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The paper aims to use a neoliberal ideology to frame an analysis of how the power of ideas can be used to maintain a failed corporate governance model based on stockholder primacy.

The paper employs the concept of corporate hegemony to provide an understanding of the conditioning environment in the USA in the 1990s. It examines the tactics that neoliberals used to gain consensus for their ideology and to skillfully deflect criticism in the face of significant policy failures that have had a global impact.

The paper highlights the power of ideology to create a desired outcome. It finds that Sarbanes‐Oxley represented a neoliberal victory in that it legitimated shareholder primacy and continued use of a failed corporate governance model.

Sarbanes‐Oxley did not address the systemic problems associated with deregulation; it will not resolve the basic problem of how to prevent corporate malfeasance in an economic environment that rewards arbitrage capitalism, high risk and a focus on short‐term profits.

If shareholder primacy weakens accountability, as the paper suggests, then accounting researchers need to develop models that focus on deregulation rather than on regulatory capture and the use of state power to promote private interests. Accounting academics need to assume the role of public intellectuals and to reject Milton Friedman's focus on negative freedom as the sole objective of economic activity and examine economic well being in terms of positive freedom.

This paper advocates for critical accounting’s contribution to immigration deliberations as part of its agenda for advancing social justice. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate accounting as implicated in immigration policies of three advanced economies.

The authors suggest that neoliberal immigration policies are operationalized through the responsibilization of individuals, corporations and universities. By examining three immigration policies from the USA, Canada and the UK, the paper clarifies how accounting technologies facilitate responsibilization techniques, making immigration governable. Additionally, by employing immigrant narratives as counter accounts, the impacts of immigrant lived experiences can be witnessed.

Accounting upholds neoliberal principles of life by expanding market mentalities and governance, through technologies of measurement, reports, audits and surveillance. A neoliberal strategy of responsibilization contributes to divesting authority for immigration policy in an attempt to erase the social and moral agency of immigrants, with accounting integral to this process. However the social cannot be eradicated as the work illustrates in the narratives and counter accounts that immigrants create.

The work reveals the illusion of accounting as neutral. As no single story captures the nuances and complexities of immigration practices, further exploration is encouraged.

The work is a unique contribution to the underdeveloped study of immigration in critical accounting. By unmasking accounting’s role and revealing techniques underpinning immigration discourses, enhanced ways of researching immigration are possible.

This paper draws on the concepts of biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality to provide a sociological analysis of the strategic turn in management accounting.

This conceptual and review paper addresses four interrelated questions: How can the early history of management accounting be revisited from a biopolitical angle? How has strategising been linked to the neoliberal evolution of capitalism? How has this neoliberal connection transformed management accounting into its new form of strategising? What are the implications of this transformation for future research and pedagogical practices in management accounting?

Management accounting is strategised in four interrelated directions: by absorbing the jurisdictional and veridictional roles of the market into the calculative practices of management accounting; by transforming management accounting's centripetal hierarchical order of calculations to a centrifugal order the neoliberal governmentality demanded; by re-calculating the point of production as a site in which labour now takes the form of entrepreneurs of the self, performing not only material but also immaterial elements of managerial labour; and by rescoping management accounting to address issues the “fourth or the global age of security” brought, including the social and the environmental ones.

The research expands the existing frames of reference for exploring contemporary calculative practices in neoliberal governmentality.

Strategic turn in management accounting implicates in issues of security, governance and ethics and offers “new opportunities” for expanding management accounting's relevance beyond economic enterprises to various civil society and political constituencies.

This paper makes a theoretical contribution to management accounting's contemporary developments by demonstrating how it moves into biopolitical circulation.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, tremendous changes have taken place in the US economy – the economic growth in the whole year of 2020 was negative, and though it enjoyed a significant rebound for the first half of 2021, the growth rate began to decline rapidly by the third quarter, and inflation suddenly rises rapidly, which after came the all-time highs of the “misery index” consisted of the inflation rate and unemployment rate. All signs indicate that the US economy will likely enter a “stagflation” crisis.

This paper analyzes the institutional and social contradictions in the United States during the neoliberal era from the perspectives of domestic social structure of accumulation (SSA) and international SSA based on the SSA theory.

The current risk of stagflation in the US economy is a concentrated outbreak of the long-term accumulated contradictions in neoliberal SSA under the impact of the epidemic, which is the product of the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production.

Based on this analysis, the paper points out that with the deepening of the crisis, the neoliberal SSA is likely to end and a new SSA will be established gradually.

Within a neoliberal environment, financial vulnerability of households has become an increasing challenge and there is a requirement of financial literacy education, a necessary activity to facilitate sustainable development and well-being. However, this is seldom a mainstream discourse in social work deliberations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

First, introducing the neoliberal impact on financial well-being and capability for vulnerable households, the authors’ postulation is substantiated on a seven-point argument. The contexts of financially vulnerable households are sketched. Second, a conceptualisation of financial literacy is offered, and third, perspectives on and approaches to financial literacy as a fundamental capability are presented. This is followed by a theoretical foundation of community education as a practice model in social work to develop financial capabilities. In the fifth place, prevailing practices of Financial Capabilities Development (FCD) programmes are offered. Subsequently, the implications of a neoliberal environment for social work practice are examined.

The revised global definition of social work encourages the profession to understand and address the structural causes of social problems through collective interventions. As a response, it is argued that community education towards FCD of vulnerable households within a neoliberal environment should be an essential discourse in social development.

The authors reflect on the significance of FCD, highlighting its contribution towards human security and sustainable development. Although this paper draws on Southern African contexts, the discourse finds resonance in other contexts across the world.

This paper aims to uncover links, overlaps and influence flows across two seemingly unrelated historical processes – the broadening of the marketing concept and the rapid rise of neoliberal ideology, and associated economic and social policies.

Historical examination of the pivotal points in marketing thought, especially since 1960s and 1970s, is juxtaposed with the historical rise of neoliberalism to uncover linkages between marketing and neoliberalism, with a particular reference to Foucault’s analysis of the neoliberal transgression of classical liberalism.

While noble intentions were behind the broadening of the concept of marketing, the implicit assumptions reinforced neoliberal ideology and policies that led to rapid rise in inequality and to disastrous financial and economic crises.

This study, relying on extensive interdisciplinary theorizing, could benefit from empirical and practical extensions.

Globally pervasive marketing practices – based on the broadening of the marketing concept – have become imbricated in contemporary spiraling crises. To escape such spirals, radical rethinking of marketing theories and practices is required.

To reorient away from serving only the interests of centralized capital and to serve the needs of people the world over, marketing thought and practice need to reorient to innovative ideas that transcend the broadened and generic marketing concepts.

The paper develops the linkages between marketing theory and practices since the late 1960s and the neoliberal ideology politics and policies, with roots in the 1920s, that rose to prominence in the 1970s. A key contribution is an exploration of, in a marketing context, Foucault’s analysis of the neoliberal eclipsing of classical liberalism.

This paper aims to interpret the role and professional issues of public sector performance auditing (PA) as a mechanism of neoliberal governmentality in the New Public Management (NPM) era by drawing on a Foucauldian conceptual lens to chart directions for future research.

The study uses the Foucauldian concepts of visibility and identity to interpret PA against the background of neoliberal imperatives of public sector management.

As the growing emphasis on PA in recent decades can be understood as driven by the concurrent development of neoliberal and NPM rationalities, the relatively underexploited concepts of visibility and identity allow further inquiry into important PA issues. This paper identifies avenues for future research under the following three themes: the issue of visibility in neoliberal governmentality and potential for auditors-general to expand the domain of influence of National Audit Offices through the PA role; the potential for PA as a unified distinct specialisation; and the neoliberal idea of professional identity as the individual expert and its interplay with the potential emergence of PA as a distinct function within the accounting profession.

This conceptual paper is anticipated to stimulate future PA research. Key areas in this respect include the position and authority afforded to PA and the possibility of transformation in auditors’ conception of their professional worldview.

This paper charts direction for future research by interpreting PA using Foucauldian concepts of visibility and identity that remain to be exploited in PA research.

The purpose of this paper is to draw upon empirical research in order to demonstrate the ways in which trade unions have responded to the so‐called current UK pension crisis.

The paper uses both theoretical approaches to neoliberalism, and empirical research in the form of interviews, to examine the contradictions between the rhetoric and reality of government policy towards, and trade union responses to, pension reform in the UK.

That trade unions have been constrained by: the fact that the labour party, which they support, has been in government but has increasingly become receptive to neoliberal economic policies; and by the broader discourse of pension reform, advanced by elites that are committed to neoliberal reforms to the British welfare state.

The scope of the paper is large and thus certain issues regarding the pension crisis and ideology are not covered in as much detail as would be preferred.

The paper offers forward a unique critique regarding the current favoured pension policies and solutions.

This paper draws upon front‐line theoretical contributions and combines them with the author's interviews with leading trade union general secretaries. As such, it is a unique insight into not only the current so‐called “pensions crisis” but also the responses of trade unions, and the labour movement more broadly, to this constructed dilemma.

This paper aims to engage with the concept of resilience as theorized by David Chandler in his book Resilience: The Governance of Complexity by drawing from the theory of governmentality presented by Michel Foucault and Jonathan Joseph.

Evolving from classical liberalism to neoliberalism and from natural sciences to social sciences, the term “resilience” raises many questions about its sustainability in terms of its meaning and complexity. While most scholars tend to underscore the significance and practicality of the term, a few scholars argue that it is a failed dogma with neoliberal characteristics. As this is a theory-based study, its methodology involves close readings of academic texts produced mainly by David Chandler, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Joseph.

The central argument in this paper is though Chandler convincingly explains the paradigm shift of the term resilience from classical to neoliberal, his theorizing lacks the understanding that the type of power and governmentality involved in individual freedom, autonomy and complexity are actually parts of the neoliberal state. Hence, the buzzword resilience today is actually an extension of the same neoliberal thought.

First, the author attempts to critically engage with the term resilience from a sociological point of view using purposively selected academic literature. Second, the paper attempts to bring Chandler’s conceptualization on resilience into the disaster context and evaluates its practicality within the tenets of neoliberalism by drawing on Joseph’s and Foucault’s theorizations.

This paper examines disaster capitalism in Chile, that is, the relationships between disasters and neoliberalism. It looks at two post-disaster dimensions: disasters as windows of opportunity to introduce political reforms and disasters as occasions for the corporate class to capitalize on such disasters.

Two indices, disaster capitalism (DC) and post-disaster private involvement (PDPI), are proposed for cross-case analysis. They are based on legal records, institutional reports and economic data. The DC assesses the introduction of reforms following disasters, while PDPI evaluates the share of public-private funding used for recovery. Both indices are applied here to two disasters in Chile: the 2010 Maule earthquake, and the 2008 Chaitén volcanic eruption.

Results show that the highly neoliberal Chilean context leaves limited space for new neoliberal reforms. Although recovery is implemented predominantly through the private sector, the state still assumes greater responsibility for recovery costs. Results also detect poor levels of participation from the private sector in accounting their efforts and making them publicly available. Likewise, the research suggests that neoliberal reforms become more likely after disasters. However, the preexisting politico-economic context matters. Finally, there is clearly a need for data systematization in post-disaster recovery.

In the Chilean context, the indices proved beneficial as a strategy for data collection and a method for scrutinizing the implications of neoliberal policy implemented in the wake of disasters, as well as in evaluating the role of the corporate class during recovery.