Neoliberalism as Theory, Policy and Practice: A Two Day Postgraduate Workshop

June 6, 2013 - June 7, 2013
Manchester Metropolitan University

Manchester
United Kingdom

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Panel Programme:

Panel One (Thursday June 6th at 10am in LT4)

Neoliberalism as economic ideology and political economy

1.Professor Ray Kiely (Queen Mary)

‘The neoliberal state: myth or reality? Critical reflections on neoliberalism, neoliberalisation and state restructuring’

Neoliberal advocates constantly express disappointment with neoliberal government, and particularly their failure to roll back the state (Pennington). Critics either ignore this failure or, more productively, stress the contingencies of the neoliberal project in terms of electoral expediency and/or path dependency. In this way neoliberalisation (Peck et al.) is regarded as an uneven, variegated and contingent process. While this is useful in challenging the reification of neoliberalism as a monolithic, all powerful entity, it carries the danger of a different kind of reification, where everything can potentially be subsumed under the so-called neoliberal project (Clark). Similarly, some critics argue that the neoliberal state is a myth and that the developmental state persists (Weiss), a mirror image of the position associated with ‘neoliberal disappointment’, and one that potentially enhances recent interest in the idea of state capitalism (Bremmer).

This paper reflects on these debates by examining the claims made about neoliberalism, by proponents and critics, and identifies some contradictions and inconsistencies in the views of the former, particularly regarding the role of the state. The paper then draws on these identified inconsistencies to assess the record of neoliberal states. It is argued that paradoxically, the very weakness of neoliberal understandings of the state can be a source of strength and renewal for the neoliberal project. An assessment is then made of this uneven project of neoliberalisation in the real world, but one that attempts to avoid the reifications identified above.

2.Dr. Susie Jacobs (MMU)

‘Women’s livelihoods, gendered labour and neoliberalism’

This session focuses on women’s livelihoods within neoliberal socio-economic frameworks.  Overall, the ‘push’ of neoliberal policies is for fragmentation and informalisation of employment, or the process initially referred to by Guy Standing (1989) as ‘global feminisation’- referring to the quality of jobs rather than to the incumbents.  It is the case that since the advent of neoliberal policies (including structural adjustment policies) many women have entered – or else been pushed – into waged employment or work in the informal sector.   Additionally, care as well as  commodity chains ‘stretch’ across space and countries, encouraging women’s migration across larger distances, and work in Free Trade Zone factories and in agribusiness estates.  The work of feminist theorists over decades has indicated the differential impact of neoliberal policies resulting from male bias (Elson, 1995) in policy and relatedly, from lack of analysis of gendered household labour.

A number of studies have indicated contradictory ‘outcomes’.  Employment even under difficult, low-paid and insecure conditions sometimes presents opportunities for autonomy and sociability for women, particularly when previously they had been confined (as a matter of social practice or simply de facto) to households and/or work in smallholdings.  And women who bring wages into a (male-headed) household often gain a measure of autonomy and decision-making power.  At the same time, women remain responsible for most labour within households and so their hours of (unpaid) work typically increase.  Initially when it became evident that many workers in export factories were female, it was thought that women might gain relatively high wages, some skills and more security.  It has often been the case, however, that complex strategies of sub-contracting work (Pearson, 2007; Hale and Wills 2005) and increasing informalisation has meant deterioration of most women’s working conditions.  A labour rights based approach – often absent from discussions of globalisation – is of some urgency for both women and men; such an approach must be able to encompass  the conditions of women’s lives (Brahic and Jacobs, 2013).

3.Dr. Kevin Albertson (MMU)

‘The use and misuse of the (so-called) ‘neoliberal paradigm’ by political and business interests and its consequences for economic sustainability’

This talk will address the beginnings of neoliberalism and its supposed alternative to a perceived totalitarian future, the contrast between the founding vision and the contemporary playing out of neoliberalism, and issues around ecological and economic sustainability.

Panel Two (Thursday 6th June at 3pm in LT4)

The social and legal casualties of neoliberal policies

1. Dr Emma Bell (Savoie University)

‘Neoliberalism and the criminal justice system’

Despite the rhetoric of freedom, neoliberalism has in practice led to increased authoritarianism as the state has been strengthened to deal with the social fallout of free market policies. The criminal justice system (CJS) is at the sharp end of these attempts to deal with troublesome populations. Even though it fails spectacularly in this particular task, asserting the strong arm of the state is an effective way of shoring up state power (at least in the short term) against a crisis of legitimacy for neoliberal capitalism. Furthermore, the CJS can be studied as yet another testing ground for neoliberal policies of privatisation and market-testing with catastrophic consequences for those caught up in the system.

2. Katherine Runswick-Cole (MMU)

‘Privatization and disability’

Abstract to follow.

3. Monish Bhatia (Huddersfield University)

‘Managing Global Vagabonds: The Role of Asylum Control Industry’

The ability to control the movement of populations across national borders is one of the few key elements of sovereignty that Britain maintains. Asylum seekers and ‘illegal’ migrants circumvent national border controls by entering the country via illegitimate means. In doing so asylum seekers threaten national sovereignty and are therefore considered a security problem, one which needs to be dealt with through tough policy measures. The British government has increasingly involved transnational security companies (TNCs) to control and implement these policies, which has resulted in the migration management by ‘remote control’ (Zolberg, 1999). By contracting TNCs to conduct control related functions and creating a business friendly investment conditions, the state has not only exacerbated its disciplinary and punitive functions but also expanded the repressive elements of its power. As Britain gets ‘flooded’ by the ‘waves’ of asylum seekers and ‘illegal’ migrants knocking its door for safety and assistance, the management of despair and hopelessness has turned into a lucrative activity for the private sector. In this talk Monish will draw upon his Doctoral study findings and highlight the human consequences of policy and procedures enforced to control the flow of global vagabonds.

Monish Bhatia’s  doctoral research aims to establish a link between the UK government’s restrictive asylum policies and practices, individual offending, and the mental and physical health of individuals being processed through the different stages of the asylum system (including post sentence). He has undertaken eighteen months of fieldwork, at three different refugee charities in the capacity of a volunteer worker and part of a team of social workers, and has gathered a rich qualitative data set, drawn on in his talk.

Panel Three (Friday June 7th at 11.30am in LT4)

Neoliberalism, aesthetics and culture

1. Professor Berthold Schoene (MMU)

‘Neoliberalism and the New American Novel’

‘It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.’

— Richard Hofstadter

As William Chafe has recently explained, neoliberalist tendencies have been conflictually inscribed in the American narrative for centuries so that in many ways neoliberalism appears ideally suited to express and perpetuate (a certain, deeply-ingrained aspect of) Americanness: ‘Two overriding paradigms have long competed in defining who we are. The first imagines America as a community that places the good of the whole first; the second envisions the country as a gathering of individuals who prize individual freedom and value more than anything else each person’s ability to determine his own fate.’ Neoliberalisation has resulted in a conflation of political liberty with economic freedom, making the latter the primary foundation of a free and prosperous society and thus considerably troubling America’s e pluribus unum ideal, which champions national cohesion over individual self-assertion. The triumphant ascent of neoliberalism since the late 1970s must therefore be understood as jeopardising not only American society but indeed Americanness as such.

Looking at recent fiction by Jonathan Frantzen, Adam Haslett, Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders I aim to problematise neoliberalism as an expression of ‘true’ Americanness by contrasting America’s inveterate provincialism with its cosmopolitan aspirations, its exceptionalist self-image with its loss of indisputable world-hegemonic status, as well as neoliberalism’s stark irreconcilability with notions of national community and cohesion.

2. Dr. Jane Elliott (King’s College)

‘Suffering Agency: Imagining Neoliberal Personhood in 21C Popular Aesthetics’

In this talk, I examine the way in which twenty-first-century popular fiction, television and film imagine what I term ‘suffering agency’, or the experience of agency as an omnipresent and overriding burden for the neoliberal subject. These works, which include texts from Dave Eggers’ human-rights novel What is the What to the Saw horror franchise, offer visions of neoliberal personhood in which to be an individual making agential choice appears either akin to or literally a form of torture. By locating these aesthetic interventions within the long intellectual history of microeconomic thought, I argue that the cultural drive to render the parameters of neoliberal personhood has resulted the genesis of a microeconomic mode of representation, one which I argue constitutes the aesthetic dominant of the present.

3. Dr. Jeremy Gilbert (UEL)

‘“Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul”: the existential territories of neoliberalism’

This talk will look at the cultural logic of neoliberalism, in particular its reliance on the enforcement and normalisation of competitive relations across a range of social and cultural sites, drawing on Guattari, Gramsci and recent work by Lazzarato to consider the ways in which consent for a transparently exploitative and basically unpopular political programme has been maintained  in the global North for several decades,  and how emergent possibilities for opposition to neoliberalism might be intensified.

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June 6, 2013, 10:00am BST

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