The Handbook of Neoliberalism

Sheppard E. et al (eds) The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology, New York: Wiley. , 2023

Environment and Planning A, 2005

Drawing on recent research and critical analysis, this rich collection of papers addresses the uneven geographies of neoliberalism and their contestation in six diverse countries, that range from the large industrial powerhouses of Mexico and Brazil through to the predominantly rural and informal economies of Bolivia and Nicaragua, and the resource-exporting countries of Peru and Ecuador. As the editors state in their introduction, the papers``interrogate the particular geographies of neoliberalism in Latin America, throwing into sharp relief the production of neoliberal landscapes and livelihoods in a diversity of ... contexts'' (Perreault and Martin, page 194). In their diverse ways, the authors grapple with the recent debates in geographyö found among economic, political, feminist, and other geographers öto go beyond the reduction of neoliberalism to a``monolithic exogenous force that transforms places from the outside'' (Martin, page 205). Too frequently in the past, analysts have presented a view from nowhere of neoliberalism or globalization as if it were always materialized and operationalized identically across the world. As Nagar et al (2002) and others have argued, neoliberalism operates only through multiple scales, actors, and institutions, many of which are invisible in standard accounts. Recent debates have called for detailed empirical work on the informal sector, households, rural areas, and the diverseöoften marginalizedöactors within those spaces, in order to understand the processes by which neoliberalism works its way acrossöand simultaneously constructsöscales. The papers in this issue start from the premise that it is necessary to go beyond the boardrooms of big business and the policy headquarters of the international financial institutions to understand neoliberalism in practice. In addition to documenting national government policy and political economic trends, the papers focus on less visible arenas such as rural and nonmetropolitan urban areas, on households, and indigenous populated areas. Latin American countries' application of neoliberal macroeconomic policies and the reorientation of nationalism and social policies around them have a number of intended and unintended consequences for the geographies of development in the region. As the papers document in relation to their specific case studies, neoliberalism simultaneously globalizes and localizes, a process that generates a rescaling of economic, political, and social institutions, responsibilities, and costs (Perreault and Martin). The papers document in detail the processes and actors involved in this rescaling and reorganization of geographies in different countries (usually by focusing on subnational regions). While Latin America has long been characterized by its uneven patterns of wealth and poverty, resource exploitation, fixing of ethnic identities, and industrial^urban development, the papers show how the mid-20th-century geographies of impact substituting industrialization (ISI), corporatist politics and resource use have been radically transformed by the imposition of neoliberal policies over the past ten to fifteen years. One aspect of this historical^geographical transformation

The aim of this special issue is to revisit and rethink neoliberalism as an abstract concept and as an empirical object. We invite contributors to critically evaluate dominant conceptions of neoliberalism, to examine how we use neoliberalism as an analytical and methodological framework, and to offer new ideas about how to productively (re)conceptualize neoliberalism. Below we outline some broad questions that contributors might like to engage with, although others are welcome: • How conceptually useful is neoliberalism in different disciplines? • How has the concept of neoliberalism evolved over time? • Does neoliberalism represent a useful or critical way of understanding the current state of the world? • What are the limitations to our use of neoliberalism? • Does neoliberalism need updating as a critical concept in ways that take us beyond hybridity and variegation? • What is missing from debates on neoliberalism in contemporary scholarship? • What makes neoliberalism such a popular analytical framework? call for papers | 2 • Are there alternative ways to conceptualize neoliberalism? • Are we in need of finding alternative conceptions that break with the language of ‘neoliberalism’ altogether? • What might new visions beyond neoliberalism yield in terms of our collective political future?

Journal of Economic Geography , 2008

Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 2016

2016

'The Discourse of Neoliberalism: An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea' explores the internal workings of capitalism’s most infamous contemporary offspring by dissecting the diverse interpretations of neoliberalism that have been advanced in academia. Using a critical geographical approach to pierce the heart of neoliberal theory, the book arrives at a discursive understanding wherein political economic approaches to neoliberalism are sutured together with poststructuralist interpretations in an attempt to overcome the ongoing ideological impasse that prevents the articulation of a more vibrant solidarity on the political left. Reading neoliberalism as a discourse better equips us to understand the power of this variegated economic formation as an expansive process of social-spatial transformation that is intimately bound up with the production of poverty, inequality, and violence across the globe. In examining how imaginative geographies are employed to discursively bind neoliberalism’s attendant violence to particular places and thereby blame its victims, this vivisection of neoliberalism reveals the concealment of an inherently bloodthirsty character to an ever-mutating process of socio-spatial transformation that simply refuses to die.

Neoliberalism means many things to many people. Often used indiscriminately to mean anything ‘bad’, neoliberalism is in need of dissection as an analytical category and a way of understanding the transformation of society over the last few decades. This paper is a brief introduction to neoliberalism and a number of key analytical approaches used to study it, including governmentality, Marxism, ideational analysis, history and philosophy of economics, institutional analysis, state/regulation theory, and human geography. It finishes with some suggestions for areas of further and future research.

Neoliberalism is many things to many people, perhaps too many things to too many people. As such it is a pertinent time to put neoliberalism under the microscope in order to examine whether it remains a useful concept to understand modern society and capitalism. This book is motivated by an emerging literature questioning the usefulness of neoliberalism as a concept, especially the way it is used to ‘explain’ or ‘represent’ almost everything from the state to space, from technologies to discourses, from development to non-development, from governance to regulation, etc., etc. For some writers, neoliberalism has ended up becoming more of a rhetorical trope than an analytical tool. As such, it seems an opportune time to engage critically with the concept of neoliberalism in order to identify new research agendas that can address some of these concerns and offer new avenues for investigation. The book will outline: how neoliberal ideas shape people’s thinking about the world in particular ways; the diverse evolution of neoliberal ideas; the different critical analytical perspectives of neoliberalism; the problems with these perspectives; the core contradiction in neoliberalism between markets and corporate power; and a way to rethink neoliberalism as a contract-based concept.

Anthropology Matters , 2014

This issue of Anthropology Matters addresses the subject of neoliberalism by enquiring into its contradictions. Rather than assuming that we are completely settled on what the term designates or that its referent is indisputably negative, we asked the contributors to this edition to consider the opportunities and risks emerging out of the processes that fall under the rubric of neoliberalism, and how these opportunities and risks are distributed within and across different populations. Our goal in doing so was to enable a better understanding of why diverse aspects of neoliberalism seem to remain dominant in spite of the crisis of neoliberal governance that surfaced in the US in mid-2007 and has spread worldwide, albeit in different ways, thereafter. The grounds for this edition were laid by discussions on neoliberalism by a group of postgraduate social anthropology researchers at the University of Manchester during 2010/2011. In the context of a reading group set up to discuss David Harvey"s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), we raised questions revolving around the pervasiveness of neoliberalism and the possibilities for transformation through and beyond neoliberalism. These discussions led to the conceptualization of this edition of Anthropology Matters.

Neoliberalism has had an interesting trajectory. It was initially formulated as an intellectual-cum-political project in 1938; enjoyed growing acceptance as an economic and political strategy in the 1970s; witnessed panic-stricken meetings in New York and Washington a generation later at the height of the global financial crisis; and, most recently, seems to be undergoing a return to business as usual. There have been many efforts over these long decades to promote (or defend) ‘neoliberal’ institutions and practices as the best basis for economic, legal, political, social, and moral order in complex social formations. There is an even wider range of commentaries and criticisms concerned with neoliberalism, its core features, social bases of support, and its impact on various sites and scales from the local to the global. This contribution addresses some of these issues. It has five main aims: to offer a baseline definition of neoliberalism; to discuss different social scientific approaches to neoliberalism; to distinguish four main types of neoliberalism from a critical political economy viewpoint and relate them to the world market, geopolitics, and global governance; to review the contradictory aspects of neoliberalism in actually existing capitalism; and to assess its prospects after the first global financial crisis and first great recession of the 21st century.