Month: March 2017

The Moral Panic About Boys ‘Underachievement’ in Education

Researchers in the Gender and Education Association take a critical feminist approach to the issue of boys’ underachievement.

moral panic boys education.png
A news headline from 2016 – Is this just a ‘moral panic’?

 

They argue that boys’ underachievement has long been a feature of the UK education system, but it has recently become a ‘moral panic’ (In 1996, the UK’s Chief Inspector of Schools called it “one of the most disturbing problems facing the education system”) which has arisen because of the following three reasons:

  • First, deindustrialisation in the UK has led to the decline of traditional manufacturing jobs, and so there are fewer jobs available for those with few or no educational qualifications. As a result, young working-class men who leave school with relatively few qualifications have now become a ‘problem’.
  • Second, feminism has had an impact on girls’ education and career aspirations, and so women are advancing into technical and professional jobs which were previously male dominated.
  • Third, examination performance is increasingly central to policy, with Britain ranked against other countries, and failing students matter more.

They argue that focusing on boys’ underachievement is a problem because:

  • It ignores other differences between young people, particularly of ethnicity and class, which actually have a far greater affect on results.
  • Since girls are on top, there’s no space to tackle the problems that girls have in education. including teenage pregnancy, sexualisation and bullying in friendship groups.

Finally, they point out that some of the strategies adopted to deal with the ‘problem with boys’ are unlikely to work:

  • For example, there has been a big push to recruit more male teachers, particularly in primary schools, to act as role models for their male pupils. Yet research shows that the gender of the teacher has no effect on how well boys achieve in school.
  • Similarly, to solve the gender gap in reading policymakers have suggested giving boys adventure stories and factual books. But research shows that boys have a more positive attitude to reading when all pupils are encouraged to read as wide a range of books as possible.

Global Gender Inequalities – A Statistical Overview

Last Updated on February 18, 2021 by Karl Thompson

Gender inequality is an extremely important aspect of development. Even if we put aside the significant social justice issues associated with the historical power differences between men and women, when you have half the population that are disempowered with less access to education, employment and healthcare, that alone is enough to drastically skew the social development statistics downwards!

Hence there is an argument that promoting gender equality should be the primary development goal, simply because it’s the easiest way to have a positive knock on effect in every other area of social life.

Global Gender Inequalities in 2020

The United Nations notes that

The commitment to achieving gender equality remains unfulfilled:

  • In 2019, one in five young women aged 20 to 24 was married in childhood (down from one in four in 2004). In Sub-Saharan Africa, one in three young women was still married in childhood.
  • In 2020, almost 25% of MPs in national parliaments were women (up slightly from 22.3 per cent in 2015). Women hold 36 per cent of elected seats in local parliaments.
  • In 2019, 28 per cent of managerial positions in the world were occupied by women (up from 25 per cent in 2000).
  • Women are still less likely to work than men. They make up half of the world’s working-age population but only 39 per cent of the world’s workers.
  • Only 55% of married or in-union women aged 15 to 49 made their own decisions regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights.
  • In 2019, 73 per cent of the laws and regulations needed to guarantee full and equal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights were in place (based on data from 75 countries).
  • At least 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital mutilation (data from 31 countries where the practice is concentrated). The harmful practice is becoming less common, but progress is not fast enough to meet the global target of its elimination by 2030.

The coronavirus pandemic is hitting women and girls harder than men:

  • Globally, women make up three quarters of medical doctors and nursing personnel.
  • Women already spend three times as many hours as men on unpaid care work at home. The closure of school and day-care centres has put an extra burden on women to provide home-learning for their children.
  • Reports from several countries suggest that domestic violence against women and children is also rising during the global lockdown.

Statistics on Global Gender Inequality

The World Economic Forum produces the Global Gender Gap Report, which in 2020 noted that none of us will see global gender equality in our life time as it will take almost 100 years to achieve global gender equality at current rates of progress!

It measures gender inequality by using 14 indicators in 4 categories:

  • Economic Participation and Opportunity
  • Educational attainment
  • Health and Survival
  • Political Empowerment

It reports similar global stats to the United Nations, but is more useful for finding out the country rankings by gender inequality. If you download the report and scroll to the back, you can even look at each individual country’s score card for each indicator.

Another ‘gender equality world ranking’ system is The Women Peace and Security Index. This is a bit more niche/ focused than the WEF report and measures gender inequality in countries by using 11 indicators in 3 categories:

  • Inclusion
  • Security
  • Justice

The world country rankings for both the above two monitoring tools are similar:

2019-2020Global Gender Gap ReportWomen Peace and Security Index
Top five countries for gender equalityIceland
Norway
Finland
Sweden
Nicaragua		Norway
Switzerland
Finland
Denmark
Iceland
Bottom five countries for gender equalityDRC
Syria
Pakistan
Iraq
Yemen		South Sudan
Pakistan
Syria
Afghanistan
Yemen

The countries with the highest ‘Peace and Security Scores’ for Women.

Discussion Questions

Explore the rankings above. (1) Are you surprised by any of the results. (2) Do you think any of these indicators are more valid/ important than others as measurements of gender equality?

Sources

The United Nations – Progress towards SDG Five – improving gender equality.

The World Economic Forums The Global Gender Gap Report

The Women Peace and Security Index – findings summarised by National Geographic

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NB the material below is from 2017 and is pending an update, which will be forthcoming! (You know the score, not enough time to update everything as often as you’d like!)

Gender Inequalities in Employment

For every dollar earned by men, women earn 70-90 cents.

Women are less likely to work than men – Globally in 2015 about three quarters of men and half of women participate in the labour force. Women’s labour force participation rates are the lowest in Northern Africa, Western Asia and Southern Asia (at 30 per cent or lower).

When women are employed, they are typically paid less and have less financial and social security than men. Women are more likely than men to be in vulnerable jobs — characterized by inadequate earnings, low productivity and substandard working conditions — especially in Western Asia and Northern Africa. In Western Asia, Southern Asia and Northern Africa, women hold less than 10 per cent of top-level positions.

When all work – paid and unpaid – is considered, women work longer hours than men. Women in developing countries spend 7 hours and 9 minutes per day on paid and unpaid work, while men spend 6 hours and 16 minutes per day. In developed countries, women spend 6 hours 45 minutes per day on paid and unpaid work while men spend 6 hours and 12 minutes per day.

Gender Inequalities in Education

The past two decades have witnessed remarkable progress in participation in education. Enrollment of children in primary education is at present nearly universal. The gender gap has narrowed, and in some regions girls tend to perform better in school than boys and progress in a more timely manner.

However, the following gender disparities in education remain:

  • 31 million of an estimated 58 million children of primary school age are girls (more than 50% girls)
  • 87 per cent of young women compared to 92 per cent of young men have basic reading and writing skills. However, at older age, the gender gap in literacy shows marked disparities against women, two thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women.
  • The proportion of women graduating in the fields of science (1 in 14, compared to 1 in 9 men graduates) and engineering (1 in 20, compared to 1 in 5 men graduates) remain low in poor and rich countries alike. Women are more likely to graduate in the fields related to education (1 in 6, compared to 1 in 10 men graduates), health and welfare (1 in 7, compared to 1 in 15 men graduates), and humanities and the arts (1 in 9, compared to 1 in 13 men graduates).
  • There is unequal access to universities especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. In these regions, only 67 and 76 girls per 100 boys, respectively, are enrolled in tertiary education. Completion rates also tend to be lower among women than men. Poverty is the main cause of unequal access to education, particularly for girls of secondary-school age.

Gender Inequalities in Health

Women in developing countries suffer from….

  • Poor Maternal Health (support during pregnancy) – As we saw in the topic on health and education, maternity services are often very underfunded, leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary female deaths as a result of pregnancy and child birth every year.
  • Lack of reproductive rights – Women also lack reproductive rights. They often do not have the power to decide whether to have children, when to have them and how many they should have. They are often prevented from making rational decisions about contraception and abortion. Men often make all of these decisions and women are strongly encouraged to see their status as being bound up with being a mother.

Gender Inequalities in the Experience of Overt Violence

Around the world, women are more likely to be…

  • Victims of Violence and Rape – Globally 1/3 women have experience domestic violence, only 53 countries have laws against marital rape.
  • Missing: More than 100 million women are missing from the world’s population – a result of discrimination against women and girls, including female infanticide.
  • At risk from FGM – An estimated 3 million girls are estimated to be at risk of female genital mutilation/cutting each year.
  • Girls are more likely to be forced into marriage: More than 60 million girls worldwide are forced into marriage before the age of 18. Almost half of women aged 20 to 24 in Southern Asia and two fifths in sub-Saharan Africa were married before age 18. The reason this matters is because in sub‐Saharan Africa, only 46 per cent of married women earned any cash labour income in the past 12 months, compared to 75 per cent of married men

Gender Inequalities in Politics

  • Between 1995 and 2014, the share of women in parliament, on a global level, increased from 11 per cent to 22 per cent — a gain of 73 per cent, but far short of gender parity.

Sources

Most of the above information is taken from the sources below…

The World’s Women: Trends and Statistics (United Nations)

The Global Gender Gap Report (Video link) (Rankings)

WomanKind

Five Reasons Women Don’t Get Promoted

Paula PrincipleFive reasons why women are less likely to get promoted than men include discrimination, caring responsibilities, lack of vertical networks, lack of self-confidence and ‘positive choice’ – at least according to Professor Tom Schuller in his recent book ‘The Paula Principle: How and Why Women Work Below Their Level of Confidence‘.

The context of this research is that there are now nearly two women for every man in UK universities, which suggests increasing levels of competence among women compared to men, but this is not the case in the world of work – the rate at which women are catching up to men in the world of work (as measured by the pay-gap for example), and especially in the higher ranks of the professions, is not as rapid as it should be based on the relatively high numbers of female graduates.

Five reasons women are less likely to get promoted than men

  1. Discrimination – both overt and covert – here prof. Schuller reminds us that people are likely to employ people who are ‘like them’, and in most cases it’s men doing the employing to higher positions.
  2. Caring responsibilities – women are more likely to go part-time to care for children and increasingly for their elderly parents. here prof. Schuller points out that there is this tendency to see only full time workers as being ‘serious about their careers’.
  3. Lack of vertical networks – men tend to network more with people above them.
  4. Lack of self-confidence – women are more likely to feel they can’t move up the career ladder, whereas men just ‘go for it’.
  5. ‘Positive Choice’ – women are more likely to make a positive choice to stay employed below their level of competence. They simply make the rational decision that they are earning enough and are fulfilled enough where they are, and don’t believe the increased stress of moving up the career ladder to a job they won’t necessarily enjoy would be worth the extra money.

So which factor is the most important?

Tom Schuller suggests this will be dependent both on the sector, the employer, and the individual, but he would never say that it’s purely the fault of an individual woman for failing to get a promotion.

The above summary is based on a Women’s Hour interview with Tom Schuller, broadcast on Radio 4, Saturday 18th March.

Sociological Perspectives on Advertising

A brief summary of pages of 27-32 of Joel Stillerman’s ‘Sociology of Consumption’: The Effects of Advertising and Branding on Consumers (with comments!).

The theories covered in this section include:

The Manipulation Thesis

(1) This originated with Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay ‘the culture industry’ which was inspired by their observations of 1930s Hollywood and the way the Nazis used propaganda.

The basic idea is that advertising manipulates consumers into buying goods. Mass entertainment is produced in a similar way as mass produced auto-mobiles and other products. Adorno and Horkheimer viewed advertising as standardised, artless and manipulative. Products offered people cheap thrills which provided them with compensatory pleasures after a day at a dissatisfying job. Playing to consumers’ emotional vulnerability, music, film and advertising offered instant gratification without true satisfaction while helping them to tolerate unacceptable working conditions.

In short, the culture industry was a form mass manipulation which helped to keep the working masses happy in order to discourage them from protesting about poor wages and working conditions.

A long line of scholars has followed this basic idea – through with different foci –

(2) Kenneth Galbraith argued advertising played the same function of manipulation but rather than seducing the masses into political apathy served the function of convincing shoppers to buy new goods and keep industry profitable.

(3) Jean Baudrillard argues advertising helps businesses solve the ‘realisation problem’ – namely how to sell the increasing number of goods which are produced as Capitalism ‘evolves’. However, Baudrillard accords advertising a more central role in changing our culture. He argues that rather than focussing on the functional properties of a good advertising articulates their emotional or symbolic properties, thereby unleashing an endless process of consumption that has lost its connection to exchange and only reflects a symbolic system which classifies goods into different categories.

Furthermore, goods are no longer appealing because of their individual properties, consumers only recognise them as part of a particular style: in a particular living room set, combined with certain objects and colour combinations for example.

As a result, for Baudrillard, advertising has overtaken our culture and we are trapped in a world of symbols and the incessant need to consume.

(4) More recent analysis focuses on the emotional aspect of advertising – how advertising attempts to link particular emotions and sex to certain products (e.g. Zukin 04 and Smart 10)

(5) Other analysis focuses on how society is increasingly organised around consumption rather than work and thus individuals are expected to consume at a certain level or else face rejection by their peers (Bauman 2007).

Comments

I’M broadly sympathetic to Manipulation Theory in that I believe we can distinguish between ‘basic’ and ‘false’ needs and the primary function of advertising is to manipulate people into buying shit they don’t simply need.

Taking all of the above together I think the primary function of advertising is that it reinforces a world-view in which it’s it’s normal to shop, it’s normal to consume at a historically high level, it’s normal to link happy states to products (or rather sets of products in Baudrillard”s case), it’s normal to construct your very identity using consumption, and it’s normal to spend a lot of time alone and with others, engaged in consumption.

In short the effect of advertising is to convince us that consuming is a normal part of everyday life which should not be questioned, and we are right to assume that shopping as a strategy can provide us with individual and collective emotional fulfilment as human beings.

However, I don’t actually think advertising is necessary to a high consumption society – the various reasons outlined in this post explain the emergence of a high consumption society – we’d probably consume at similarly historically high levels without advertising – advertising exists because of surplus production – broadcast by producers to get our attention amidst a whole load of other producers churning out what is essentially the same shit-we-don’t need.

The other bit of manipulation theory I agree with is that advertising has a sort of ideological function – it masks the truth of its existence and the truth about unnecessary consumption which is as follows

(a) Advertising primarily exists to help the capitalist class sell the shit they produce.

(b) Despite what advertising tells us about this or that shit we really don’t need any of it.

(c) If we ‘buy into’ the messages of the advertisers (which are a bunch of lies) we’re being stupid/ shallow

(d) In the case of Bauman – if we pursue happiness through consumerism, we’re probably going to end up being miserable in the long run.

(e) We don’t freely choose to consume, we are buffeted into it by social and economic pressures (meaningless work, pestering kids (who have been manipulated by advertisers), busy-hurried lives, the strange desire to stand-out) and the causes of these pressures-to-consume need to be put under investigation but the very act of consuming at a high level prevents us from doing so, and advertising helps in this.

(f) There are more effective ways to pursue happiness which aren’t about consumption – producing things, and ‘sprituality’ being the two most obvious.

‘Active Theories of Consumption’

Having outlined the above five aspects of Manipulation Theory, Stillerman now turns to more active approaches.

(1) Other scholars have criticised the manipulation thesis. Douglas and Isherwood (1996) argue that goods are a ‘communication system’ and that most of our consumption is ritualistic. There are essentially three reasons we consume

Firstly – we consume to remain connected with others and stay involved in the ‘information system’.

Secondly – people can also find their place within the group and mark of stages in the life cycle through engaging in consumption rituals.

Thirdly – consumption is also about boundary maintenance – the wealthy try to monopolise certain events and goods, the middle class try to gain access to them and the working classes try to maintain their consumption at a certain level.

COMMENT – All of this is true – we consume actively, BUT – the frame within which we consume has changed radically over the last few decades – the pace of consumption and overall level of consumption have increased, and so (inevitable) has the amount of choosing people have to do – as a result, we are devoting more and more time to keeping up with consuming… Take the average cost of weddings, houses and raising children increasing for example. Also, people may well consume actively in various ‘neo-tribes’ but the fact that this is the norm, also means more time has to be devoted to consumption – THUS society has made us into consumers, this is the thing I find most interesting, focussing on HOW people consume once they have been made into consumers just isn’t interesting….!

(2) Colin Campbell (2005) rejects the manipulation thesis for two reasons – first, he argues that this thesis distinguishes ‘needs’ from ‘desires’ but there is no easy way to know what ‘basic needs’ are because needs are always cultural defined in all societies (No they are not – food, water, shelter, clothing for warmth, security, this is straight up post-modern BS). Second, he argues that advertising tries to appeal to consumers in order to convince them to make a purchase, rather than manipulating them. (OK – I accept the fact that consumer are more active, but I’d like to see Cambell distinguish between the act of manipulation and appeal).

(3) Slater (1997) rejects the idea that consumers are cultural dopes, and argues that they buy products in response to their own individual or cultural needs and dispositions.

(4) DeCerteau (1984), Fiske (2000) and Miller (1987) also argue that consumers are more active – they use goods in their own ways, often appropriate goods and creatively recontextualise the meanings of them in ways which are specific to their own live (this sounds like Transformationalism and cultural hybridity in Globalisation), and some of these consumption practices are forms of resistance against advertisers.

(5) Other scholars emphasise the liberating aspects of consumption, arguing that because shopping and and consumption were not traditionally coded as masculine, these became the domain of women and women gained status, satisfaction and a degree of freedom by becoming skilful consumers.

Comment – I fully accept that people make active choices when it comes to consumption – however, to reiterate the above point – It is society which has made us into consumers, focussing on HOW people consume once they have been made into consumers sort of misses the point – As far as I’m concerned, for the majority of people, consumerism is a pathetic strategy toward ‘agency’ – agency within a sub-optimal framework, which is based on false promises and false hope of realising happiness and satisfation.

Beyond the Active Passive Debate

Recent scholarship has moved ‘beyond’ (sideways?) debates about whether individuals are active or passive in relation to advertising.

(1) Leiss (2005) argues that advertisers study society, recycle existing beliefs and practices and broadcast those ideas back to society. The importance of advertising lies in the fact that it has become integrated into our culture and affects how we view ourselves.

(2) Finally Holt and Holt and Cameron (2010) argue that advertising reconfigures existing beliefs and practices in a way that resolves psychological needs for specific groups of consumers, which arise because of social and economic challenges they face.

Advertisers create adverts based on profiling certain groups and try to strike a chord with them – advertising recycles existing cultural practices in a manner that resolves psychological distress and uncertainty among people within these groups.

Leiss and Holt and Cameron all argue that we should understand advertising as the product of a dialogue between creative professionals and specific social groups.

Once again to reiterate the above, advertising may well help people resolve psychological crises they’ve developed because of having alienating jobs and busy-hurried lives, but the consumption that one’s encouraged to do in order to resolved such psychological distress is only ever going to offer short-term release, a quick fix if you like.

Overall I think all of these active theories of advertising which (a) fail to contextualise its function within the broader social and economic context (alienating/ insecure/ liquid) and (b) fail to recognise the fundamentally false nature of advertising’s promises to alleviate the suffering induced by this social and economic context are ultimately incomplete theories (and probably derived from people with career-histories in advertising!)

Industrialisation and Development

Last Updated on February 19, 2021 by Karl Thompson

What is Industrialisation?

Industrialisation is where a country moves from an economy dominated by agricultural output and employment to one dominated by manufacturing. This will usually involve the establishment of factories in which things are produced in a rationally organized (efficient) manner. Below we look at perspectives on ‘industrialisation’ as a means of development.

Industrialisation today at it’s best? Clean, modern and efficient.

How can Industrialisation Promote Development?

Industrialisation should promote economic and social development in the following ways.

  1. Industrialisation means a country can produce a wider range of higher value goods – both for sale at home and for export abroad….
  2. Industrialisation encourages the emergence of other businesses to meet the needs of factories – coal mining to provide power for example.
  3. Industrialisation eventually means a country will be less dependent on manufactured imports from abroad
  4. Industrialisation requires workers – who will be paid wages – which gives them more money and stimulates demand in the economy and further economic and social development
  5. Industrialisation requires an educated workforce (at least some workers – management – need to be educated) which encourages the government to invest in education.
  6. Industrialisation leads to urbanisation – as workers flock to factories to find work….

Arguments for the view that industrialisation leads to development

Modernisation Theory

Modernisation Theorists argue that Industrialisation lead to the West developing and this is what developing countries should do. In the 1950s and 60s, Modernisation Theorists suggested that the West should provide assistance in the form of Official Development Aid to developing countries – providing them with an initial injection of capital and expertise to enable them to build factories and power stations (hydro-electric dams were particularly favoured),  and infrastructure to kick start industrialisation. Another form of ‘industrial development’ achieved with help from the west involved providing tractors and pesticides to ‘industrialise agriculture’ – which involved the setting up of large scale farms which could produce food more efficiently than numerous subsistence small holdings.

Supporting evidence for Modernisation Theory

There are a couple of examples of countries which have successfully (at least partially) industrialised with the support of Official Development Aid from the West – the most obvious examples being Indonesia, Botswana and to a lesser extent India.

Hans Rosling and the Magic Washing Machine

This presentation by Hans Rosling outlines the crucial role which the washing machine can play in development – the point being that you can’t really have washing machines without industrialisation!

Criticisms of the idea that industrialisation results in development

Dependency Theory and Industrialisation

Dependency Theorists (Classical Marxists) argue that Industrialisation is crucial for ‘independent development’ – but it is just as crucial that developing countries control the process of industrialisation, not the West.

Supporting evidence for Dependency Theory

This was the position adopted by Russia in the 1920s and 30s, China in the 1960s – where two communist governments controlled the industrialisation process. Even though tens of millions died during these respective periods of forced industrialisation, today these two countries make up 2/4 of  the BRIC nations.

World Systems Theory and Industrialisation

Emmanuel Wallerstein argues that countries only industrialise if it benefits the West and that it isn’t in the interests of the West for every country to industrialise and grow economically. In short, not ever country and industrialise!

Wallerstein sees the World Economy as being is split into 3 main regions –

The Core – Who consume high tech ‘end products’ such as cars, computers, processed foods, holidays (planes) – these are also ‘post-industrial’ service economies – mainly Europe, America, some of Asia and parts of Latin America.

The Semi- Periphery – The ‘industrialising, sweat-shop manufacturing areas – who turn raw materials into the high end products that the ‘top billion consume’ – Most of Asia and Latin America.

The Periphery – These are the poorer countries and regions who export raw materials (most of Africa but also huge swathes of Asia and some of Latin America) to the semi-periphery, who then make the products that the Core consumes.

The last half century has witnessed much of Asia and Latin America industrialise because this has benefitted the core – we can afford cheap manufactured goods because of cheap labour. However, our present model of high-consumption also requires cheap raw materials – for example minerals for mobile phones and computers, cheap cotton for clothes, and cheap grains for meat – and these will only stay cheap if the countries in the periphery stay peripheral – i.e. we require them to stay stuck at the bottom as non- industrialised exporters of cheap raw materials.

Further to this most advanced western nations are now post-industrial – only about 10% of jobs in the UK are now in the industrial-manufacturing sector. As a result, we now have more jobs in the service sector and still massive unemployment and social problems in the de-industrialised north.

People Centred Development –

Countries don’t need Industrialisation to be socially developed!

People Centred Development theory argues that the whole idea of industrialization being essential to development is very Eurocentric – this is how most Europe developed and thus modernization theorists assume that every other underdeveloped country now needs to do the same.

The two case studies of Bhutan and Anuta both remind us that Industrialisation is not the only path to development. Both of these countries have not industrialized and both populations have very good standards of living when measured by the HDI and more subjective measures of happiness. Having said this, both of these countries make use of goods that have been produced by industrialized countries.

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Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity

Last Updated on September 21, 2022 by Karl Thompson

This is a brief summary of Jason Read’s: A Genealogy of H*m*-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity (2009)

Introduction

Neoliberalism represents a fundamental shift in ideology – firstly, it is not generated from the state, but from the quotidian experience of buying and selling commodities from the market, which is then extended across other social spaces, “the marketplace of ideas,” to become an image of society. Secondly, it is an ideology that refers not only to the political realm, to an ideal of the state, but to the entirety of human existence. It claims to present not an ideal, but a reality.

A critical examination of neoliberalism must address this transformation of its discursive deployment, as a new understanding of human nature and social existence rather than a political program.

H*m*-Economicus: The Subject of Neoliberalism

Foucault – the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism – according to Foucault neoliberalism extends the process of making economic activity a general matrix of social and political relations; the sphere of economics expands, and more and more things are understood through a simple means-ends, cost-benefit analysis.

Another difference between liberalism and neoliberalism is that neoliberalism takes as its focus not exchange but competition. Competition necessitates a constant intervention on the part of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions of the market.

Foucault also takes the neoliberal ideal to be a new regime of truth, and a new way in which people are made subjects: homo economicus is fundamentally different subject, structured by different motivations and governed by different principles, than homo juridicus, or the legal subject of the state. Neoliberalism constitutes a new mode of “governmentality,” a manner, or a mentality, in which people are governed and govern themselves.

The operative terms of this governmentality are no longer rights and laws but interest, investment and competition.

As a mode of governmentality, neoliberalism operates on interests, desires, and aspirations rather than through rights and obligations; neoliberal governmentality follows a general trajectory of intensification. This trajectory follows a fundamental paradox; as power becomes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also becomes more intense, saturating the field of actions, and possible actions.

Neoliberalism has created individualised individuals, companies of one – the needs of Corporations to be free from expensive commitments and to have ever greater numbers of ‘flexible satellites’ has resulted in workers not seeing themselves as existing in solidarity, but as individuals who need to invest in their future, through constantly updating their skills.

The worker has become “human capital”. Salary or wages become the revenue that is earned on an initial investment, an investment in one’s skills or abilities – As Foucault writes summarizing this point of view: “Homo economicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.”

As Thomas Lemke argues, neoliberalism is a political project that attempts to create a social reality that it suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social relations while fostering those same relations.

Foucault offers us a different interpretation of the relationship between labour and capital. Marx saw labour as being exploited by capital in the process of production, whereas neoliberals redefine the two terms and the relation between them: the capitalist is redefined as an entrepreneur, and labour becomes human capital – capital emerges from labour.

(However, for Foucault) As Christian Laval argues, in neoliberalism all actions are seen to conform to the fundamental economic ideas of self-interest, of greatest benefit for least possible cost. This extends to all areas of society – It is not the structure of the economy that is extended across society but the subject of economic thinking, its implicit anthropology.

Towards a criticism of neoliberalism

Marx tended to see labour as being turned into a cog in the machine, and this was the major way labour ended up working for capital. However, Marx raised the possibility in the Grundrisse, that other human potentialities might be subsumed under capital – and this is where we are at now….

Capital no longer simply exploits labour, understood as the physical capacity to transform objects, but puts to work the capacities to create and communicate that traverse social relations. This subsumption involves not only the formation of what Marx referred to as a specifically capitalist mode of production, but also the incorporation of all subjective potential, the capacity to communicate, to feel, to create, to think, into productive powers for capital.

For Negri… as production moves from the closed space of the factory to become distributed across all of social space, encompassing all spheres of cultural and social existence, neoliberalism presents an image of society as a market, effacing production altogether and neoliberal power works by dispersing bodies and individuals through privatization and isolation.

To put the problem in Foucault’s terms, what has disappeared in neoliberalism is the tactical polyvalence of discourse; everything is framed in terms of interests, freedoms and risks. As Wendy Brown argues, one can survey the quotidian effects or practices of governmentality in the manner in which individualized/market based solutions appear in lieu of collective political solutions: gated communities for concerns about security and safety; bottled water for concerns about water purity; and private schools (or vouchers) for failing public schools, all of which offer the opportunity for individuals to opt out rather than address political problems. Privatization is not just neoliberalism’s strategy for dealing with the public sector, what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession, but a consistent element of its particular form of governmentality, its ethos, everything becomes privatized, institutions, structures, issues, and problems that used to constitute the public.24 It is privatization all the way down.

As Foucault argues, neoliberalism operates less on actions, directly curtailing them, then on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibility…. Competing ideas must address this!

Sources/ related posts…

The full article on neoliberalism and subjectivity.

Neoliberalism: A Short Introduction.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

NB for some irrational reason Google regards ‘h*m* as objectionable content despite the obvious scientific meaning as it is used here!

Are Downshifters Resisting Neoliberalism?

This is a summary of Verdow: The subject who thinks economically? Comparative money subjectivities in neoliberal context

The findings below are based on a comparative study of the money values of 3 groups of Australian generation Xers -‘ordinary’ low and high income individuals and ‘downshifters’. The study is based on a sample of 41 interviewees from one region in Australia, using unstructured interviews with the question ‘what is the good life’ as a starting point.

The study looks at how neoliberalism it might shape subjective identity through the lens of money meanings, looking at respondents’ attitudes to money goals, money values, money boundaries and their relation to temporality. It shows that while ‘ordinary’ middle and low income participants’ subjectivities strongly reference lay (everyday) forms of neoliberalism, some aspects of downshifters’ money meanings proactively undermine them.

To couch this in more theoretical terms the study analyses the ‘particular manner of living’ (Read, 2009: 27) that participants narrate; or what Foucault (1997: 298) would call ‘the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self’ by which individuals regulate themselves.

Specific Findings

Key theories of neoliberalism are enacted through adult subjective money meanings of middle- and low-income groups in the following ways:

  1. Both value economic entrepreneurialism: having freedom, independence,self-reliance and the opportunity for consumer choice.
  2. Money is viewed as a form of personal security (from unpredictable life events, or anxiety)
  3. Participants emphasizeself-responsibility for the management and/or improvement of their circumstance. In line with Buchan (1997: 270), the values and goals of the middle- and low-income participants emphasize economic thinking as the ‘condition of moral health’. This is the subject who thinks economically, embroiled in a ‘manner of governing that is actualized in habits, perceptions and subjectivity’ (Read, 2009: 34).
  4. Economic ‘freedoms’ are envisaged as empowering projects for the middle-income participants, for the low-income participants they generate anxiety through the absence of a means to achieve them.
  5. Money use for the middle-income participants is limited to an intimate social sphere, including private use and extending to family and close friends, or whatBrown (2006: 42) names a citizenship of ‘self-care’. For the low-income participants – there is an imposed permeability to their money status; that they are part-owned by others. This dependence is experienced as stigma, or self-inadequacy.
  6. With respect to temporality, middle-income participants are confident of a clear linear future, including projects, goals and possibilities. Low-income participants emphasize the present, where, due to unachievable aspirations, future expectations are unclear and become anxiety generating.

Downshifter themes also present habits and perceptions that (in a few cases) fit with neoliberal tenets:

  1. Their emphasis on takingself-responsibility, and their agency around goals of health and personal growth (Joseph, 2013).
  2. The curtailing of collective transformation forneoliberal subjects (Read, 2009: 36) is also observed, in that there is no collective organization in their efforts towards behaviour transformation.

Notwithstanding these exceptions, downshifters in this study tend to challenge principles of neoliberalism.

  1. Downshifters’ money values demonstrate an activemoral rethinking of money priorities, demoting its value relative to quality of life and connectedness with others.
  2. Their goals are less material and they do not perceive a low income as a failure toself-regulate (Walker, 2011). Rather, downshifters emphasize quality and meaning in work, social contribution and personal and spiritual growth.
  3. Their money boundaries are permeable, as personal money is viewed as part of taking moral responsibility for a wider social sphere.
  4. Similarly, their confidence in the future is not economically oriented, and temporality tends to be non-linear. Their focus is on being adaptive and reflective in response to possibilities that life may, or may not, present to them.

Where theories and social critiques of neoliberalism state in variegated ways that its disciplinary power is near total (e.g. it is viewed as a ‘leviathan’ by Wacquant [2010: 211], which offers no ‘ameliorative outcome’ [Whitehead and Crawshaw, 2014: 24]), the downshifters offer an alternative possibility. Based on these terms, monetary values and goals are reoriented, and include taking responsibility for the other.

The downshifters’ subjectivity is transformed, but not in neoliberal terms of competition in order to maximize economic options and futures. Rather, their behaviour accounts for currencies of personal and social health, through strategies including working with and for others so that they, too, may experience social and economic opportunities for transformed futures.

This study demonstrates that neoliberalism does not psychologically govern everyone’s soul (Rose, 1990).

Qualifications

There is risk in romanticizing downshifter experiences, as if having a low income is preferable should the right attitude accompany it. Research shows that downshifters often have the ability to adapt to their low income because they can draw on a middle-income ‘tool kit’ of resources and networks.

Further research highlighting other ‘deviant’ cases, and in particular understanding their epistemological differences in terms of how they are resilient in the face of specific neoliberal subjectivities and agencies (Gershon, 2011: 138), would be an important contribution to this knowledge.

Also noteworthy is that the relationship between neoliberal money meanings and their effects on social relations captured by this data does not account for the presence of ‘relational work’ (e.g. see Zelizer, 2012; see also Block, 2012; Tilly 1988), a salient dimension of the sociological study of money. Further study with a focus on participant money practices in the context of key relationships would provide greater depth to our understanding of how neoliberal subjectivities are embedded in specific social and relational practices

What is Individualisation?

where individuals are forced to spend more time and effort deciding on what choices to make.

Last Updated on August 20, 2021 by Karl Thompson

The concept of individualisation was developed to describe the process where the increasing rapidity of social change and greater uncertainty force individuals to spend more time and effort deciding on what choices to make in their daily lives, and where they have to accept greater individual responsibility for the consequences of those choices.

It is a concept most closely associated with the late modern sociological perspectives of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens.

The easiest way to understand it is to contrast it to the concept of ‘individual freedom’ in postmodern thought.

In postmodernism, the breakdown of traditional social norms and ways of live are presented as something positive – resulting in greater freedom of choice for individuals – since the 1980s especially people do have much more freedom to choose their careers, their family situation (whether to get married or not), their faith, even their sexuality.

In short, postmodern society is one in which people have greater freedom to construct their own individual identity.

HOWEVER, according to Beck and Giddens, postmodernists have overstated the extent to which individuals are free, there is more going on.

The move to postmodernity has also meant that there is more social instability and uncertainty – careers last for a shorter period of time, relationships are more likely to break down, the welfare state provides less security for us if we fall on hard times, and even experts (scientists/ doctors) seem less able to give us definitive answers on how we should live.

THUS, it is not so much a case of postmodern society providing us with opportunities to be free to do as we please, rather we are forced into making hundreds if not thousands of choices in order to simply get-by – we are ‘individualised’, this is NOT the same thing as just simply being free.

Individualisation – In More Depth….

Individualisation is ‘compulsory’ rather than being about genuine personal freedom, and is an integral part of self-hood in the neoliberal (dis) order.

As Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2001/2002) have argued, individuals are compelled now to make agonistic choices throughout their life-course – there may be no guidance – and they are required to take sole responsibility for the consequences of choices made or, indeed, not made.

Individualisation is a contradictory phenomenon, both exhilarating and terrifying. It really does feel like freedom, especially for women liberated from patriarchal control. But, when things go wrong there is no excuse for anyone. The individual is penalised harshly not only for personal failure but also for sheer bad luck in a highly competitive and relentlessly harsh social environment. Although the Becks deny it, such a self – condemned to freedom and lonely responsibility – is exactly the kind of self cultivated by neoliberalism, combining freewheeling consumer sovereignty with enterprising business acumen.

Signposting

This concept is a very advanced one for A-level sociology students who can use it to criticise Postmodernism which they are required to study as part of the second year module in Theory and Methods.

Sources:

The Neoliberal Self by Jim McGuigan

What is the Neoliberal Subject?

Last Updated on May 2, 2018 by Karl Thompson

What are the key aspects of the neoliberal subject?

Below is a brief summary of some of the key theorizing around and indicators of the successful neoliberal subject, drawn from Verdouw 2016 (1)

  1. They are an entrepreneurial, competitive creature, forming a ‘company of one’ (Read 2009)
  2. Freedom is defined as the freedom to choose market strategies (Browne 2005)
  3. Practices are presented as freely chosen, responsibility is taken regardless of constraint (Brown 2005, Gill 2008)
  4. They subscribe to a cultural trope of individual moral responsibility (Wacquant 2010)
  5. They close off alternative moral possibilities (Whitehead and Crashaw 2014, Read 2009)
  6. Their main goal is economic entrepreneurial freedom, more specifically independence, self-reliance, choice (to be realised through markets) and (financial) security
  7. They tend to be materialistic
  8. They perceive the self as a project, and themselves as a rational economic actors
  9. problems are construed as ones with market solutions
  10. They focus on profit and productivity
  11. They emphasize self-responsibility, agency and initiative.
  12. They value money generation. comfort, leisure and success
  13. In terms of money boundaries they emphasise privatisation, dispersion and isolation
  14. They define citizenship as self-care
  15. If they Living in the shadow of financialised norm
  16. They subscribe to the implausibility of social transformation
  17. They only take Responsibility for family and small groups of friends
  18. They are confident in self-identification with the future
  19. They are never in the moment, they are future oriented
  20. They have a clear, linear view of the future.

NB – There may well be some overlap with the points above, this is a starting point post to be refined over the long term.

According to McGuigan (2014, see 2 below) – the neoliberal self is comprised of the following characteristics:

  1. A self which is subjected to compulsory individualisation and combines a freewheeling consumer sovereignty with enterprising business acumen; a self condemned to freedom and lonely responsibility. The individual is penalised harshly not only for personal failure but also for sheer bad luck in a highly competitive and relentlessly harsh social environment
  2. A cool-capitalist way of life that does not appear to insist upon conformity and even permits a limited measure of bohemian posturing, personal experimentation and geographical exploration (‘the year out’, for instance).
  3. Generational tension is a distinct feature of the neoliberal imaginary, including the rejection of ‘dinosaur’ attitudes concerning all sorts of matters cherished by an older generation. In this sense, the neoliberal self is connected to a generational structure of feeling, a selfhood counter-posed to the old social-democratic self. Concretely this will typically involve enthusiasm for the latest communications gadget.
  4. The consumption aspect of the neoliberal self is the most obvious, involving the subjectivity cultivated by the cool seduction of promotional culture and acutely brand-aware commodity fetishism. Naomi Klein (2000) said most of what needs to be said about it at the turn of the Millennium.
  5. ‘Generation Debt’ – he doesn’t say much about this, but I’m guessing the neoliberal self is comfortable with debt. NB to my mind this contradicts fundamentally with ‘capital accumulation’.
  6. Significant numbers work in the ‘creative industries’ in wealthier countries are caught in a ‘neoliberal trap’. The paradoxical life conditions of such professional-managerial groups have been written about by Andrew Ross (2009). Personal initiative and frantic networking in the precarious labour market of short-term contracts, where enterprising ‘creativity’ is at a premium
  7. As Boltanski and Chiapello (1999/2005: 199) put it, for cadres instilled with ‘the new spirit of capitalism’, in effect, ‘Autonomy exchanged for security’.
  8. People subjected to uncertainty and unpredictability especially in so called ‘creative’ and allied careers, though not only there, must fashion the kind of self that can cope where trade-union representation has been eliminated or severely restricted. This kind of self is a neoliberal self, figuring a competitive individual who is exceptionally self-reliant and rather indifferent to the fact that his or her predicament is shared with others – and, therefore, incapable of organising as a group to do anything about it. Such a person must be ‘cool’ in the circumstances, selfishly resourceful and fit in order to survive under social-Darwinian conditions. Many simply fall by the wayside, exterminated by the croak-voiced Daleks of neoliberalism. However, the mass-media of communication hardly ever report upon the down-side of the neoliberal experience
  9. Today, it is impossible to talk of an ideal self without mentioning the role of the celebrity, larger-than-life figures to be admired and maybe even emulated, in an old-fashioned term functional as role models of aspiration – ‘dressed-down cool capitalists like Bill Gates or “Ben and Jerry”’ (Budgen, 2000: 151), Steve Jobbs, and today Mark Zuckerberg.

Specific examples of neoliberal subjectivities?

If you struggle a bit with this sort of thing, then you might like my more simplified version: ‘What is Neoliberalism‘?

Sources 

(1) The subject who thinks economically? Comparative money subjectivities in neoliberal context, Julia Joanne Verdouw. Journal of Sociology – August 29, 2016.

(2) McGuigan, J (2014) ‘The Neoliberal Self’, Culture Unbound, Volume 6, 2014: 223–240.

 

Bourdieu’s Structuration Theory

Last Updated on March 12, 2017 by Karl Thompson

Bourdieu didn’t like the label ‘social theorist’ because he insisted that there was a fundamentally important relationship between empirical data, research methods and ‘theory’.

He was not interested in making grand theoretical claims, but rather was engaged in examining particular substantive areas (fields) of social life that existed at particular times and places, such as fields of education.

Drawing inspiration from Marx and Weber, Bourdieu argued that all aspects of social life must be examined in terms of the power relations they embody – the main aim of sociology is to expose the power of elite groups, which would normally not be visible without sociological analysis.

This ‘exposure’ element is different to Giddens’ structuration theory, who generally assumes the knowledgeability of subjects, while for Bourdieu actors are not necessarily conscious of the operation of power.  Bourdieu also focused more on the group, rather than the individual agent.

Bourdieu has been criticise as just being  a Marxist, for seemingly analysing power relations in terms of how structure and ideology reproduce individuals. However, Bourdieu saw his position as successfully mediating between objectivism and subjectivism. He claimed these are transcended by his key concept of habitus – a term meant to describe how social conditions act upon and shape individuals’ actions and how also people are –within certain limits – capable of creative responses to the situations they find themselves in (Reay 2004).

A habitus is the characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, acting and experiencing shared by all members of a certain group.  It describes how social structures act on individuals in a group and how individuals actively respond to the social situations created by those structures – a person’s practices can either maintain or transform the social situations people operate within.

For Bourdieu the primary groups in society are social class groups. He understands power as the domination of one class over another, via attempts at legitimising their world view.

For Bourdieu, the habitus encompasses both  objective and subjective, passive and active, material and ideal elements.

The more objective elements concern wealth and power, and the socialisation processes – socialisation happens at a mental as well as a bodily level — the tiniest details of how we walk, or blow are knows signify aspects of our socialisation, mostly our class background, and for Bourdieu we are not fully aware that everything we do is expressive of the habitus into which we’ve been socialised. Instead the habits disguises itself by making people see the world in common sense ways, and these do not allow critical attention to be paid to it. People just experience what they experience as ‘common sense’.

We do not even realise we have a habitus until we step outside it, into a different context – e.g. a working class person going to a society wedding, realising their ordinary ways of being just don’t fit.

The habitus ‘adjusts expectations to reality’ – so that our subjective outlook meshes with our objective conditions – thus a working class person would just not expect to eat caviar for breakfast, we just accept this.

Bourdieu maintains that habitus does not simply constrain individuals – it also allows action to take place, but it always provides a limited set of possibilities, most of this happens within the realm of practical consciousness.

Bourdieu has been criticised for understating the extent to which people are reflexive today – i.e. it appears that people do increasingly reflect on themselves and their habitus and consciously seek to change what they are.

More to follow>>>

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