Appointment Time: Disability and Neoliberal Workfare Temporalities

Abstract

My primary interest in this paper is to reveal the complexity of neoliberal temporalities on the lives of disabled people forced to participate in workfare regimes to maintain access to social security measures and programming. Through drawing upon some of the contemporary debates arising within the social study of time, this paper explicates what Jessop (2008) refers to as the sovereignty of time that has emerged with the global adoption of neoliberal workfare regimes. It is argued that the central role of temporality within the globalizing project of neoliberal workfare and the positioning of disability within these global macro-structural processes, requires the sociological imagination to return to both time as a theme and time as a methodology.

Temporalities of mental health recovery

“…Thus, the rotation system may be similar to the workfare appointments critiqued by Soldatic (2013), in that they direct the 'flow and movement of bodies' (p. 5) in moralising and normative ways. However, the material-semiotic analysis presented here shows that unlike the example of the workfare appointment, the activity that Create service-users are directed to through the rotation system focuses on agency and collective practices of hope and living "good" lives-in-time.…”

“…Welfare is seen to cultivate dependence in its recipients, the antithesis to independent neoliberal subjectivity (see Fraser and valentine, 2008;Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2011;Petersen, 1997;Raco, 2009). For Soldatic (2013 this attempt to reduce perceived dependence upon welfare provision for disabled people has entailed 'a range of moral strategies that situate disability within the new temporal norms of work' (p. 5).…”

“…This involves increasingly negative representation of disabled people as "scroungers" (Briant et al, 2013;Garthwaite, 2011) in order to 'reinscribe, reimagine and reshape social understandings of the prior welfare state contract and to hide the socio-relations of power deeply embedded within it' (Soldatic, 2013, p. 5). Using the example of the workfare appointment Soldatic (2013) argues that neoliberal governance involves 'temporal discursive markers, which signify the new temporal disciplines of the neoliberal economy' (p. 5: original emphasis). Clock time gains hegemonic status over all other times and rhythms in order to evaluate someone's right to citizenship.…”

Neoliberal Temporality: Time-Sense and the Shift from Pensions to 401(k)s

“…However, several recent studies have investigated neoliberal temporalities defined by specific contexts, such as workfare programs for disabled citizens in Australia and public-sector labor relations in New York City. 37 The specific experience and relations of 401(k) investing define the neoliberal temporality of that context. In this section, I argue that the neoliberal temporality of 401(k) investing exists at the intersection of the future orientation necessary for saving for retirement and the future-in-present temporality of financialization.…”

Neoliberalising disability income reform: What does this mean for Indigenous Australians living in regional areas?

“…With the onset of the global financial crisis, disability policy became 'a key economic policy area in most OECD countries' (OECD 2009: 1). Nearly all Western liberal democracies have undertaken large-scale disability policy restructuring in line with neoliberal welfare policy trends (Wilton & Schuer 2006, Humpage 2007, Soldatic 2013. While there is a multiplicity of local variations and deviations, international analysis suggests that neoliberal disability policy tendencies converge around the restructuring of disability social security entitlements with the primary aim of steering disabled people off disability pensions and into the open labour market (Roulstone & Barnes 2005, Grover & Piggott 2010.…”