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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.

Internationalisation and academic mobility have long been integral parts, although serving different purposes in the higher education industry. Internationalisation has played a crucial role in facilitating academic exchange, knowledge sharing, research partnerships and collaborative innovation. However, the rise of neoliberalism has introduced the market forces of global capitalism that have significantly impacted higher education worldwide – invading the sector with neoliberal market values. This chapter aims to explore the impact of neoliberalism on the internationalisation of higher education in Africa, with a specific focus on trends in international student mobility. The chapter argues that the influence of neoliberalism on international mobility extends beyond market dynamics, encompassing discussions on hegemony within international knowledge systems, where African countries and institutions often find themselves marginalised. The study relies on published materials and publicly available statistical data from both governmental and non-governmental organisations. By examining the interplay between neoliberalism and the process of internationalisation in higher education, this chapter sheds light on the intricate and multifaceted aspects of both concepts, as well as their practical implications for international student mobility. Moreover, the chapter reflects on the implications of neoliberal entanglements for the prospects of internationalisation in African higher education.

This article aims to address the response from the higher education (HE) sector in the United Kingdom (UK) to the full-scale war in Ukraine which started in 2022.

Relying on theoretical ideas of neoliberalism and the collection and thematic analysis of relevant official communications from six UK universities, the article uncovers three major ways in which these universities have been responding to the war.

They include (1) altruistic responses, (2) the promotion of equal treatment of all people and (3) the condemnation of the invasion and its implications for UK’s international cooperation in HE. These responses suggest the strengthening of the liberal ideals in the UK HE sector, heavily dominated by marketisation.

This analysis is significant not only for advancing a very limited scholarship on the topic of HE in the context of this war but also for understanding the development of the neoliberal landscape of UK HE and neoliberalism as a phenomenon in times of crises.

This chapter examines the relationship between neocolonialism, neoliberalism and the overrepresentation of Indigenous women and girls in Canada's criminal justice system. Indigenous women are 60% more likely to be convicted of violent offences than non-Indigenous women and they make up 42% of all federally sentenced women – while First Nations people represent approximately 5% of the total Canadian population. With an abolition feminist and decolonial theoretical framework, we argue that even when Indigenous women do commit violent crimes, their criminalisation is contingent on the legacy of colonialism. This includes the ongoing genocide against Indigenous women and girls and a neoliberal criminal justice system that reproduces gendered racial state violence and perpetrates the portrayal of stereotypes about Indigenous women, rendering them as inherently violent and ‘risky’. We examine why and how such a disproportionate number of Indigenous women end up involved in cycles of violence, with subsequent disputes with the law. This chapter advances the field of feminist criminology by building on feminist analyses of penal abolition to critique global neoliberalism and the interlocking systems that sustain the ongoing violence in which First Nations women and girls are involved.

This paper aims to analyse the character and strength of the claims made in an emerging literature offering a sociology of financial reporting principles.

The analysis evaluates exemplary works in the literature against the characteristics of the paranoid style first identified by Richard Hofstadter: overheated claims of a far-reaching, malign and collusive machinery of influence; a reductive, rationalistic and dualistic reading of events; weak empirics; and weak theorisation.

A significant stream within the literature is coming to be constructed in the paranoid style. Paranoid stylistics, used as a diagnostic tool, alerts us here to distorted judgement.

Alternative ways of avoiding the dangers of paranoid-style readings are suggested, ranging from resisting the temptations towards such readings to a radical re-working of the epistemics of “socio-accounting”.

The danger of allowing the conclusions advanced in the literature to go unchallenged is that they may influence society’s attitude to accounting, public policy-making and scholars’ willingness to contribute to the crafting of reporting principles and standards.

Although paranoid style analysis has been widely used to examine narratives in other academic fields, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to apply it to scholarly accounting.

This study aims to examine the influence of neoliberalism and managerialism on the recruitment of tourism academics in the UK. The study analyses how sustainable the recruitment and retention of talents are in the tourism industry. Importantly, this study provides particular focus on sustainable tourism roles, as well as the impacts of COVID-19.

Qualitative content analysis focuses on academic jobs in tourism advertised on Jobs.ac.uk between June 2020 and July 2021.

Study findings reveal how, in the case of the UK, current educational ideologies, including neoliberalism and managerialism, significantly influence curriculum and recruitment. Such an approach facilitates the hidden curriculum of undisciplined tourism programmes and significantly constrains the prominence of sustainability principles. The development of curriculum, student life course and recruitment of academics are influenced by several variables (personal, environmental, behavioural), which must be identified to enable decision-makers to engage in efficient planning.

This study provides a unique focus on the recruitment of tourism academics encompassing crucial factors like sustainable tourism and COVID-19. The proposed framework creates the foundation for the investigation and discussion of academics’ recruitment in different contexts. This study also offers several new avenues for future research.

This chapter argues that modern societies are changing in ways that disrupt the complementarity between social structure and character structure. One source of this divergence occurs because, on the one hand, there exists a “neoliberal” character structure that is oriented toward the accumulation of human capital and holds that such accumulation and hard work will allow one to achieve the “American Dream.” On the other hand, the deep embeddedness of this character structure may in fact deepen the possibility of structural crisis, as developments in automation and ongoing transformations of labor continuously shift the economic structure and many feel they are employed in meaningless “soul crushing” jobs. This diagnosis prompts the question: is the accumulation of human capital futile? In other words, can there exist an abundance of jobs that simultaneously pay enough to provide a middle-class lifestyle and be both socially respected by most members of society while also providing subjective meaning for the individual – without accruing high social costs? Through reflections upon my own biography growing up in East Tennessee, this chapter utilizes the framework of Planetary Sociology to encourage sociologists to rethink the category of “human capital” and recognize the divergence of social structure and character structure to be a serious problem with planetary implications. Only by critical examination of the sociohistoric context from a planetary perspective can these challenges be constructively evaluated and reckoned with.

The author argues that contemporary college culture is predicated on hedonism indicated by a use of predominantly social time in which parties, alcohol, casual sex, and lax academics pervade students' experiences. Coincident with this culture, however, is a deleterious pattern among students that has developed dramatically: their compromised mental health. The situation presents an apparent paradox: why are many students suffering when enveloped by fun? This chapter draws a connection between fun and suffering by treating each as conditions that spring from the sociohistorical context that situates institutions of higher education. In so doing, a theory is set forth to explain why despair is rendered applicable and how it is institutionally installed in the minds of modern-day college students.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the power of affective pedagogies and playful literacies to resist neoliberal framings of video game play and design in educational contexts.

Focusing on the Giga-Games Camp, a video game design camp for adolescents, the authors mobilize different methodological impulses across a number of different registers, using interview data to trace institutional arcs, focal frames from a GoPro camera to see vitality in action and descriptions of platform events to follow these lines through the shift to online instruction brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors narrate three transversal movements of the Giga-Games Camp to reveal how play-centered pedagogies can challenge the neoliberal tendency to assimilate young people’s video gaming practices as a vehicle for future-proof science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning.

The authors offer the concept of actually existing vitality rights to describe how attending seriously to vitality in learning spaces will often manifest organically in very real strategies to reimagine and restructure preexisting, neoliberally sedimented uses of space, institutional configurations and constellations of sociopolitical power.