Papers by Sahil Jai Dutta
What is neoliberal about new public management?
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Apr 21, 2023
The authors explore the concept of new public management. The term describes a deep restructuring... more The authors explore the concept of new public management. The term describes a deep restructuring of the state involving the weakening of the classical welfare state under the guise of increased efficiency and necessary structural adjustments. The authors argue that although the term new public management is widely perceived as the neoliberal approach to public administration per se, the relationship between the two is, in fact, far from clear and highly ambiguous. In order to problematize the notion of new public management and to elaborate its political dimension, the contribution critically discusses different explanations of its association with neoliberalism. The authors argue that the relation between new public management and neoliberalism is rather diffuse: first, in many cases centre-left governments have been strong supporters of new public management, both before and after New Right governments of the 1980s. Second, in many respects, public choice ideas and new public management are not compatible. Third, purported ‘business-like’ methods that are often associated with new public management are rather fuzzy and the dualistic framing of private versus public management has always been conceptually empty. In order to bring deeper insight into the role and politico-economic significance of new public management, Dutta, Knafo and Lovering trace the emergence of the approach in the 1950s and 1960s. Against this background it becomes clear that the success of the new public management approach was based on its ability to create a market-like environment in public administration. The authors conclude that while the neoliberal context was crucial to the development of new public management, the governance practices introduced with this approach had little to do with neoliberal ideas.
The neoliberal welfare state
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Apr 25, 2023
New Political Economy, 2018
The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wi... more The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP URL' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.
Review of International Studies, 2021
The history of neoliberalism is a messy attempt to turn theory into practice. Neoliberals struggl... more The history of neoliberalism is a messy attempt to turn theory into practice. Neoliberals struggled with their plans to implement flagship policies of monetarism, fiscal prudence, and public sector privatisation. Yet, inflation was still cut, welfare slashed, and the public sector ‘marketised’. Existing literature often interprets this as neoliberalism ‘failing-forward’, achieving policy goals by whatever means necessary and at great social cost. Often overlooked in this narrative is how far actually existing neoliberalism strayed from the original designs of public choice theorists and neoliberal ideologues. By examining the history of the Thatcher government's public sector reforms, we demonstrate how neoliberal plans for marketisation ran aground, forcing neoliberal governments to turn to an approach of Managed Competition that owed more to practices of postwar planning born in Cold War US than neoliberal theory. Rather than impose a market-like transformation of the public s...
Finance and Society
Critical macro-finance (CMF) has become an influential avenue of research aimed at shedding light... more Critical macro-finance (CMF) has become an influential avenue of research aimed at shedding light on how the global payments system is governed. In the introduction to this special forum on CMF, we explore three main themes: (1) the intellectual lineage of CMF and its relation to financialisation studies; (2) the policy relevance of CMF; and (3) its ‘critical’ position.
The myth of shareholder primacy
IPPR Progressive Review
Sovereign Debt Management and the Transformation from Keynesian to Neoliberal Monetary Governance in Britain
New Political Economy
Competition & Change
This article focuses on the central position of sovereign debt securities in the financial system... more This article focuses on the central position of sovereign debt securities in the financial system to challenge existing accounts about the 1986 'Big Bang' deregulation of the City of London's securities market. The reforms are often cast as an iconic moment of neoliberal deregulation and a key episode in the globalisation of financial markets. Such accounts stress that the state played an active role constructing the reforms and upholding the global market relations they produced, yet they remain unclear about the state's direct interest in pursuing financial market liberalisation. The article contends that domestic concerns over sovereign debt management were central to the state's pursuit of regulatory change. The Big Bang reforms greatly expanded the size and liquidity of the market for British sovereign debt. This empowered the state, improving its capacity to conduct monetary policy and to raise finance on better terms. In doing so the article demonstrates the necessity of examining sovereign debt management in order to specify the state's role in the construction of financial globalisation.
Socio-Economic Review, 2016
This paper focuses on the history of financialised management and its connections to shareholder ... more This paper focuses on the history of financialised management and its connections to shareholder value which is often viewed as undermining patient strategies of investments. We argue that the rise of financialised management has in fact a long history that goes back to the conglomerate movement in 1960s America. As we show, the conglomerates pioneered the use of financial markets as a baseline for strategy, and the emphasis on financial transactions as an engine for growth. They developed key techniques-high leverage, share-price maximisation, accounting manipulation-that later came to be associated with managerial strategies of the shareholder value era. This legacy has important implications for how we think about patient capital. It challenges the idea that patient capital consists foremost in shielding non-financial companies from capital markets and highlights the central role of management too often neglected in these debates.
The myth of the shareholder revolution and the financialization of the firm
Review of International Political Economy
This article re-examines the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s to challenge the dominant ... more This article re-examines the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s to challenge the dominant conception of the financialization of the firm. This transformation is widely interpreted as a re-alignment of corporate management in response to growing shareholder power and neoliberal managerial norms associated notably with agency theory. By contrast, we demonstrate how the financialization of the firm has its roots in the innovations made in 1960s America by a small group of outsider firms, the conglomerates, to challenge the corporate establishment. As we show, these firms pioneered financial techniques that profoundly transformed the nature of corporate strategy and launched a process of financialization as firms began to exploit the leverage financial markets could provide in various corporate contests. Taking stock of this historical lineage leads us to re-interpret the shareholder revolution of the 1980s. We demonstrate how the key features of this era: the orientation of firms towards capital market, the increase in shareholder activism, and the rise of agency theory, should be read as unintended outcomes of the success of financialized management and its destabilizing effects on corporate governance.
Review of International Political Economy, 2019
This article re-examines the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s to challenge the dominant ... more This article re-examines the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s to challenge the dominant conception of the financialization of the firm. This transformation is widely interpreted as a re-alignment of corporate management in response to growing shareholder power and neoliberal managerial norms associated notably with agency theory. By contrast, we demonstrate how the financialization of the firm has its roots in the innovations made in 1960s America by a small group of outsider firms, the conglomerates, to challenge the corporate establishment. As we show, these firms pioneered financial techniques that profoundly transformed the nature of corporate strategy and launched a process of financialization as firms began to exploit the leverage financial markets could provide in various corporate contests. Taking stock of this historical lineage leads us to re-interpret the shareholder revolution of the 1980s. We demonstrate how the key features of this era: the orientation of firms towards capital market, the increase in shareholder activism, and the rise of agency theory, should be read as unintended outcomes of the success of financialized management and its destabilizing effects on corporate governance.
IPPR Progressive Review, 2018
Neoliberal policy owes less to the ideology of free-markets than it does the planning techniques ... more Neoliberal policy owes less to the ideology of free-markets than it does the planning techniques born in Cold War America.
New Political Economy
Managerialism is often depicted as a key practice of neoliberalism yet relatively little has been... more Managerialism is often depicted as a key practice of neoliberalism yet relatively little has been written by scholars of neoliberalism about the actual relationship between managerialism and neoliberalism. Usually subsumed under a functional reading of neoliberalism, managerialism has too often been understood simply as a means for neoliberal ends (i.e. to promote market rule or competition). This paper challenges this perspective on the grounds that it conflates practices that stem from two different historical lineages. As we show, managerial governance not only has a very different history than neoliberal theory, but it also rests on different principles. Its development can be traced back to the US defence sector in the 1950s and the pivotal role of the RAND corporation. On the basis of this historical perspective, we argue for the need to analyse managerialism on its own terms and make the case for considering the rise of managerial science as a paradigmatic shift in governance. In doing so, we show how managerial governance represented a radical rupture from previous management practices and show how it profoundly reshaped how we have come to understand governance.
Competition and Change , 2018
This article focuses on the central position of sovereign debt securities in the financial system... more This article focuses on the central position of sovereign debt securities in the financial system to challenge existing accounts about the 1986 'Big Bang' deregulation of the City of London's securities market. The reforms are often cast as an iconic moment of neoliberal deregulation and a key episode in the globalisation of financial markets. Such accounts stress that the state played an active role constructing the reforms and upholding the global market relations they produced, yet they remain unclear about the state's direct interest in pursuing financial market liberalisation. The article contends that domestic concerns over sovereign debt management were central to the state's pursuit of regulatory change. The Big Bang reforms greatly expanded the size and liquidity of the market for British sovereign debt. This empowered the state, improving its capacity to conduct monetary policy and to raise finance on better terms. In doing so the article demonstrates the necessity of examining sovereign debt management in order to specify the state's role in the construction of financial globalisation.
This paper focuses on the history of financialised management and its connections to shareholder ... more This paper focuses on the history of financialised management and its connections to shareholder value which is often viewed as undermining patient strategies of investments. We argue that the rise of financialised management has in fact a long history that goes back to the conglomerate movement in 1960s America. As we show, the conglomerates pioneered the use of financial markets as a baseline for strategy, and the emphasis on financial transactions as an engine for growth. They developed key techniques-high leverage, share-price maximisation, accounting manipulation-that later came to be associated with managerial strategies of the shareholder value era. This legacy has important implications for how we think about patient capital. It challenges the idea that patient capital consists foremost in shielding non-financial companies from capital markets and highlights the central role of management too often neglected in these debates.
This primer provides a broad overview of the issues surrounding financialisation. It attempts to ... more This primer provides a broad overview of the issues surrounding financialisation. It attempts to introduce the topic in a way that is accessible to a wide (non-specialist) audience.
Book Reviews by Sahil Jai Dutta
Renewal , 2019
Adam Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018) is a hugely signi... more Adam Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018) is a hugely significant retrospective on the politics and economics of the past decade. Although written from a perspective sympathetic to the left, it centres on two areas-the daily operations of international finance, and the shifting configurations of global geopolitics-that still confuse and alienate socialist thinkers and movements. Crashed will already be familiar to many readers, and it has already attracted a huge range of reviews. Here, we gather three perspectives on the book's central arguments, and how they differ from other dominant analyses of our current moment.
Blogs by Sahil Jai Dutta
New Socialist, 2017
The IPPR, which describes itself as The Progressive Policy Think Tank, has launched the interim r... more The IPPR, which describes itself as The Progressive Policy Think Tank, has launched the interim report of its Commission on Economic Justice, titled Time for Change: A New Vision for the British Economy. It is a thoroughly researched, useful and important resource that provides a diagnosis of what is broken in Britain’s political economy and how it should be fixed. It nonetheless also speaks from a tradition of centre-left economic thought that has failed for the last four decades.
New Socialist, 2017
There's a dffierence between policies and power. If a left-wing party wants to turn its manifesto... more There's a dffierence between policies and power. If a left-wing party wants to turn its manifesto promises into political practice it needs to construct the capacity to do so. The gap between a minister's policy aspiration and the lived reality of a worker or service user is vast, and composed of a chain of different institutions, expertise and personnel. This gap corrupts the democratic ideal that elected politicians make policies, while civil servants merely carry them out. Connecting these disparate parts of the British state are not the Machiavellian scheming of Yes Minster bureaucrats. Instead, it's the managerial reforms that sought to rationalise the state bureaucracy that must be challenged. It's here, in what Christopher Hood called the tools of New Public Management (NPM), that neoliberalism is deeply encoded. These techniques, used to design, cost and evaluate state action are so embedded in state administration, that it's perhaps no surprise that the Labour Party's own briefing on 'Alternative Models of Ownership' says so little about alternative, democratic forms of management. While it (rightly) highlights the importance of 'democratising' ownership, it depicts management as a simple corollary of ownership. Here, the very real ills which beset privatised services and infrastructure are simply laid at the door of privatisation. But reversing decades of privatisation will not produce the return of a mythic " public service ethos ". Reforming ownership is not enough, for a Left political economy to succeed, managerialism must matter too.
Teaching Documents by Sahil Jai Dutta
Neoliberalism by Sahil Jai Dutta
Handbook on Critical Political Economy and Public Policy, 2023
The authors explore the concept of new public management. The term describes a deep restructuring... more The authors explore the concept of new public management. The term describes a deep restructuring of the state involving the weakening of the classical welfare state under the guise of increased efficiency and necessary structural adjustments. The authors argue that although the term new public management is widely perceived as the neoliberal approach to public administration per se, the relationship between the two is, in fact, far from clear and highly ambiguous. In order to problematize the notion of new public management and to elaborate its political dimension, the contribution critically discusses different explanations of its association with neoliberalism. The authors argue that the relation between new public management and neoliberalism is rather diffuse: first, in many cases centre-left governments have been strong supporters of new public management, both before and after New Right governments of the 1980s. Second, in many respects, public choice ideas and new public management are not compatible. Third, purported ‘business-like’ methods that are often associated with new public management are rather fuzzy and the dualistic framing of private versus public management has always been conceptually empty. In order to bring deeper insight into the role and politico-economic significance of new public management, Dutta, Knafo and Lovering trace the emergence of the approach in the 1950s and 1960s. Against this background it becomes clear that the success of the new public management approach was based on its ability to create a market-like environment in public administration. The authors conclude that while the neoliberal context was crucial to the development of new public management, the governance practices introduced with this approach had little to do with neoliberal ideas.
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Papers by Sahil Jai Dutta
Book Reviews by Sahil Jai Dutta
Blogs by Sahil Jai Dutta
Teaching Documents by Sahil Jai Dutta
Neoliberalism by Sahil Jai Dutta