Organising Neoliberalism

Philip Whitehead And Paul Crawshaw

Description

A multidimensional look at the impact of neoliberalism within different organisational domains from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.

This collection of essays incorporates the insight of an international group of experts to explore the impact of neoliberalism within different organisational domains from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Examining neoliberalism in the context of political, social, economic and institutional domains, this volume promotes a critical and challenging approach to the social and economic attitudes characterising late-modern capitalism.

1. Introduction: A Preliminary Mapping of the Terrain – Philip Whitehead and Paul Crawshaw; 2. Neoliberalism and Crime in the United States and United Kingdom – Mark Cowling; 3. Neoliberalism, Prisons and Probation in the USA and England and Wales – Michael Teague; 4. The Neoliberal Wings of the ‘Smoke-Breathing Dragon’: The Cigarette Counterfeiting Business and Economic Development in the People’s Republic of China – Anqi Shen, Georgios A. Antonopoulos, Marin K. Kurti and Klaus von Lampe; 5. A Neoliberal Security Complex? – Georgios Papanicolaou; 6. The Influence of Neoliberalism on the Development of the English Youth Justice System under New Labour – Raymond Arthur; 7. Institutionalising Commercialism? The Case of Social Marketing for Health in the United Kingdom – Paul Crawshaw; 8. Neoliberal Policy, Quality and Inequality in Undergraduate Degrees – Andrea Abbas, Paul Ashwin and Monica McLean; 9. Religion and Criminal Justice in Canada, England and Wales: Community Chaplaincy and Resistance to the Surging Tide of Neoliberal Orthodoxy – Philip Whitehead; 10. Markets, Privatisation and Justice: Some Critical Reflections – Philip Whitehead and Paul Crawshaw; Notes on Contributors; Index

Sujets

• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Social policy
• Public policy
• Ideology
• Criminal procedure
• LAW

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780857285362
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Organising Neoliberalism

Organising Neoliberalism

Markets, Privatisation and Justice

Edited by Philip Whitehead and Paul Crawshaw

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com

This edition rst published in UK and USA 2012 by ANTHEM PRESS 75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2012 Philip Whitehead and Paul Crawshaw editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

Cover photograph © 2012 Joel Rowbottom Photography

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library CataloguinginPublication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Organising neoliberalism : markets, privatisation and justice / edited by Philip Whitehead and Paul Crawshaw.  p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85728-533-1 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Neoliberalism. I. Whitehead, Philip, 1952- II. Crawshaw, Paul. HB95.O74 2012 320.51dc23 2012022746

ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 533 1 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 0 85728 533 5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an eBook.

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Chapter 1 Introduction: A Preliminary Mapping of the Terrain  Philip Whitehead and Paul Crawshaw Chapter 2 Neoliberalism and Crime in the United States and the United Kingdom  Mark Cowling Chapter 3 Neoliberalism, Prisons and Probation in the United States and England and Wales  Michael Teague Chapter 4 The Neoliberal Wings of the Smoke-Breathing Dragon: The Cigarette Counterfeiting Business and Economic Development in the Peoples Republic of China  Anqi Shen, Georgios A. Antonopoulos, Marin K. Kurti and Klaus von Lampe Chapter 5 A Neoliberal Security Complex?  Georgios Papanicolaou Chapter 6 The Inuence of Neoliberalism on the Development of the English Youth Justice System under New Labour  Raymond Arthur Chapter 7 Institutionalising Commercialism? The Case of Social Marketing for Health in the United Kingdom  Paul Crawshaw Chapter 8 Neoliberal Policy, Quality and Inequality in Undergraduate Degrees  Andrea Abbas, Paul Ashwin and Monica McLean Chapter 9 Religion and Criminal Justice in Canada, England and Wales: Community Chaplaincy and Resistance to the Surging Tide of Neoliberal Orthodoxy  Philip Whitehead

1

23

45

81

105

135

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179

201

vi ORGANISING

NEOLIBERALISM

Chapter 10 Markets, Privatisation and Justice: Some Critical Reections  Philip Whitehead and Paul Crawshaw Notes on Contributors242 Index245

229

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: A PRELIMINARY MAPPING OF THE TERRAIN

Philip Whitehead and Paul Crawshaw

The global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. (Žižek 2011, x)

Introduction

As the long history of the twentieth century drew to a close, a series of political events took place which, although initially local to nation states, changed the landscape of global politics in a fundamental and seemingly irrevocable way. The revolutions which marked the demise of the Eastern communist blocs, which had so defined the political dialectic of the second half of the twentieth century, were said to herald the end of history (Fukuyama 1992) and the inevitable end point of political and economic tensions which had begun some fifty years earlier. The doctrinal dominance of the free market had fi nally been established, which signalled the end of ideological contestations and the creation of a new global capitalist order without national or international boundaries. These Eastern convulsions followed a steady retreat from Keynesian polity, located within the policies of Western governments, which had begun with the economic crisis of the 1970s. Where the post-war period in nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom had been defined by a general consensus around the provision of welfare and a form of managed capitalism of greatest benefit to ordinary workers and their families, this earlier crash brought fi nance to the fore in a previously unprecedented manner and prepared the ground for a new form of politics based upon the championing of free-market capitalism and an overt attack upon established forms of social organisation. A new hegemony of finance emerged under the direction of powerful ideologues such as President Reagan in the United States

2 ORGANISING

NEOLIBERALISM

and Mrs Thatcher in the United Kingdom, both of whom entered power with explicit mandates to roll back the state, quash unionisation and promote Hayekian free-market economics as the only route to growth and prosperity (Hayek 1944). These changes fundamentally altered the landscape of political economies at national, regional and global levels, leading to the hegemony of free-market ideologies and the promotion of competitive capitalism as the orthodox means of economic organisation within late-modern societies. Although most clearly identifi able in the Global North, particularly in the Western post-industrial nations, the effects are not limited to these regions with significant direct and indirect impacts upon other economies, apparent in both the burgeoning capitalist markets of China and other parts of East Asia and the continuing inequalities manifest in the Global South. A key contention of this collection is that the effects of neoliberalism are not observable only at the level of macro-political decision making and economic shifts. Rather, we and our colleagues in the chapters which follow argue that one of the most important ways in which neoliberalism must be understood is in its escalating institutionalisation within diversely mutating organisational domains, from crime and the criminal justice sector to health and education. We contend that the micro level of organisational structures which we explore are indicative of what Harvey (2010, 131) has described as the new ‘mental conceptions of the world’ which neoliberalism has engendered. In other words, it is within these organisational reconfigurations that we can observe how the neoliberal dynamic is played out in a range of shifting operational structures and discourses which are fundamental in shaping social life, including our day-to-day experiences and encounters with each other and the wider social world. As Harvey notes,

Neoliberalism…has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world. (Harvey 2005, 3)

Harvey (2005) echoes Althusser’s (1971) conception of ideology which operates not only in the classically Marxist sense of inculcating dominant social relations and a fixed social order, but more insidiously in the way it becomes existentially lived out in the material, ideological and cultural practices of everyday life. Neoliberalism and its myriad effects thus become an unchallenged commonplace, a veritable ontological and epistemological orthodox ordering within contemporary Western societies while being simultaneously proposed as a model for the ‘developing’ world. As Žižek has argued, ‘in a given society, certain features, attitudes and mores are no longer perceived as ideological but as “neutral”, as a non-ideological or common sense way of life’ (2006, xiii).

INTRODUCTION

3

Further, Read (2009, 2) argues that neoliberalism represents not merely a new ideology, but a transformation of ideology, as it is generated not from the state or a dominant social class, but from the experience of buying and selling commodities from the market which is then extended across other social spaces – ‘the market place of ideas’ – to become a paradigmatic image of society. It is this embedding of neoliberalism as an unchallenged force within contemporary political economies, its manifestation in diverse organisational spheres, along with its morally questionable impacts and social effects that are to be the recurring motifs in the discussions which follow. Accordingly, the purpose of this book, in its theoretical and empirical, national and international dimensions, is to present diverse accounts of the operationalisation of the neoliberal dynamic in a range of organisational fields. It is intended that the chapters contained within this collection explore and critically interrogate the impacts of neoliberalism upon political, social, economic and organisational structures from the late twentieth century onward. To achieve this, we pursue different and yet overlapping perspectives on how they are both complicit in, actively maintain and promote neoliberal doxa. These enquiries require us to interrogate how organisational structures associated with crime control, probation, prisons, criminal justice and penal policy, drugs policy, state and policing, youth justice, the voluntary sector and faith organisations, health and education, have come to reproduce and reinforce neoliberalism as a dominant mode of social and political organisation. Our proposition is that neoliberalism as the selected path for governmental reason to pursue (Foucault 2008), draws into its orbital sphere the values, norms, ideas and operational dynamics of diverse organisations in a mutually reinforcing line dance. Our intention is most certainly not to argue that these reformulated organisational structures slavishly adhere to neoliberal parameters in an inevitable or deterministic way (notwithstanding the lingering whiff of the functionality of dominant neoliberal economic doctrine and subservient organisational expression representing a contemporary dalliance with the base- superstructure metaphor). Rather, the state and its affi liated organisational structures can be understood as a site of contradiction and contestation; not inevitable collusion but containing the potential threat of collision, protest and perhaps even resistance to its blandishments. These thematics will emerge in the following chapters. Prior to dilating upon the dynamics and differential effects of neoliberal hegemony, including the scope for resistance within the operating framework ofinstitutionalising neoliberalism in diverse organisational spheres, we proceed initially with a necessary historical excursion into the emergence of capitalism. Discussion begins in the United Kingdom and introduces conceptual lines of enquiry which are explored further in subsequent chapters

4 ORGANISING

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where their international salience is illuminated. Once the parameters of our theoretical and empirical terrain have been mapped out, we progress towards our central concerns, which begin in Chapter2. However, the following pages offer some general comments on the rise of industrial capitalism, nineteenth- century liberalism and challenges offered by Keynesianism during the middle years of the twentieth century, before moving on to the rise of neoliberalism, which has been described as the latest phase of capitalist formation (Duménil and Lévy 2004; also 2011 for a deeper contemporary analysis of globalisation and financialisation).

Historical Dynamics of Nineteenth-Century Industrial Capitalism The historical schematisation adumbrated by Marx identifi es four different types of social organisation: primitive communism, ancient or slave society, feudalism and then, emerging in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, 1 the tracings of capitalist formation. Capitalism, an economic system rationally geared to the accumulation of profit (indubitable economic benefits) alongside which there are profound moral effects (questionable social costs), is composed of a number of identifi able elements whose longevity can be enumerated as follows:

• Private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange • The creation of goods and services (commodities) that are produced, bought, and sold in a free and competitive national and increasingly global marketplace • The owners of capital and those who sell their labour provide the time, skills and resources to make the capitalist system function, the latter receiving a wage that is not tantamount to the value of their labour resulting in alienation and exploitation • Capital resources (the raw materials and tools required for the production process) create the consumer goods (from cars to computers and the latest ephemeral gadgets) which are then bought and sold for money with a speccifi exchange value • Finally money currency within a money-dominated economy is the measure of all things, the definitive standard of value by which all things are judged, as well as making the world spin on its capitalist axis.

The emergence and historical development of capitalism, which Arrighi (2010) traces to its formative period within Italian city-states of the fi fteenth century, may well have progressed through numerous transformations – free