新自由主义全球化对“医疗化”的形构

“医疗化”与新自由主义全球化之间有怎样的关联?国内外社会学界对此尚缺乏系统的分析。本文以物质力量、制度、观念为分析框架,探讨新自由主义如何加剧并转变全球的“医疗化”状况。在物质上,产、官、学复合体网络的多方利益形成有力的市场力量,从而促成医疗化;在制度上,则是由于药品之国际专利权的制定与各国导致医疗化的政策;在观念上,某些压力团体因为要强化“竞争力”而推动某种服药的观念、个人自主健康管理的盛行、风险恐慌的论述普遍化及另类医疗的兴起等氛围都加剧了“医疗化”。 即便有反新自由主义的力量,但医疗的供给面与需求面均被牵涉到因商品化可获利的普遍利益中,因而新自由主义的结构性力量仍难以撼动,从而使医疗化加剧。     

Street art in non-capital urban centres: between exploiting commercial appeal and expressing social concerns

ABSTRACT

How do local cultural agents in particular places adopt new policies towards street art as having commercial and political value? The present article takes up this question through a discussion of street art festivals and their role within urban culture and cultural policies in two large Russian cities. It considers the activities of cultural intermediaries promoting street art vis-à-vis the existing constellation of over-centralized politics, creative industries, urban development and precarious labour. Drawing on fieldwork in these cities and conducting critical sociological analysis of the street art curating, I show how the appropriation of street art by cultural intermediaries is subtly changing its ecology and values and argue that this change contributes to the range of ambivalences of neoliberal cultural politics. The article also sheds light on cultural policy and practice in Russia at a juncture characterised by the impact of globalization, on the one hand, and the country's isolationist and conservative politics, on the other.     

Contesting the neoliberal project for agriculture: Productivist and multifunctional trajectories in the European Union and Australia

The liberalisation of agricultural trade is strongly contested as an international policy project. In the context of the current World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha trade round, concerns revolve around the implications of freer trade for rural livelihoods and environments. Analysis of this complex and morally charged issue offers important insights into the nature of resistance to the neoliberal agenda. This resistance has been expressed in terms of perceived threats to the ‘multifunctionality’ of agriculture and its ability to provide public environmental and social benefits. We focus specifically on Australia and the European Union (EU), key players in the WTO process but diametrically opposed in their embrace of, or resistance to, agricultural neoliberalisation. While the EU has sought to maintain trade barriers in order to protect both marginal areas and the market advantages derived from a heavily-subsidised, productivist agriculture, Australia relies on ‘competitive productivism’ – unsubsidised, highly productive agriculture – to win markets. There is nevertheless evidence that the compatibility of market rule with agri-environmental (and, to a lesser extent, social) sustainability is being contested in both Australia and the EU, particularly at the regional scale. The nature and terms of this contestation are different, however, given the radically divergent macro-economic and socio-political contexts in which it is being framed. The debate about the socio-environmental implications of market opening within the agriculturally protectionist environment of the EU is largely anticipatory and risk-averting, while in the already market-exposed Australian context it is increasingly compensatory and harm-minimising. In this paper, we argue that neoliberalisation as a policy agenda is reshaped in different states and regions through processes of resistance and accommodation arising from particular geographical, historical, political and institutional contexts, and as a response to crises.     

HYBRIDITY AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

There is a steady consensus within academic cultural studies concerning the fact that reifications (or ‘essentializations’) of ethnicity, whether literally meant or practically used, like reifications involving gender or national identity, are not good from a political perspective. The common response invokes hybridity as a counter-concept strong enough to dissolve the dangers of either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic reification and by the same token is able to ground a sufficiently fluid politics of identity/difference that might warrant the cultural redemption of the subaltern. Nevertheless, the political force of hybridity, such as it may be, remains to a large extent contained within a politics of the colour line. Without abandoning it, that is, without altogether abandoning the terrain of a politics of the subject, it would seem necessary to move beyond the theorization of hybridity in cultural studies in order to find ways to articulate subaltern resistance against the terror of dominant identities more effectively within a larger commitment to economic justice.

Hybridity categories, once they solidify into a strategic political project, circumscribe political life to subjective agency; but subjective agency does not exhaust the political. Ultimately, the postulation of subjective agency as the limit of the political remains trapped within a Cartesian game of calculation and counter-calculation which is by its very nature unable to break through and beyond the internalization of hegemony. Some appeal to a position of exteriority remains necessary in order to restitute the possibility of what,following Balibar, we might call ‘unconditional insurrection’. Unconditional insurrection does not name a voluntaristic project of world revolution. It names, rather, the possibility of an other history, of an alternative historical memory: a memory made possible by the simple fact that things could be, and could have been, other than what they are.     

Constructing Workers: Working-Class Formation under Neoliberalism

This introduction to “Constructing Workers” places the contributions to the special issue in the context of a review of central themes in a broader literature on the definition of workers, their public identities, and their rights. This literature has developed over the past 30 years in sociology and, especially, in social and labor history. At the same time, a more recent literature has emerged, most clearly in the USA, but also in other national settings, on the changing role of labor unions and other types of labor organization in an increasingly global economy. The two sets of scholarship are growing closer together and addressing importantly related themes, relevant both to more incisive sociological and historical understanding of the modes of labor organizing and regulation and to contemporary efforts to combat neoliberal restructuring of labor and class relations.

Rethinking the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ thesis

ABSTRACT

Numerous scholars have identified the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ as the key driver of the neoliberal transformation. These accounts emphasize the building of neoliberal hegemony through the mobilization of this collective, and the New Right parties who aligned to these ideas. We argue that Australia's corporatist road to neoliberalism pushes against this thesis, as the movement found little sympathy among policy makers. Rather, the thought collective acted more like a ‘ginger group’, attempting to radicalize public debate and create space for new neoliberal arrangements. In Australia, successive centre-left Labor governments rolled out neoliberalism in a series of formal corporatist arrangements with the trade union movement. This paper sets out a reconsideration of the role of the thought collective, on the basis of the Australian experience, and argues this can move us beyond the ideational determinism that has come to characterize key accounts of how neoliberalism developed.     

Critical feminist hope: the encounter of neoliberalism and popular feminism in WWE 24: Women’s Evolution

Scholarship has pointed to contemporary feminism’s popularity and cultural “luminosity.” While this research has highlighted the limitations of feminist politics in a context of neoliberal individualism, this paper seeks to ask what possibilities for critiques and transformation of gender inequalities might be enabled by feminism’s visibility in neoliberalism. Using a framework of critical feminist hope, we highlight that capitalism’s embrace of feminism inarguably limits its political scope, but it may also open up opportunities for new forms of representation. To illustrate this, the paper analyses WWE 24: Women’s Evolution, a “brandcasting” documentary made to mark the rebrand of the sport entertainment promotion’s women’s division in 2016. While never naming it directly, the documentary draws heavily upon the signifiers of popular feminism. Although this mobilisation is often highly limited, a critically hopeful feminist reading allows us to move beyond dismissing this text as an example of feminism’s “co-optation” by neoliberalism. We highlight the documentary’s scathing critique of past failings in the representation and treatment of women performers, and, more importantly, the way feminism is used to make the case for corporate re-structure and change.     

The Experiences of Human Service Managers in Contexts of Change and Uncertainty

Against a background of rapid and widespread changes to the delivery of human services and social welfare, this paper reports on a study into the experiences of managers of human services organisations. Within an interpretive methodology, the research utilised focus group and interview methods to examine the relevance and need for business, finance, and management skills from the perspective of managers in the human services. Results indicate that managers of human service organisations need advanced business, management, and finance skills to deal with change and uncertainty in contemporary and competitive service environments.

IMPLICATIONS

• Human service organisations in Australia are subject to change and uncertainty with new models of funding and increased accountability.

• Social workers employed as managers are under pressure to lead sustainable and accountable services, while still holding to social work principles.

• Social workers who manage organisations face a challenge of how to integrate business, management, and finance skills with the values and mission of social work.

     

“第三条道路”价值观的理论来源探析

"第三条道路"的价值观,是西方社会民主主义价值观念的现代转型,它以标榜超越传统"左"右"之争为基本价值取向,以自由、公正、团结为基本价值观念,是一个开放的价值观念体系。"第三条道路"的价值观,作为资本主义意识形态在全球化背景下的价值体现,具有比较复杂的理论来源,但基本的来源主要有五个方面:古典自由主义是其理论源头;马克思主义是其理论来源之一;传统社会民主主义价值观是其直接来源之一;新自由主义价值观则是其又一直接来源;宗教因素对其产生了复杂而深层次的影响。只有认清"第三条道路"的理论来源,才能更好地认清它的本质。