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The purpose of this paper is to examine the political position of academic librarianship in the context of recent changes in English Higher Education. The neoliberalisation of academic librarianship, both as an academic discipline and profession, is considered. The emergence of the Radical Librarians Collective is examined as a potential site through which to counter these developments and foster radical alternatives.

The paper draws upon Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and praxis, and post-structural critiques of neoliberalism, as a theoretical framework to guide data collection and analysis, and observe developments within academic librarianship vis-à-vis broader processes of neoliberalisation. Empirical data collected through interviews and participant observation are analysed using thematic and critical discourse analysis.

The research finds that academic librarianship as a discipline and practice is undergoing a process of neoliberalisation. An umbrella organisation of activist librarians, Radical Librarians Collective, is found to be resisting these developments and has some potential to become a space through which radical alternatives to neoliberal hegemony can be explored and fostered.

The research demonstrates the utility of a Gramscian theoretical framework as a lens through which to observe developments in the field of library and information studies (LIS). Further empirical work would deepen the authors’ understanding of such developments across a range of institutions and locales.

The research makes an original contribution to critical research on the struggles around the neoliberalisation of academic librarianship in the UK. The theoretically informed analysis provides original insights into these processes, and makes a methodological contribution to LIS research.

The precise relationships between neoliberalization, financialization, and rising risk are still being debated in the literature. This paper examines, and challenges, the Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) developed by Hyman Minsky and his adherents. In this perspective, the level of financial risk builds over time as participants orient their behavior in relation to assessments of past levels of risk performance, leading them to overly optimistic valuation estimates and increasingly risky behavior with each subsequent cycle. However, there are problems with this approach, and many questions remain, including how participants modify their exposure to risk over time, how risk is scaled, and who benefits from changes in exposure to risk. This paper examines such questions and proposes an alternate perspective on financial instability and risk, in light of the history of risk management within Canada’s housing finance sector. The rise of financialization in Canada has been accompanied by shifts in the sectoral and scalar locus of risk within the housing sector, from the federal state, to lower levels of government, third-sector organizations, and finally, private households. In each case, the transfer of risk has occurred as participants in each stage sought to reduce their own risk exposure in light of realistic and even pessimistic (not optimistic) expectations deriving from past exposure, contradicting basic assumptions of Minsky’s FIH. This is the process that has driven the neoliberalization of housing finance in Canada, characterized by the socialization of lender risk while households increasingly take on the financial and social risks relating to shelter.

This paper aims to explore the implementation of fair value accounting (FVA) in China as part of a global process of neoliberalisation and financialisation of political and economic systems. It establishes that FVA forms part of the technical architecture of neoliberalism.

In considering the processes of neoliberalisation in China, this paper uses a qualitative approach to explore some of the impacts the adoption of FVA has had on Chinese capital markets.

It is shown that the practice of FVA is imbued with assumptions about the state and the market that have little bearing on the realities of Chinese capital markets. Rather than advancing the public interest, as neoliberal theories claim, this accounting change has failed to transform political and economic power. Instead, it has provided another opportunity to reposition powerful political and economic elites both inside and outside China. This paper argues that the process has reconfigured capital markets in the image of those in advanced capitalist economies, but is devoid of the regulatory and socio‐political apparatus to rationalise its relevance and reliability in the Chinese context.

By positioning the research in broader literature of neoliberalism, this paper offers an alternative framing of the purpose of adopting FVA and, more broadly, the globalisation of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

Within societies in the 21st century, individuals who are embedded in a controlled context that impedes their political actions deal with the tensions they are experiencing through attempts at resistance. Several studies that examine individual infrapolitics in organizations explain how the subtle mix of compliance and resistance are constructed at the level of individual identity in a complex mechanism that both questions the system and strengthens it. However, the interplay between managers' identities and management accounting tools in this process is a topic that deserves more investigation. The aim of this article is to understand how the subtle resistance of individuals constructs neoliberal reforms through management accounting (MA).

The authors conducted a case study on three health and social organizations two years after major reforms were implemented in the health and social services sector in Québec, a province of Canada. These reforms were part of a new public management dynamic and involved the implementation of accounting tools, here referred to as New Public Management Accounting (NPMA) tools.

The authors’ findings show how managers participate in reforms, at the same time as attempt to stem the dehumanization they generate. Managers engage in subtly resisting, for themselves and for their field professional teams, the dehumanization and identity destruction that arises from the reforms. NPMA tools are central to this process, since managers question the reforms through NPMA tools and use them to resist creatively. However, their subtle resistance can lead to the strengthening of the neoliberal dynamic of the reform.

The authors contribute to both the literature of infrapolitics and MA by showing the role of NPMA tools in the construction of subtle resistance. Their article enriches the MA literature by characterizing the subtle forms of resistance and showing how managers engage in creative resistance by using the managerial potential flexibility of NPMA tools. The article also outlines how NPMA tools play a role in the dialectic process of resistance, since they aid managers in resisting reform-induced dehumanization but also support managers in reinventing and reinforcing what they are trying to fight. The authors’ study also illustrates the dialectic dynamic of resistance through NPMA in all its dimensions: discursive, material and symbolic. Finally, the authors contribute to management accounting literature by showing that NPMA tools are not only the objects of neoliberalization but also the support of backstage resistance to neoliberalization.

Higher education (HE) in Slovakia is undergoing a second massive wave of transformation that is a direct post-socialist response to the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) (ESG, 2015). In Slovakia, these standards have led to the end of the previous accreditation model and the emergence of a new accreditation agency. It is through the new forms of assessment and assessment standards that one can observe the second wave of the neoliberalisation of HE in Slovakia that stems from the Bologna Process (BP). The chapter describes the nature and consequences of this second wave. The question is whether the new accreditation standards in Slovakia take into account the idea of social justice in HE and what type of effects the second wave of ‘Bologna’ neoliberalisation is having on social justice. The chapter relies on a thematic analysis of the following types of documents issued between 2002 and 2020: strategic government documents, internal regulations of the accreditation agency and course accreditation manuals. It compares the discourses on the accreditation criteria in both waves of the neoliberalisation of HE in Slovakia. The results of the analysis show that the meaning of social justice in these discourses lacks the emphasis on the social dimension particularly in the second phase of the BP in Slovakia.

How is the global embedded in the national? How do national institutions enable global relations? And how in turn is citizenship being transformed as a social, political, and legal institution amidst these two-way ties? These are some of the important questions at the heart of Saskia Sassen's paper examining the “denationalization” of citizenship. Drawing on a wide diversity of theoretical literatures, and complicating simple sound bites with her sensitivity to the contested character of key concepts, Sassen here offers inspiration and provocation in equal amounts. Her approach is inspiring in part because of the insistence from the start that it is the always-incomplete nature of citizenship that allows for it to be both developed and studied as an outcome of diverse insurgencies against the exclusion and marginalization of the non-citizen or sub-citizen. Sassen thus models a way of theorizing citizenship that problematizes its enclosure as a fixed and finalized socio-legal institution. Instead, she shows how it can be explored as a congeries of ongoing and open-ended citizenship struggles or projects. These ongoing processes of redefinition, she suggests, have a tendential trajectory, and it is with Sassen's attempt to chart this trajectory that her paper makes its particular provocation: namely the argument that today, in the context of globalization, we are seeing citizenship becoming increasingly denationalized.

This study revisits the discourse on the neoliberalization of business schools and explores how accreditation-linked institutional pressures catalyze cultural change that adversely impact academic labor and academic subjectivities in the Global South.

This study is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with academics from elite business schools in India.

This study shows how academics encounter institutional pressures in Indian business schools. Three major themes emerged from the data: (1) the conception of the ideal academic that existed before accreditation, (2) how the conception of the ideal academic was fundamentally transformed during and after accreditation, and (3) the challenges academics experienced in achieving the performance targets introduced by accreditation-linked institutional pressures.

This study offers two contributions to the extant literature on business schools located in the Global South: (1) it illustrates how organizational changes within business schools in India are structured by accreditation-linked institutional pressures coming from the Global North, and (2) it adds to the growing body of work on neoliberal governmentality by highlighting the implications of accreditation-liked institutional pressures on academic subjectivities.

Purpose – This chapter examines the evolution of new audit and traceability systems in New Zealand horticultural export industries. Identified as one trajectory in New Zealand agriculture partly resulting from neoliberal reform, the arrival of audit culture in food export industries has significantly repositioned these export sectors, particularly in relation to how they might respond to new energy and climate change challenges.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter reviews the neoliberalisation of New Zealand agriculture in the 1980s and then examines the emergence of specific industry, audit and regulatory responses to new challenges around energy and climate change. Horticultural export sectors are used to demonstrate these responses and then compared with other, more productivist-oriented sectors in New Zealand.

Findings – The argument presented at the end of this chapter is that those food export sectors that have embraced the new audit approaches rather than taking a more productivist pathway will be better positioned to cope with the shocks of new energy costs and climate change requirements.

Originality/value – This chapter demonstrates the variable outcomes of neoliberal reform in agriculture. It identifies new audit and governance technologies as both an essential contributor to understanding the nature of global food chains and a potentially important contributor to achieving greater agri-food resilience in the face of future shocks like climate change.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate public disclosures and accountability for government decision-making in the case of a major prison project delivered through a Public–Private Partnership (PPP) in the State of Victoria (Australia).

The study explores a unique case to provide insights into public disclosures for PPPs in a jurisdiction that is a recognised leader in PPP policy and practice. The analysis is theoretically framed by an understanding of neoliberalism and New Public Management, and draws on data from case-specific reporting, media reporting and public policy, to examine interconnections between accounting, public discourse and accountability.

The analysis shows how publicly available information relating to key government decisions routinely lacked supporting evidence or explanation, even though areas of subjectivity were recognised in public policy. Accounting was deployed numerically and discursively to present potentially contestable decisions as being based on common-sense “facts”. The implied “truth” status of government reporting is problematised by media disclosure of key issues absent from government disclosures.

Under neoliberalism, accountingisation can help depoliticise the public sphere and limit discourse by constructing ostensible “facts” in an inherently contestable arena. By contrast, democratic accountability requires public disclosures that infuse a critical dialogical public sphere.

The paper shows how neoliberalism can be embedded in public policies and institutional practices, and buttressed by the use of accounting. The analysis illuminates the persistence and “failing forward” character of neoliberalism, whereby crises are addressed through further neoliberalisation.

This paper is a reflective piece on a PhD workshop on “feminist organising” organised in November 2017 by the three authors of this paper. Calls to resist the neoliberalisation of academia through academic activism are gaining momentum. The authors’ take on academic activism builds on feminist thought and practice, a tradition that remains overlooked in contributions on resisting neoliberalisation in academia. Feminism has been long committed to highlighting the epistemic inequalities endured by women and marginalised people in academia. This study aims to draw on radical feminist perspectives and on the notion of prefigurative organising to rethink the topic of academic activism. How can feminist academic activism resist the neoliberal academia?

This study explores this question through a multi-vocal autoethnographic account of the event-organising process.

The production of feminist space within academia was shaped through material and epistemic tensions. The study critically reflects on the extent to which the event can be read as prefigurative feminist self-organising and as neoliberal academic career-focused self-organising. The study concludes that by creating a space for sisterhood and learning, the empowering potential of feminist organising is experienced.

The study shows both the difficulties and potentials for feminist organising within the university. The concept of “prefiguration” provides a theoretical framework enabling us to grasp the ongoing efforts on which feminist organising relies. It escapes a dichotomy between success and failure that fosters radical pessimism or optimism potentially hindering political action.