical shift from postmodernist fiction’s pervasive epistemological and ontological reflections to a focus on questions of an affective nature in contemporary fiction. It also offers a perspective on contemporary fiction as mediating neoliberalism’s double-edged dynamics of commodifying affective experience while privatising collective experience.

The book argues that contemporary fiction develops emergent mediations of neoliberal dynamics, with the affective crises the latter yield. It studies this affective crisis in relation to central themes as identity and climate crisis, and through prevalent contemporary genres as autofiction and coming-of-age narratives. The book explores a transnational corpus, including authors Heike Geissler, Ben Lerner, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Ling Ma, Lieke Marsman, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Niña Weijers and Alejandro Zambra, amongst others.

The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia

Mongolia’s mining sector, along with its environmental and social costs, have been the subject of prolonged and heated debate. This debate has often cast the country as either a victim of the ‘resource curse’ or guilty of ‘resource nationalism’.

In The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia, Dulam Bumochir aims to avoid the pitfalls of this debate by adopting an alternative theoretical approach. He focuses on the indigenous representations of nature, environment, economy, state and sovereignty that have triggered nationalist and statist responses to the mining boom. In doing so, he explores the ways in which these responses have shaped the apparently ‘neo-liberal’ policies of twenty-first century Mongolia, and the economy that has emerged from them, in the face of competing mining companies, protest movements, international donor organizations, economic downturn, and local and central government policies.

Applying rich ethnography to a nuanced and complex picture, Bumochir’s analysis is essential reading for students and researchers studying the environment and mining, especially in Central and North East Asia and post-Soviet regions, and also for readers interested in the relationship between neoliberalism, nationalism, environmentalism and state.

Rethinking Heritage for Sustainable Development

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in 2015 have influenced the actions of international and intergovernmental organisations and governments around the world, and have dictated priorities for international aid spending. Culture, including heritage, is often presented as fundamental to addressing the SDGs: since 2010, the United Nations has adopted no fewer than five major policy recommendations that assert its importance as a driver and enabler of development. Yet, heritage is marginalized from the Sustainable Development Goals.

Rethinking Heritage for Sustainable Development constitutes a substantial and original assessment of whether and how heritage has contributed to three key dimensions of sustainable development (namely poverty reduction, gender equality and environmental sustainability) within the context of its marginalisation from the Sustainable Development Goals and from previous international development agendas.
Sophia Labadi adopts a novel, inclusive, large-scale and systematic approach, providing the first comprehensive history of the international approaches on culture (including heritage) for development, from 1970 to the present day. This book is also the first to assess the negative and positive impacts of all the international projects implemented in sub-Saharan Africa by a consortium of UN organisations that aimed to provide evidence for the contribution of heritage for development in time for the negotiation of the SDGs. The book’s conclusions provide recommendations for rethinking heritage for development, while reflecting on the major shortcomings of the selected projects.

Plantation Crisis

What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Plantation Crisis offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offers a unique and richly detailed analysis of the profound, multi-dimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism and caste hierarchy.

Tea production in India accounts for 25 per cent of global output. The colonial era planation system – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation. In the South Indian state of Kerala, otherwise known for its labour-centric development initiatives, the Tamil speaking Dalit workforce, whose ancestors were brought to the plantations in the 19th century, are at the forefront of this crisis, which has profound impacts on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis opens our eyes to the collapse of the plantation system and the rupturing of Dalit lives in India’s tea belt.

The Neoliberal Age?

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate.

Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic.

Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too; where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the business world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book illuminates other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century.

The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.

Knowledge, Policy and Practice in Education and the Struggle for Social Justice

For 50 years, educator and sociologist Geoff Whitty resolutely pursued social justice through education, first as a classroom teacher and ultimately as the Director of the Institute of Education in London.

The essays in this volume – written by some of the most influential authors in the sociology of education and critical policy studies – take Whitty’s work as the starting point from which to examine key contemporary issues in education and the challenges to social justice that they present. Set within three themes of knowledge, policy and practice in education, the chapters tackle the issues of defining and accessing ‘legitimate’ knowledge, the changing nature of education policy under neoliberalism and globalization, and the reshaping of teacher workplaces and professionalism – as well as attempts to realize more emancipatory practice. Whitty’s scholarship on what constitutes quality and impact in educational research is also explored.

Together, the essays open a window on a life in the sociology of education, the scholarly community of which it was part, and the facets of education policy, practice and research that they continue to reveal and challenge in pursuit of social justice. They celebrate Whitty as one of the foremost sociologists of education of his generation, but also as a friend and colleague. And they highlight the continued relevance of his contribution to those seeking to promote fairer and more inclusive education systems.

Creating Chinese Urbanism

Creating Chinese Urbanism describes the landscape of urbanisation in China, revealing the profound impacts of marketisation on Chinese society and the consequential governance changes at the grassroots level.
During the imperial and socialist periods, state and society were embedded. However, as China has been becoming urban, the territorial foundation of ‘earth-bound’ society has been dismantled. This metaphorically started an urban revolution, which has transformed the social order derived from the ‘state in society’. The state has thus become more visible in Chinese urban life.
Besides witnessing the breaking down of socially integrated neighbourhoods, Fulong Wu explains the urban roots of a rising state in China. Instead of governing through autonomous stakeholders, state-sponsored strategic intentions remain. In the urban realm, the desire for greater residential privacy does not foster collectivism. State-led rebuilding of residential communities has sped up the demise of traditionalism and given birth to a new China with greater urbanism and state-centred governance.
Taking the vantage point of concrete residential neighbourhoods, Creating Chinese Urbanism offers a cutting-edge analysis of how China is becoming urban and grounds the changing state governance in the process of urbanization. Its original and material interpretation of the changing role of the state in China makes it suitable reading for researchers and students in the fields of urban studies, geography, planning and the built environment.