Neoliberalization, fast policy transfer and the management of labor market services

Abstract

Neoliberalism has been a core concern for IPE for several decades, but is often ill-defined. Research offering greater definitional clarity stresses the role of contingent and local level factors in diverse processes of neoliberalisation. This paper contributes to that literature, addressing a surprising gap in critical IPE knowledge; the management practices by which pressures to activate the unemployed and to make them more competitive, are implemented. The paper suggests that performance management, is significant as both a depoliticising policy coordination mechanism and a highly politicised policy implementation practice. The paper invokes a scalar-relational approach which sees the pressure to innovate and compete at lower scales as driven by the political economy of competitiveness at the system scale. The paper reports on research undertaken within the empirical frame of EU meta-governance, showing how performance management is part of lower-scale attempts to adapt to system-scale pressures. It is neoliberalising in both form and content. It concludes by showing that while performance management may be a significant component of neoliberalisation there is scope for engagement and contestation motivated by egalitarian ideals. Critical IPE scholars interested in contesting neoliberalisation should therefore engage with the political economy of management practice as well as policy design.

Social reproduction strategies: Understanding compound inequality in the intergenerational transfer of capital, assets and resources

“…Differential success and failure obviously effects small scales, including households, families and individuals as part of aggregate absolute successes and as failures at broader scales (e.g. Cities, regions, states), and relative success and failure within them (for specific communities and households) (Nunn 2019). Where households succeed at adapting to competitive pressures at higher-scales they may gain resources that are useful in facilitating future success.…”

The EBRD, fail forward neoliberalism and the construction of the European periphery

“…the generalised characteristic of competitiveness mandates that the route out of failure is to further embed and internalise competitiveness. (Nunn, 2019: 4)…”

“…In neoliberalising policy reforms these technologies have also been put to use to coordinate policy reform efforts that run between scales. (Nunn, 2019: 3)…”

“…. must inevitably fail (Nunn, 2019: 4). The competitiveness agenda aimed to build better entrepreneurs, extended the importance of labour market reforms to configure the flexible labour force, or what Carroll has called ‘deep marketisation’ (Carroll, 2012).…”

Colonial World of Postcolonial Historians: Reification, Theoreticism, and the Neoliberal Reinvention of Tribal Identity in India

“…Resonant with this view, several non-Marxist scholars follow the Marxian tradition while making a critique of open market systems or free market capitalism, and argue that the cultural, religious or ideological ethics that sustain such a system are the root cause of economic injustices and underdevelopment (Korten, 1995;Meek, 1989). Recent works by Mirowski (2013Mirowski ( , 2018 and Nunn (2019), for example, provide a critical outlook on the conceptualization of neoliberalism. Mirowski (2013Mirowski ( , 2018 argues that the neoliberal thought collective reshaped the very terrain of knowledge production has successful engrained its market doctrines in the cultural unconscious.…”