Download or read book Life as Surplus written by Melinda E. Cooper and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today. Melinda Cooper demonstrates that the history of biotechnology cannot be understood without taking into account the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism as a political force and an economic policy. From the development of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s to the second Bush administration's policies on stem cell research, Cooper connects the utopian polemic of free-market capitalism with growing internal contradictions of the commercialized life sciences. The biotech revolution relocated economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level. Taking as her point of departure the assumption that life has been drawn into the circuits of value creation, Cooper underscores the relations between scientific, economic, political, and social practices. In penetrating analyses of Reagan-era science policy, the militarization of the life sciences, HIV politics, pharmaceutical imperialism, tissue engineering, stem cell science, and the pro-life movement, the author examines the speculative impulses that have animated the growth of the bioeconomy. At the very core of the new post-industrial economy is the transformation of biological life into surplus value. Life as Surplus offers a clear assessment of both the transformative, therapeutic dimensions of the contemporary life sciences and the violence, obligation, and debt servitude crystallizing around the emerging bioeconomy.
Download or read book Nine Lives of Neoliberalism written by Philip Mirowski and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Untangling the long history of neoliberalism Neoliberalism is dead. Again. Yet the philosophy of the free market and the strong state has an uncanny capacity to survive, and even thrive, in times of crisis. Understanding neoliberalism’s longevity and its latest permutation requires a more detailed understanding of its origins and development. This volume breaks with the caricature of neoliberalism as a simple, unvariegated belief in market fundamentalism and homo economicus. It shows how neoliberal thinkers perceived institutions from the family to the university, disagreed over issues from intellectual property rights and human behavior to social complexity and monetary order, and sought to win consent for their project through the creation of new honors, disciples, and networks. Far from a monolith, neoliberal thought is fractured and, occasionally, even at war with itself. We can begin to make sense of neoliberalism’s nine lives only by understanding its own tangled and complex history.
Download or read book Life in Debt written by Clara Han and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chile is widely known as the first experiment in neoliberalism in Latin America, carried out and made possible through state violence. Since the beginning of the transition in 1990, the state has pursued a national project of reconciliation construed as debts owed to the population. The state owed a "social debt" to the poor accrued through inequalities generated by economic liberalization, while society owed a "moral debt" to the victims of human rights violations. Life in Debt invites us into lives and world of a poor urban neighborhood in Santiago. Tracing relations and lives between 1999 and 2010, Clara Han explores how the moral and political subjects imagined and asserted by poverty and mental health policies and reparations for human rights violations are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries. Attending to intimate scenes and neighborhood life, Han reveals the force of relations in the making of selves in a world in which unstable work patterns, illness, and pervasive economic indebtedness are aspects of everyday life. Lucidly written, Life in Debt provides a unique meditation on both the past inhabiting actual life conditions but also on the difficulties of obligation and achievements of responsiveness.
Download or read book Neoliberal lives written by Robert Chernomas and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the transformation of America that has occurred over the past thirty-five years, as capitalist logic has expanded into previously protected spheres of life. This expansion has had devastating effects on the potential for human development. Looking at how human beings create themselves and their worlds on material foundations of health and the natural environment, through work and politics, the book chronicles how neoliberalism has limited human potential. At a time when neoliberalism’s effects are stirring various forms of popular resistance and opposition, this is a manifesto of sorts for the range of processes that need to be confronted if human potential is to be freed from the increasingly cramped quarters to which neoliberalism has confined it.
Download or read book Happiness as Enterprise written by Sam Binkley and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the contemporary discourse on happiness through the lens of governmentality theory. Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of happiness, as evidenced by self-help books, talk shows, spiritual mentoring, business management, and relationship counseling. At the center of this development is the expanding influence of positive psychology, which places the concern with happiness in a new position of professional respectability, while opening it to institutional applications. In settings as diverse as college education, business, military training, family, and financial planning, happiness has appeared as the object of a new technology of emotional self-optimization. As such, happiness has come to define a new mentality of self-governmentor a governmentality as the concept is developed in the work of Michel Foucaultone that Sam Binkley demonstrates is aligned closely with economic neoliberalism. Happiness as Enterprise blends theoretical argumentation and empirical description in an engaging and accessible analysis that brings governmentality theory into contact with sociological theories of practice and temporality, particularly in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This book invites readers not only to consider the new discourse on happiness for its relation to contemporary formations of power, but to rethink many of the assumptions of governmentality theory in a manner sensitive to the mundane practices and everyday agencies of government, and the unique and specific temporalities these practices imply.
Download or read book The Neoliberal Age written by Aled Davies and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic. Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too; where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the business world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book illuminates other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century. The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.
Download or read book Neoliberal Culture written by Patricia Ventura and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Departing from the conventional understanding of neoliberalism as a set of economic and political policies favoring free markets, Neoliberal Culture presents a framework for analyzing neoliberalism in the United States as a culture-or structure of feeling- which shapes American everyday life. The book proposes five 'components' as the keys to any study of American neoliberal culture: biopower, corporatocracy, globalization, the erosion of welfare-state society, and hyperlegality, these five components enabling rich analyses of key artifacts of the neoliberal era, including the Iraq War, Las Vegas, welfare reform, Walmart, and Oprah's Book Club. Carefully organized according to its central themes and adopting a case study approach in order to allow for thorough, illustrated analyses, this book is an important tool for scholars and students of contemporary cultural studies, popular culture, American Studies, and sociology.
Download or read book Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era written by Peter A. Hall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the impact of three decades of neoliberal narratives and policies on communities and individual lives? What are the sources of social resilience? This book offers a sweeping assessment of the effects of neoliberalism, the dominant feature of our times. It analyzes the ideology in unusually wide-ranging terms as a movement that not only opened markets but also introduced new logics into social life, integrating macro-level analyses of the ways in which neoliberal narratives made their way into international policy regimes with micro-level analyses of the ways in which individuals responded to the challenges of the neoliberal era. The product of ten years of collaboration among a distinguished group of scholars, it integrates institutional and cultural analysis in new ways to understand neoliberalism as a syncretic social process and to explore the sources of social resilience across communities in the developed and developing worlds.
Download or read book Knocking the Hustle written by Lester Spence and published by . This book was released on 2015-12-10 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past several years scholars, activists, and analysts have begun to examine the growing divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, suggesting that the divide can be traced to the neoliberal turn. "I'm not a business man; I'm a business, man." Perhaps no better statement gets at the heart of this turn. Increasingly we're being forced to think of ourselves in entrepreneurial terms, forced to take more and more responsibility for developing our "human capital." Furthermore a range of institutions from churches to schools to entire cities have been remade, restructured to in order to perform like businesses. Finally, even political concepts like freedom, and democracy have been significantly altered. As a result we face higher levels of inequality than any other time over the last century. In Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, Lester K. Spence writes the first book length effort to chart the effects of this transformation on African American communities, in an attempt to revitalize the black political imagination. Rather than asking black men and women to "hustle harder" Spence criticizes the act of hustling itself as a tactic used to demobilize and disempower the communities most in need of empowerment.
Download or read book A Brief History of Neoliberalism written by David Harvey and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-01-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. While Thatcher and Reagan are often cited as primary authors of this neoliberal turn, Harvey shows how a complex of forces, from Chile to China and from New York City to Mexico City, have also played their part. In addition he explores the continuities and contrasts between neoliberalism of the Clinton sort and the recent turn towards neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush. Finally, through critical engagement with this history, Harvey constructs a framework not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
Download or read book Neoliberal Culture written by Patricia Ventura and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Departing from the conventional understanding of neoliberalism as a set of economic and political policies favoring free markets, Neoliberal Culture presents a framework for analyzing neoliberalism in the United States as a culture-or structure of feeling- which shapes American everyday life. The book proposes five 'components' as the keys to any study of American neoliberal culture: biopower, corporatocracy, globalization, the erosion of welfare-state society, and hyperlegality, these five components enabling rich analyses of key artifacts of the neoliberal era, including the Iraq War, Las Vegas, welfare reform, Walmart, and Oprah's Book Club. Carefully organized according to its central themes and adopting a case study approach in order to allow for thorough, illustrated analyses, this book is an important tool for scholars and students of contemporary cultural studies, popular culture, American Studies, and sociology.
Download or read book The Neoliberal Republic written by Antoine Vauchez and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Neoliberal Republic traces the corrosive effects of the revolving door between public service and private enrichment on the French state and its ability to govern and regulate the private sector. Casting a piercing light on this circulation of influence among corporate lawyers and others in the French power elite, Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France analyze how this dynamic, a feature of all Western democracies, has developed in concert with the rise of neoliberalism over the past three decades. Based on interviews with dozens of public officials in France and a unique biographical database of more than 200 civil-servants-turned-corporate-lawyers, The Neoliberal Republic explores how the always-blurred boundary between public service and private interests has been critically compromised, enabling the transformation of the regulatory state into either an ineffectual bystander or an active collaborator in the privatization of public welfare. The cumulative effect of these developments, the authors reveal, undermines democratic citizenship and the capacity to imagine the public good.
Download or read book Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University written by Alpesh Maisuria and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University investigates the impact of neoliberalism on academics in today’s universities. Considering the experiences of early career researchers as well as more experienced academics, it outlines the changing nature of working life in the university precipitated by the reality of de-professionalisation, worsening conditions of employment, and general precarious existence. The book traces the dramatic shift in the role and function of universities and academics over the last forty years. It considers how capitalist neoliberalism drives universities to operate like businesses in a cut-throat financialised education market place. Uniquely the book then provides a possible alternative in the form of the National Education Service (NES) and what this alternative system could look like. Thought-provoking and relevant, this book will be of use to postgraduate students as well as new, emerging, and established academics interested in the current state of higher education, academic life, and possibilities for the future.
Download or read book Neoliberalizing Diversity in Liberal Arts College Life written by Bonnie Urciuoli and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-02-11 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As neoliberalism has expanded from corporations to higher education, the notion of “diversity” is increasingly seen as the contribution of individuals to an organization. By focusing on one liberal arts college, author Bonnie Urciuoli shows how schools market themselves as “diverse” communities to which all members contribute. She explores how students of color are recruited, how their lives are institutionally organized, and how they provide the faces, numbers, and stories that represent schools as diverse. In doing so, she finds that unlike students’ routine experiences of racism or other social differences, neoliberal diversity is mainly about improving schools’ images.
Download or read book The Crisis of Neoliberalism written by Gérard Duménil and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines “the great contraction” of 2007–2010 within the context of the neoliberal globalization that began in the early 1980s. This new phase of capitalism greatly enriched the top 5 percent of Americans, including capitalists and financial managers, but at a significant cost to the country as a whole. Declining domestic investment in manufacturing, unsustainable household debt, rising dependence on imports and financing, and the growth of a fragile and unwieldy global financial structure threaten the strength of the dollar. Unless these trends are reversed, the authors predict, the U.S. economy will face sharp decline.Summarizing a large amount of troubling data, the authors show that manufacturing has declined from 40 percent of GDP to under 10 percent in thirty years. Since consumption drives the American economy and since manufactured goods comprise the largest share of consumer purchases, clearly we will not be able to sustain the accumulating trade deficits.Rather than blame individuals, such as Greenspan or Bernanke, the authors focus on larger forces. Repairing the breach in our economy will require limits on free trade and the free international movement of capital; policies aimed at improving education, research, and infrastructure; reindustrialization; and the taxation of higher incomes.
Download or read book Neoliberal Nonfictions written by Daniel Worden and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examining journalism, literature, documentary films, visual art, and music from the 1960s to the present, this book explores the artistic response to economic neoliberalism"--
Download or read book Neoliberalism and Everyday Life written by Susan Braedley and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2010-03-19 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminating the ways in which neoliberal policies - such as the deregulation of economies and the transfer of governmental responsibilities to the private sector - have been implemented on a global scale, the contributors show how neoliberalism has seeped into our social and political fabric and affected our daily lives. Drawing attention to the most visible elements of neoliberalism in business, government, and personal life, reveal the ways in which policies designed to ensure market expansion also inevitably expand social inequalities of gender, race, class, and ability. Using a variety of methods, contributors discuss a range of topics, including globalization, privatization, health care, and the welfare state. An intelligent and informative collection that explains and challenges neoliberal policies, Neoliberalism and Everyday Life is an important assessment of a political system that makes profit easier and people's lives more difficult.
