Political Economy

This book has 22 chapters by reknowned New Zealand authors on a variety of realms that have been affected by neoliberal ideology. It offers suggestions to move beyond the free market faith and explore new territories for politics, policy and values. Each chapter is direct and straight forward. It does not assume any prior knowledge. This is a fantastic book for lay audiences and experts alike.

The purpose of this research is to explain how Brazilian higher education becomes a commodity of
global capitalism through a focus on institutional culture change, which transforms academic independence
toward a model of corporate-sponsored applied research. Brazilian federal universities
are invested in S.T.E.M. education and are instruments in the country’s twenty-first century
hegemonic aspirations. This national development strategy has ramifications for the humanities,
fine arts, and social sciences. Applied science and public-private partnerships (PPP) have irreversibly
changed the trajectory of the Brazilian public university and its relationship to global capitalism.
This research examines these changes to higher education and Brasília’s broader political
agenda through a critical political economy perspective.

Hawaii 5.0 is an agent-based model designed to test whether a political economy framework explains the differential emergence and maintenance of hierarchy within Hawai’i and Maui. The model was constructed in five stages, each building more complexity into the model, with the model presented here having the ability to test differential environment and agent wealth parameters. The model produced novel results, affirming that political economy frameworks were suitable for investigating and describing the emergence and maintenance of political structures and hierarchy, and demonstrating trends for understanding how and why the patterns observed archaeologically and ethnographically occurred. In addition to this the model allowed investigation into the nature of political economy itself making explicit many of the objects which had previously been assumed, thereby making headway to overcoming the tautological inferences which have previously been problematic in this area of study.

Determining whether a slum prevention or upgrading initiative has been successful depends on expectation and what the goals of the initiative are. The recent reviewing of some of the poverty alleviation initiatives is a clear indicator that the current governance of Botswana is determined in improving its people’s lives. Provision of urban services like water, sanitation, and access to housing also indicate that the government accepts urbanization. Generally, as adequate policies are implemented and the local economy grows slums gradually disappear as residents invest in their homes and upgrade them over time. The shack slowly becomes a house, and the slum becomes a decent suburb. How quickly this process happens depends largely on how fast a city’s economy grows and how effective the urban policies are. It must also be understood that turning a poor, informal settlement into an integrated city and establishing the necessary linkages into the economy can take years. Therefore, with a growing economy, the government should be commitment to slum prevention and upgrading, and with the community dedication, the slum will gradually transform into a suburb.

A recent Aljazeera  report on ‘Cambodia’s Orphan Business’ explains “how ‘voluntourism’ could be fueling the exploitation of Cambodian children” (Ruhfus, 2012). Anti-orphanage tourism movements have emerged to resist the growth of Cambodia’s contested orphanage tourism industry, which is blamed for widespread corruption and the exploitation of children for profit. Taking a Polanyian political economy approach, this article illustrates how the emergence of and response to the orphanage tourism industry represents, in Karl Polanyi’s words, a “double movement” between the neoliberalisation of orphanages and the corollary protective countermovement by anti-orphanage tourism campaigns that challenge the industry’s morality and legitimacy. It argues that while resistance to the commodification of orphanages under the newly neoliberalised Cambodian economy reflects Polanyi’s double movement thesis, the limits of this resistance are also indicative of how countermovements are challenged by the broader political economy in which they operate.

Garland, C. (forthcoming, 2014) ‘As Barriers Fall, Contingency Becomes Possibility: Protest Resisting and Escaping Containment and Categorization’, Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorisation in Eds. Lamond, I. and Spracklen, K. 'Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure (London: Rowman & Littlefield International) Hardback ISBN/9781783480760 Paperback ISBN/978-1-78348-077-7 eBook ISBN/978-1-78348-078-4 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783480760

The Rhetoric of Economics is a course that illustrates the important relationship between persuasion and modern science. Examining the discipline of economics as its particular object of analysis, the course will argue that this field of thought must be understood as an attempt to rhetorically secure belief in an innate market logic that undergirds all human behaviors and social practices. Both critical and historical in its engagement with a wide variety of economic texts, the rhetoric of economics will provide students with a vocabulary to grapple with many of the most pressing problems of the 21st century. These topics include, but are not limited to, financial crises, globalization, living wages, and climate change. An open mind and willingness to question taken for granted assumptions about society and culture are important prerequisites for the course.

This essay expands the rhetoric of economics conversation started by economist Deirdre McCloskey. Through a close engagement with Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1979, concerning the dual problematics of liberalism and biopolitics, we argue for theorizing economic rhetoric as a governmental problem of order, or taxis, which arranges value among divergent subjects beyond the dichotomies of material/cultural and global/local. This approach toward rhetoric, we further contend, takes as its strategic form what Foucault and Agamben have called a dispositif. We demonstrate this premise through a case study of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s notion of freakonomics, suggesting that it can be understood as a rhetorical dispositif working within the broader political rationality of neoliberal governmentality. We end by gesturing toward a rhetoric of the common as an alternative to the dispositif of freakonomics.