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This chapter maps the political economy characteristics of Icelandic society in the post-war period. It shows how the period of statism from the early part of the 20th century, with a strong legacy of protectionism and clientelism, changed up to the present. A major turning point came with a shift towards more liberal mixed economy in 1960, which progressed through the 1980s. That was a period of very high growth rates in an egalitarian society. During the 1990s the political economy became significantly more influenced by neoliberal policies, which can be associated with the buildup of an excessive bubble economy in the 2000s. A new policy emphasis in a new environment of globalized finance, of which Iceland became an active part from 1995, in conjunction with a generally lax attitude of laissez faire in public administration, seems to have made possible rather unusual excesses in speculation and debt accumulation. That eventually led to the dramatic collapse of Iceland's financial system in October 2008. In the wake followed a deep recession. The chapter sets this long-term development into a broad societal context, taking account of political power constellations and changes in politics, the labour market and living conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the relative absence of a theoretical underpinning to modern neoliberalism. Tracing the history of the term, it becomes clear that modern economics has only a tenuous relationship to the type of economics the term “neoliberalism” originally described. Furthermore, modern neoliberalism appears to be strengthened by the crisis it creates. Particular qualities of the orthodoxy make it at the same time both vague and omnipresent, allowing it to operate to exacerbate a pattern of crisis, resulting in profound socio-political consequences, such as the election of Donald Trump and in the rise of populist movements generally.

Critical analysis rejects the premise that prevailing knowledge is ultimately true, but rather seeks to trace the basis of knowledge to structural inequalities at significant junctions in history. The premise of interpretative research is that social phenomena have mutually impacting relationships with social contexts and human activities. Using a critical interpretive research methodology, this paper contends that there are critical social and theoretical issues which have contributed to the resilience of modern neoliberalism, even where it has manifest crisis. Furthermore, unique qualities of the orthodoxy have operated to oppress and manipulate social processes that would challenge or curtail its reach.

This paper contends that, first, modern neoliberalism has an inverted relationship to crisis in that it is ultimately able to leverage the crisis it creates to its advantage. Second, this is partly a result of the theoretical ambiguity associated with the orthodoxy, and finally, the rise of the populist right in various political forums and contexts is connected in some way to the failure of the left and to respond effectively to it.

The subject of the paper helps to explain and analyse the way that the neoliberal orthodoxy is able to leverage crisis to its advantage, and why, therefore, it continues to thrive even though it creates economic upheaval, environmental destruction, social and cultural division and increased inequality. After economic crisis, the orthodoxy presents not as the cause of it, but rather the appropriate policy response to it. The failure of the left to effectively challenge the neoliberal policy programme post-crisis is argued to be an important link in a causal chain which connects neoliberalism to the rise of the populist right.

This paper brings emphasis to the ways in which modern economics has subverted the constraints of a theoretical foundation, and ultimately has become a policy practice that exacerbates inequality and leverages crises that it has created to its advantage. It also highlights the linkages between economic crisis, the persistence of the neoliberal paradigm and the rise of right-wing populism in recent years.

The paper combines descriptive and normative accounts of the origins and evolution of neoliberalism as it has been accounted for by major economists and scholars, adding to this the understanding that in breeching from theoretical foundations, the policy programme has become vague and malleable, which curtails the possibility for the left to respond to it effectively, and contributes to the rise of the populist right in various contexts.

One of the themes that cut across most of the cases is the importance of spending time forging relationships with participants in the research setting. Whilst this can be a long process which under the drivers of the current ‘neoliberal academy’ may appear to yield few tangible outputs, we argue that dedicating effort to building relationships – and being willing to take a ‘slow’ approach – is an essential methodological aspect of researching non-formal education. In this chapter, we first outline the importance of developing relationships and embracing slowness in research, illustrating how these concepts play out in Case Study 2 – Youth Sports Programmes, Case Study 6 – Geographies of Youth Work, Case Study 7 – Parents' Everyday Maths, and Case Study 9 – Theories of Change. Finally, we distil two key recommendations from the four cases: trusting relationships can lead to richer data collection, and building relationships can lead to a more ethical and caring form of research.

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.

This chapter analyzes data from a five-year case study of a secondary school undergoing turnaround, supported by a federal School Improvement Grant. The findings explore how neoliberal policies perpetuate structural inequities in the day-to-day activities of schools by describing how district choice and accountability policies marginalize students of color in low socioeconomic positions. Findings explore the challenges faced by school leaders in a neoliberal policy context and highlight the importance of policy context in a successful improvement effort. The complex web of neoliberal polices of choice and accountability led to lower enrollment, which decreased the school's base funding and led to a greater proportion of students with skill gaps, significant socioemotional needs and students in need of special education services. For school improvement to be successful and to close the opportunity gap, leaders must dismantle and disrupt racist systems and structures bolstered by neoliberal policies.

This paper explores working mothers’ coping strategies concerning paid and unpaid work in Chile and Argentina during the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper aimed to understand the influence of cultural norms on motherhood and neoliberal workplace practices on mothers’ sensemaking processes and coping strategies. This study focuses on mothers living in Chile and Argentina where governments established mandatory lockdowns between March and September 2020. Drawing on the notion of neoliberal motherhood, women’s demands were analyzed when paid work and mothering duties collide in time and space.

Open-ended interviews were conducted with 17 women in Chile and Argentina. All interviewees had at least 1 child below the age of 6 and were working from home during the lockdown.

Neoliberal workplace demands, and disadvantageous government policies greatly heightened the dual burdens of working mothers. Women were expected to fulfill the discourses of the neoliberal worker and the good mother, while also adopting additional strategies in the wake of the lockdown. The data highlights mothers’ strategies to cope with care and work duties by adjusting to new routines involving their partners, relatives and the wider community.

The generalizability of the results is limited by the small sample of 17 interviewees, all from middle to middle-upper class. The changing scenario due to Covid-19 makes the collected data not sufficient to grasp the impact of the pandemic, as during the interviews (December 2020 and January 2021) the process was still ongoing.

Organizations should assess their role in the management of paid and unpaid work for both genders, as the neoliberal discourse views the worker as masculine, full-time, always available and productive, ignoring women’s additional care duties outside of the workplace.

The Covid-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to reflect on care work and gender, collective versus individual responses to care and work demands and the idea of organizing.

In this chapter, we examine how the media in India constructed the lives, needs, and desires of disabled children in India during the tumultuous pandemic.

Through critical discourse analysis, we address how children's bodies and needs have been explicitly discursively constructed as “excessive,” while implicitly drawing upon neoliberal, ableist logics of loss and productivity.

We foreground how the framing of COVID-19 as a disaster in the Indian context obscures state neglect, suggesting that inequality has been the result of the pandemic rather than the limits of state care under neoliberal ableism. Despite the recognition of gaps in the care received by disabled children, neoliberal, entrepreneurial solutions have emerged as a new, widely touted form of care during the pandemic.

Through our analysis, we highlight how disabled children have been neglected by the state and constructed as burdensome and vulnerable. We argue that this occurs when disabled children's bodyminds do not conform to an ideal of the self-reliant, independent citizen under the logics of neoliberal ableism. Our work demonstrates how children with disabilities are discursively rendered absent from conceptualizations of normate citizenship, unless seen as contributing to current or future aspirations for state productivity and growth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.