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1 – 10 of over 3000This paper explores how racial neoliberalism is the latest evolution of race and global capitalism and is analyzed in the example of global tourism in Costa Rica. Racial…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper explores how racial neoliberalism is the latest evolution of race and global capitalism and is analyzed in the example of global tourism in Costa Rica. Racial neoliberalism represents two important features: colorblind ideology and new racial practices.
Methodology/approach
Two beach tourism localities in Costa Rica are investigated to identify the racial neoliberal practices that racialize tourism spaces and bodies and the ideological discourses deployed to justify racial hierarchical placement that perpetuates new forms of global and national inequality.
Findings
Three neoliberal racial practices in tourism globalization were found. First, “neoliberal networks” supported white transnational actors’ linkage to national and global tourism providers. Second, “neoliberal conservation” in beach land protection policies secured private tourism business development and impacted current and future racial community displacement. Third, “neoliberal activism” exposed how community fights to change local tourism development was demarcated along racial lines.
Practical implications
An inquiry into the mechanisms and logics of how racism contemporarily operates in the global economy exposes the importance of acknowledging that race has an impact on different actor’s global economic participation by organizing the distribution of material economic rewards unevenly.
Originality/value
As scholarship exposes how gender, ethnicity, and class are constituted through global economic arrangements it is imperative that research uncovers how race is a salient category also shaping current global inequality but experienced differently in diverse geographies and histories.
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Seuwandhi Buddhika Ranasinghe and Danture Wickramasinghe
Drawing on the ideas of postcolonial hybridity and postcolonial feminism, the purpose of this paper is to explore a contextual variant of neoliberalism, which the authors call…
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing on the ideas of postcolonial hybridity and postcolonial feminism, the purpose of this paper is to explore a contextual variant of neoliberalism, which the authors call postcolonial neoliberalism. It unpacks the peculiarities of hybridised practices of management controls therein to reflect on its construction and consequences.
Design/methodology/approach
A seven-month ethnographic study was carried out in a Sri Lankan tea estate to understand both the nature and the practices of these controls.
Findings
Postcolonial neoliberalism has been animated by a hybrid form of management controls encompassing colonial action controls, postcolonial cultural controls and neoliberal results controls. This created an emancipatory space for female workers to engage in some confrontations to attain some compromises.
Originality/value
The message is that the hybridised controls are central to the construction of this form of postcolonial neoliberalism and to its reproduction. However, as these controls accompany a gendered form, female workers find a condition of possibility for some emancipatory potentials within the neoliberal development policy.
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Nglaa Ahmad, Shamima Haque and Muhammad Azizul Islam
This article aims to examine how non-governmental organisations (NGOs)' narratives portray the vulnerability of workers in global clothing supply chains during the COVID-19 crisis.
Abstract
Purpose
This article aims to examine how non-governmental organisations (NGOs)' narratives portray the vulnerability of workers in global clothing supply chains during the COVID-19 crisis.
Design/methodology/approach
The research analyses the rhetoric in global clothing retailers' and NGOs' counter-rhetoric during the first seven months of 2020.
Findings
During this period, retailers employed rhetorical strategies to legitimise irresponsible actions (corporate hegemony prevailed), while NGOs embraced forms of counter-rhetoric trying to delegitimise the retailers' logic, stressing the role of neoliberalism in worsening the situation.
Originality/value
The authors contribute to the literature by providing new insight into the consequences of COVID-19 for retailers' neoliberal practices and the livelihood of workers in global supply chains. Findings of this study extend authors’ knowledge about retailers' COVID-19 measures: These have contributed to the plights of workers working for their supply factories in the global South.
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Lynne Andersson and Lisa Calvano
This paper aims to examine how the globally mobile elite (GME) uses its capital and networks to create a perception that market-driven solutions to social problems are superior to…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine how the globally mobile elite (GME) uses its capital and networks to create a perception that market-driven solutions to social problems are superior to the efforts of government and civil society.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on a number of emerging literatures, the authors introduce and develop the concept of the “perceived mobility of impact” and use the case of the “Bono effect” to illustrate how this phenomenon is enacted. The authors then employ a critical lens to challenge the consequences of this perceived mobility of impact.
Findings
Global elites use their mobility to generate network capital, which in conjunction with celebrity affinity for global humanitarian causes builds a self-reinforcing consensus and legitimizes market-driven solutions to social problems. While this approach may make the GME feel generous about their contribution, it raises questions about accountability and representation in shaping global social policy.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on the GME, offering a unique critical perspective on their motives and actions, and introduces the concept of ‘perceived mobility of impact’.
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Enterprise education (EE) is a growing educational phenomenon. Despite its proliferation globally, there is little critical research on the field. In particular, the ideological…
Abstract
Purpose
Enterprise education (EE) is a growing educational phenomenon. Despite its proliferation globally, there is little critical research on the field. In particular, the ideological potential of EE has been ignored by education scholars. This paper is the first to review the history of the Enterprise New Zealand Trust (ENZT) (known as the Young Enterprise Trust from 2009), as the largest and oldest organisation for the delivery of EE in New Zealand. It examines the activities of the ENZT and its networks in the context of the ascent of neoliberalism including its cultural manifestation in the form of a national “enterprise culture”. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the precise nature of the proximity between the ENZT and neoliberal ideology.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses document analysis, internet searches and interviews to reconstruct aspects of the history of the ENZT. Historical examination of the ENZT is in part obstructed by a lack of access to direct source material prior to the 1990s, as publications and materials of the ENZT are only available in archives from the early 1990s. The ENZT was, however, important to broader historical networks and actors, such as employer associations and think tanks, who left behind more robust records. Unlike the ENZT itself, these actors are given significant attention in literature which can be drawn upon to further enhance understandings of the ENZT and its relationship to neoliberalism.
Findings
This paper reveals that the ENZT has been a major conduit for enterprise culture and neoliberalism since its inception. It has been explicitly concerned with the development of enterprise culture through activities targeting both school students and the general public. Its educational activities, though presented in non-ideological terms, were designed to inculcate students in neoliberal or free market capitalist principles, including amenability towards private ownership of goods and services, private investment, private finance of public projects, free markets and free trade. These findings might serve to encourage critical attitudes among researchers and policy actors as to the broader ideological role of EE on a general scale.
Research limitations/implications
EE on the whole requires closer examination by critical education researchers. The overwhelmingly majority of existing research is concerned with enhancing the practices of EE, while deeper questions regarding its ideological implications are ignored. Perhaps as a result, EE as a conceptual category lacks definitional clarity, as researchers and policy actors grapple with its meaning. If it can be established that EE schemes are not merely “neutral” or non-ideological educational projects, but rather are serious purveyors of ideology, this should have implications for future research and particularly for policy actors involved in the field. A review of the history of the ENZT may be illuminative in this respect, as it reveals the organisation’s record of deliberate political or ideological messaging.
Originality/value
This paper is the first to review the history of the ENZT as the largest provider of EE in New Zealand. EE has become a global phenomenon in recent decades. Non-existent in New Zealand before the 1970s, it is now a staple of the school system, its principles enshrined in the national curriculum document. Within a decade of the ENZT’s inauguration in 1986, eight out of ten secondary schools were using its services. Despite this, the ENZT is all but absent from existing historical literature. Analysing the history of the ENZT allows for enhanced understanding of an important actor within New Zealand education, whose history has been overlooked, as well as provides insight into the broader ideological implications of EE.
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Jane Andrew, Max Baker, James Guthrie and Ann Martin-Sardesai
This paper explores how neoliberalism restrains the ability of governments to respond to crises through budgetary action. It examines the immediate budgetary responses to the…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper explores how neoliberalism restrains the ability of governments to respond to crises through budgetary action. It examines the immediate budgetary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by the Australian government and explores how the conditions created by prior neoliberal policies have limited these responses.
Design/methodology/approach
A review and examination of the prior literature on public budgeting and new public management are provided. The idea of a “neoliberal straitjacket” is used to frame the current budgetary and economic situation in Australia.
Findings
The paper examines the chronology of Australia's budgetary responses to the economic and health crisis created by COVID-19. These responses have taken the form of tax breaks and a temporary payment scheme for individuals made unemployed by the pandemic.
Practical implications
The insights gained from this paper may help with future policy developments and promote future research on similar crises.
Originality/value
The analysis of Australia's policies in dealing with the pandemic may offer insights for other countries struggling to cope with the fiscal consequences of COVID-19.
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Trevor Tsz-lok Lee, Paula Kwan and Benjamin Yuet Man Li
The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the neoliberal challenges and problems facing public schools in the particular Hong Kong context.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the neoliberal challenges and problems facing public schools in the particular Hong Kong context.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a systematic and critical analysis on the history and socio-political context of Hong Kong’s school policies and practice as well as the official documents and statistics, this paper examines the impacts of neoliberalism in four main aspects of school education in Hong Kong: school governance, accountability, privatization and government expenditure.
Findings
Convergence, as well as deviation, on neoliberal globalization occurs in the particular Hong Kong context. School bureaucracy has irresistibly expanded. Policymakers have placed increasing emphasis on instrumentally evaluating schools while decentralizing, diversifying and privatizing education. School leadership has become focused solely on succeeding within those imposed performance management and metrics, pulling ahead of school competitions and prioritizing easily quantifiable and measurable tasks. Teachers have faced a potential threat from the loss of autonomy through the market logic and consumerist metrics. The rise of privatized education has further intensified school practices based on competitiveness and performativity. On the other hand, resource cutbacks and financial constraints – problems that are generally inflicted by neoliberal discourse – have rarely occurred in Hong Kong.
Research limitations/implications
This study is part of concerted efforts in research that adopts the comparative and critical perspectives emerging from different social contexts to consider and flesh out how neoliberalism look across the school systems, how it challenges the systems differently, and how it evokes various responses from within the systems (Apple, 2001). Taken all the efforts together, a finely nuanced understanding of the trails of neoliberalism can help collectively re-discover school education as a social good, and collectively re-imagine and reshape alternatives for the future.
Originality/value
This paper offers an international and comparative perspective and further nuances to an understanding of how neoliberal policies and ideology are recontextualized in countries across the globe given particularities of different local contexts.
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This study aims to unravel the tensions and convergences between market-oriented neoliberal education and state-serving transnational higher education (TNHE) practices through an…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to unravel the tensions and convergences between market-oriented neoliberal education and state-serving transnational higher education (TNHE) practices through an infrastructural lens within the broad context of post-pandemic geopolitics.
Design/methodology/approach
The study utilizes a case study approach, with a diverse array of data collection methods, including observations, interviews and review of material/online documents issued by the TNHE-related institutions and the Chinese Ministry of Education.
Findings
The study identifies three findings: (1) Re-articulation of transnational infrastructures, valuing ‘glocal' education and casting immobility as advantageous yet quasi-mobile; (2) Infrastructural tensions arising from stakeholder contests over program control and (3) Infrastructural dialectics, illustrating how promised (im)mobility becomes a tightly regulated academic journey due to institutional constraints and conflicts.
Research limitations/implications
The findings elucidate the dynamic interplay between international education and TNHE amidst neoliberal pedagogical trends and pandemic-driven geopolitical shifts in China. While the interplay showcased a notable effect on Chinese students' (im)mobility during the pandemic, more empirical research is needed to understand international student (im)mobility issues in the post-pandemic era.
Originality/value
This study explores the infrastructural intersections between international and transnational education during the unprecedented Covid-19. Findings may provide a reference for policymakers and practitioners to strategize the “glocal” approach to international/transnational education in China after the pandemic.
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What does it mean to be alternative? What is alternativity, and how does it relate to other attempts to make sense of those on the margins? In the first part of this chapter, I…
Abstract
What does it mean to be alternative? What is alternativity, and how does it relate to other attempts to make sense of those on the margins? In the first part of this chapter, I will undertake a history and philosophy of alternativity, from deviance through subcultures to neo-tribes. This will focus partly on popular notions of alternativity, and partly on academic attempts to understand it in various disciplines and subject fields. In the second part of the chapter, the author will focus on how alternativity has been explored in two specific subject fields – leisure studies and popular cultural studies – to make the claim that both subject fields have failed through different means to get to groups with the idea of the alternative: leisure studies have failed through a lack of theory, and cultural studies have failed through a lack of empirical research. In the final part of the chapter, I will attempt to reconcile leisure and culture, and I will sketch out a new theory and empirical programme of alternative leisure that returns to the idea of subculture as counterculture.