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In this chapter, we examine the multifaceted challenges that feminist labor organizations face in decommodifying the lives and labor of poor and working-class women. Using an in-depth case study of domestic worker organizing in South Korea, we find that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the National House Managers Cooperative and the Korean Women Workers Association became entangled in hegemonic state projects that linked support for women’s basic livelihoods to the proliferation of part-time, informal domestic work in the context of widespread crises. To challenge the discriminatory and market-driven logics of state-driven social protection efforts, these NGOs have advanced an emancipatory agenda to improve the working conditions, labor rights, and social dignity of domestic workers through consciousness-raising grassroots organizing methods and contentious policy advocacy campaigns. Their social movement transformation goals, however, have been constrained by the relative organizational isolation and limited organizational capacity of feminist labor NGOs in a broader context of neoliberal precaritization and gender-stratified labor markets. The myriad dilemmas facing domestic worker organizing in an era of global hegemonic market rule highlight the need to develop new political imaginaries to contest gender and economic injustice.

The United States has always been an outlier in its approach to social welfare and safety net provision compared to other industrial and postindustrial nations. A large literature has emerged to explain U.S. exceptionalism. Much of this theory and research centers on U.S. race relations and, more recently, on gender ideologies embedded in state policies that have fostered “poverty knowledge” and policies that emphasize individual responsibility and dependency rather than structural factors and processes that create social stigma and exclusion (O'Connor, 2001). Relatively unrecognized is the way spatial inequality shapes U.S. welfare policies. The restructuring of the welfare state by the enactment in 1996 of PRWORA, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, more familiarly known as welfare reform, highlighted the significance of spatial inequality through one of its key provisions: devolution of authority for program formation and administration to state and local jurisdictions. Devolution, a major element of neoliberal policies designed to diminish state redistributive power, places responsibility for welfare reform in local jurisdictions and agencies with varying capacities and resources for this task. Rural areas are particularly subject to disadvantage from devolution as they often lack the means to successfully implement welfare to work policies. Studies of the impacts of welfare reform using national data and crude proxies for spatial differences obscure differences in outcomes for individuals and communities that emerge when more attention is paid to spatial variation. The result is a form of extreme spatial inequality that marginalizes rural regions, communities, and their impoverished residents. This chapter examines the relationship between spatial inequality, devolution, and social exclusion for rural peoples and places in the era of welfare reform and shows how these form key elements of U.S. welfare provision. Illustrations are drawn from primary research on the impacts of welfare reform in rural Appalachia.

This paper aims to explore the lived experiences of key stakeholders working with homeless people during the implementation of universal credit during the austerity years.

The literature on austerity reveals welfare reforms’ impact on support services staff. Service providers’ perceptions of the impact of austerity-led policies and welfare reform via nine interviews with people working in homelessness organisations in Brighton and Hove in the UK. Service providers see the situation for their service users has gotten worse and that the policies make it more difficult to extricate themselves from their current situation. Three central themes relating to the impact of austerity-led welfare reforms were, namely, Universal Credit: the imposition of a precarious livelihood on welfare claimants; a double-edged sword: “If people are sanctioned: people can’t pay”; and “Hard to maintain my own mental equilibrium”.

More precisely, this paper captures service providers’ perceptions and experiences of the impact of austerity-led policies on their services and how they believe this, in turn, impacts their clients and their own lives.

The dimension cuts across service provision to vulnerable people and is intertwined with health and well-being outcomes. Austerity is detrimental to the health of service users and their clients. It is known that when it comes to the health and well-being of the most vulnerable, who have suffered most from the impacts of austerity policies. However, in times of open austerity, it falls also on those trying to ease their suffering.

The data suggest that policies were developed and accentuated by austerity, which led to the stripping of welfare support from vulnerable people. This process has impacted the people who rely on welfare and service providers.

Recent scholarship reveals the imagery of the professional as the “ideal citizen”. The linkage between professionalism and citizenship is here approached from the perspective of democratic social justice in order to examine the persistence of gendered inequalities in the health care system. The paper aims to examine the ideas framing professionalism, both in sociological theory and historically, asking what gendered hierarchies mean in modern health care systems, and why and how they persist in the conditions of liberal democracy.

The question is approached through both sociological literature and an analysis of historical framings of professionalism; the Finnish health care system is employed as a case. The reason for keeping the discussion close to a specific case is that different professional fields, countries and historic contexts differ from each other in democratically relevant respects.

Traditional sociological theory assumed that professional privilege was based on essentially neutral expertise that benefits democracy only if protected from bureaucracy and politics. The recent theoretical turn reframes professional knowledge as socially defined, but the destabilisation of professional knowledge claims is not without problems. The paper refers to the persisting tensions between changing governance and gendered hierarchies in health care and argues for new approaches that suggest ways through which professional expertise can be democratically represented in politics.

The interdisciplinary framework uses political theory on social justice to examine how health care politics frame professionalism.

The paper aims to investigate how accounting techniques, when embedded within data-driven public-sector management systems, mask and intensify the neoliberal ideological commitments of powerful state and corporate actors. The authors explore the role of accounting in the operationalisation of “instrumentarian power” (Zuboff, 2019) – a new form of power that mobilises ubiquitous digital instrumentation to ensure that algorithmic architectures can tune, herd and modify behaviour.

The authors employ a qualitative archival analysis of publicly available data related to the automation of welfare-policing systems to explore the role of accounting in advancing instrumentarian power.

In exploring the automation of Australia's welfare debt recovery system (Robodebt), this paper examines a new algorithmic accountability that has emerged at the interface of government, technology and accounting. The authors show that accounting supports both the rise of instrumentarian power and the intensification of neoliberal ideals when buried within algorithms. In focusing on Robodebt, the authors show how the algorithmic reconfiguration of accountability within the welfare system intensified the inequalities that welfare recipients experienced. Furthermore, the authors show that, despite its apparent failure, it worked to modify welfare recipients' behaviour to align with the neoliberal ideals of “self-management” and “individual responsibility”.

This paper addresses Agostino, Saliterer and Steccolini's (2021) call to investigate the relationship between accounting, digital innovations and the lived experience of vulnerable people. To anchor this, the authors show how algorithms work to mask the accounting assumptions that underpin them and assert that this, in turn, recasts accountability relationships. When accounting is embedded in algorithms, the ideological potency of calculations can be obscured, and when applied within technologies that affect vulnerable people, they can intensify already substantial inequalities.

The study explores the role of accounting technologies of government (ATGs) associated with UK Tax Credits and their impact on claimants' motivations, behaviour and identities. The aim of this study is to deepen empirical and conceptual understandings of how ATGs of tax authorities transform claimants into “entrepreneurs of the self”.

The authors approach Tax Credits (TC) as a case study to examine how ATGs articulate and operationalise neoliberal ideology through a complex network of inscription devices, expertise and locales. They adopt an ethnographic approach based on interviews, archival data and field notes to gain a deep understanding of citizens' lived experiences of ATGs when claiming Tax Credits.

The authors find that ATGs play a key role in transforming TC claimants into self-disciplined “citizen-subjects” whose decisions are informed by market logic. When claiming TC, citizens interact with ATGs and are transformed into “entrepreneurs of the self” who internalise neoliberal ideology and associated beliefs and assumptions of poverty, work and the welfare state. In this process of subjectification, ATGs (re)construct their identities from welfare recipients to “responsible” and “accountable” hardworking individuals and families. However, ATGs perversely disempower claimants who lack the required human capital for becoming responsible for their own welfare, and thus ultimately maintain socio-economic inequality.

Participants were drawn from a relatively narrow geographic area.

The authors reveal how accounting as a technology of government (dis)empowers individuals vis-à-vis the state and spurs inequality dependent on personal circumstances and calculative skills.

The authors contribute to the accounting literature by showing how neoliberal ideology is articulated, operationalised and reinforced by dynamic and repetitive interactions with ATGs of the UK TC scheme. The study helps deepen the understanding of the processes through which socially and economically disadvantaged individuals are transformed into self-governing economic agents responsible for their own welfare.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has provoked considerable debate. Initial expressions of CSR can be traced back to the seventeenth century. However, the ideal of socially responsible business was most evident after the depression of the 1930s and the post-war period in the 1950s. CSR was, by then, mainly influenced by values of philanthropy and principles of the welfare state, and mostly centred on corporations’ charitable donations which provided social welfare for materially deprived families and individuals. In the 1980s, there was a marked shift to the neoliberal ideals of profit maximisation and free regulation in corporate activities and this fed through into CSR practices. We argue that these conflicting ideals of CSR create divergent discourses where corporations on the one hand proclaim a lack of self-interest and a duty of care towards host societies, and on the other hand legitimise corporation’s self-interested preoccupation with profit. Divergent care versus profit discourses influence how legislators, CSR experts, corporations and NGOs understand and practise CSR in host societies. In this chapter, we examine how welfare and neoliberal ideologies contribute to divergent discourses of duty of care and profit, and how these discourses influence corporations’ decision-making about their social responsibility. The chapter concludes by proposing alternative ways for rethinking political and economic relationships between communities and corporations, in order to move beyond the limits of the current discourses of duty of care and profit.

Rural welfare is more than addressing problems of ‘poverty’. As we argue here, social policy initiatives are also conceived by governments as solutions to geographical problems about uneven regional development and population distribution. What these problems were, and how welfare provision could solve them, has varied from generation to generation and takes shape in place-specific ways. That welfare provision has operated as de facto geographical development and population policy is particularly the case in Australia, in its context of massive continental size and heterogeneous rural places. In Australia, the ‘rural’ means much more than just the ‘countryside’ surrounding or between networks of cities and towns (in the traditional European sense; see Gorman-Murray, Darian-Smith, & Gibson, 2008). ‘Rural Australia’ is inserted into national politics as a slippery geographical category, coming to encompass all of non-metropolitan Australia (each of Australia's states only having one major city), within which there is great diversity: broadacre farming regions involving the production of cash crops at scales of thousands of squared kilometres; regions producing rice and cotton with state-sponsored irrigation; coastal agricultural zones with smaller and usually older land holdings (often the places of traditional ‘family farming’ communities); single industry regions focused around minerals extraction or defence (many of Australia's major defence bases being located outside state capitals either in sparsely populated regions in Australia's north or in smaller ‘country towns’ in the south, where they dominate local demography); semi-arid rangelands regions dominated by enormous pastoral stations leased on Crown land (single examples of which rival the United Kingdom in size); and remote savannah and desert regions many thousands of kilometres from capital cities, supporting Aboriginal communities living on traditional country mixing subsistence hunting and gathering with government-supported employment and food programmes. In this context, rural welfare performs a social policy function, but also becomes a means for government to comprehend, problematise and manage geographical space.

Neoliberal political leaders such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) and President Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) heralded entrepreneurs as capitalist heroes, yet for the most part, the policies they enacted did not help real entrepreneurs. Their image of a self-made entrepreneur who thrives in the absence of government action was fundamentally flawed. Their ideology impaired their ability to promote entrepreneurship because they viewed support for entrepreneurs primarily in negative terms as the removal of government tax and regulatory burdens rather than in positive terms as the cultivation of a dynamic market infrastructure. This article presents this argument in four steps, focusing on the US case: (1) how neoliberal reforms embodied internal contradictions; (2) how reforms to market governance undermined entrepreneurship; (3) how other neoliberal policies also failed to support entrepreneurs; and (4) how policies that violated neoliberal principles, such as industry and technology policies, were actually more supportive of entrepreneurs.