Neoliberalism as discourse: between Foucauldian political economy and Marxian poststructuralism

Neoliberalism as concept

“…Its brush strokes thicken to the point where they lose specificity, and become unwieldy and blunt, wanting in analytical or even descriptive capacity. Indeed, much of the recent conceptual critique of neoliberalism is directed squarely at this super--sized omni--present model, particularly because it fails to account for contingency, or for the wide contextual variance and contradictory types of outcomes (Larner 2003, Mudge 2008, Birch and Mykhenkho 2010, Springer 2012. For example, Aihwa Ong's work on neoliberalism starts with a critique of what she terms 'Big--N' neoliberalism that takes the form of 'an economic tsunami that is gathering force across the planet' (Ong 2007:1).…”

Las "cárceles del capital humano": trabajo y vidas precarias en la juventud universitaria

“…En una lectura del neoliberalismo como forma de gubernamentalidad (Lorey, 2006(Lorey, , 2015Springer, 2012), se puede concebir el currículum como uno de los dispositivos que interactúan con los sujetos y marcan límites a la acción de estos. Al pasar de situaciones donde la precariedad permanecía circunscrita a la dimensión laboral, a otras situaciones en las cuales la precariedad afecta al conjunto de las dimensiones biográficas, las viejas formas de disciplina se muestran del todo insuficientes para asegurar una conducta que garantice la reproducción social o, cuando menos, los comportamientos óptimos para el mantenimiento de un determinado orden normativo.…”

On the perils of invoking neoliberalism in public health critique

“…We need also to be reflexive about claims to neoliberalism, in that of course our critique is inevitably embroiled in the very processes it seeks to analyze. Indeed, it may be productive to think of neoliberalism as a discourse as much as a reality (Springer, 2012). In sum, we are not calling for the abandonment of the concept -paraphrasing Clifford (1988) on yet another troubled notion ('culture'), neoliberalism seems to be a deeply compromised idea we cannot yet do without.…”