Marx, Foucault, and state–corporate harm: a case study of regulatory failure in Australian non-prescription medicine regulation

Privatisation and accountability in Australian immigration detention: A case of state-corporate symbiosis

“…For Whyte (2014), these spectacles, or ‘moments of rupture’, distract from the underlying ‘regimes of permission’ between governments and corporations which enable harmful business-as-usual practices, including practices of punishment: these regimes of permission entail legal processes such as limited liability laws, but also neoliberal discursive shifts that privilege private enterprise as the most efficient vehicle for service delivery (Tombs & Whyte, 2015: 92). The complexity of these relationships means they can produce harm in new and often hidden ways, as some emerging scholarship demonstrates (e.g., Bandiera, 2021; Bernal et al, 2014; Gerkin & Doyon-Martin, 2017). This a priori analysis of the regulatory relationship is vital for understanding and critiquing the criminogenic political-economic arrangement that privileges corporations as social goods, even as they inflict harm (Michalowski & Kramer 2003).…”

Modern Slavery as the New Moral Asset for the Production and Reproduction of State-Corporate Harm

“…The narratives generated in this case study can be conceived as part of a hegemonic project which legalizes market and supply chain practices that cause modern slavery and portrays states and reporting entities as benevolent actors. This is not a new phenomenon, as for the past 30 years, compliance or consensus approaches, which emphasize the use of soft law and the delegation of responsibility to corporations to regulate their own legal compliance (also known as self-regulation or corporate social responsibility), have been advanced as the best means of responding to corporate crime and harm (Bandiera, 2021; Khoury & Whyte, 2017; Kinley & Tadaki, 2004). Therefore, modern slavery has been legislated purposely to accommodate—rather than resist—such status quo under the premise of humanitarianism and state and corporate benevolence.…”

“…Neoliberalism espouses limited intervention by the state and “the emancipation of individuals through the realisation of their freedoms” (Khoury & Whyte, 2017, p. 14). Its success (and pervasiveness) as a hegemonic project at the national and global level is due, in part, to its capacity to transcend markets, and embed neoliberal rationality in non-economic domains (Bandiera, 2021; Brown, 2005; Polanyi, 2001), including human rights. Indeed, neoliberalism is “equally compatible” with human rights (Khoury & Whyte, 2017, p. 13), as it “proposes that human wellbeing can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2).…”

“…Over time, global neoliberal hegemonic ideas have come to be disseminated, and “legitimately sustained,” through consensus formation (Bandiera, 2021; Khoury & Whyte, 2017, p. 7 [emphasis removed]; Khoury & Whyte, 2019). According to Jessop (1990), states represent an ensemble of forces.…”

“…According to Jessop (1990), states represent an ensemble of forces. The structuration of the relations between these forces inside the state, not only confers a level of authority which enables the powerful to assert their interests and maintain their hegemony over the less powerful, but it also renders the state more amenable to this hegemony (Bandiera, 2021; Jessop, 1990; Tombs & Whyte, 2015). Globally, class forces across states have combined by way of their shared neoliberal hegemonic ideas, forming a transnational capitalist class (Patten, 2020; Özekin, 2014) that seeks to shape the global economy in line with the interests of neoliberal globalization.…”