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"Commodification England."
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Performativity, Commodification and Commitment: An I-Spy Guide to the Neoliberal University
The author was a student in two \"plate glass\", welfare state universities, Essex (founded 1964) and Sussex (founded 1961), although they were very different. Essex was very small, socially very diverse and politically \"exciting\", to say the least--a sort of comprehensive university. His sociology teachers there profoundly influenced him intellectually and they taught him to think. Sussex, \"Balliol by the Sea\" as it was dubbed, had a very different social profile and institutional habitus but was pedagogically very adventurous. The author's aim as a researcher and a teacher became to provide tools for others to think with. He was produced and formed as a welfare state academic subject in these contexts. Over the past 20 years, he has been re-formed as a neoliberal academic subject. In this personal reflection, the author examines the growth of the neoliberal university during his lifetime and laments the commodification of academic practice and the commercial ethos of much of the higher education system. (Contains 2 notes.)
Journal Article
The financialisation of the social project: Embedded liberalism, neoliberalism and home ownership
This paper argues that the relentless logic of commodification has served to undermine a key element of the social cement of contemporary capitalism: home ownership. In addressing this issue, the paper explores the development of the post war 'social project' of home ownership with particular reference to mature home ownership societies such as the USA, Japan, Britain and Australia. The paper then outlines the new fault lines and fractures which have emerged in post-crisis home ownership systems and the way in which a more vigorous, financialised private landlordism has emerged from the debris of the subprime meltdown. A key argument is that in a new and more intensified process of housing commodification, the social project promise of home ownership for a previous generation has shifted to a promise of private landlordism for current generations. In summary, the social project of Keynesian-embedded liberalism has been undermined by the economic project of neoliberalism.
Journal Article
Neoliberalizing Nature? Market Environmentalism in Water Supply in England and Wales
The 1989 privatization of the water supply sector in England and Wales is a much-cited model of market environmentalism-the introduction of market institutions to natural resource management as a means of reconciling goals of efficiency and environmental conservation. Yet, more than a decade after privatization, the application of market mechanisms to water supply management is much more limited than had been expected. Drawing on recent geographical research on commodities, this article analyzes the reasons for this retrenchment of the market environmentalist project. I make three related claims: resource commodification is a contested, partial, and transient process; commodification is distinct from privatization; and fresh water is a particularly uncooperative commodity. To illustrate these claims, I explore how water's geography underpinned the failure of commodification initiatives in England and Wales. I focus specifically on contradictions faced by industry regulators, water companies, and the government when attempting to implement direct competition, universal metering, and full-cost pricing of water supply. The failure to resolve these contradictions was a critical driver in the reregulation of the water supply industry and in the overall trend toward improvement in environmental and drinking water quality, a finding that underpins my closing argument-that neoliberalization is implicated in processes of reregulation that rescript the entitlements of both humans and nonhumans, with outcomes that are not necessarily negative for what we conventionally delimit as the environment.
Journal Article
Divided we fall: the commodification of primary medical care
Allowing segmentation of general practice is a risky strategy with largely unknown consequences
Journal Article
Domiciliary care: the formal and informal labour process
Domiciliary carers are paid care workers who travel to the homes of older people to assist with personal routines. Increasingly, over the past 20 years, the delivery of domiciliary care has been organised according to market principles and portrayed as the ideal type of formal care; offering cost savings to local authorities and independence for older people. Crucially, the work of the former 'home help' is transformed as domiciliary carers are now subject to the imperative of private, competitive accumulation which necessitates a constant search for increases in labour productivity. Drawing on qualitative data from domiciliary carers, managers and stakeholders, this article highlights the commodification of caring labour and reveals the constraints, contradictions and challenges of paid care work. Labour Process Theory offers a means of understanding the political economy of care work and important distinctions in terms of the formal and informal domiciliary care labour process.
Journal Article
Developing an offsetting programme: tensions, dilemmas and difficulties in biodiversity market-making in England
In 2011, the UK government set in motion a process to establish a formal biodiversity offsetting programme in England, as an attempt to tackle biodiversity loss as a result of development. Drawing on critical approaches to the commodification of nature, this article traces the dilemmas encountered by the UK government in its endeavours to roll out a biodiversity offsetting programme in the English planning system. Based on 34 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, documentary analysis and participant observation at policy-focused events, the paper aims to show how the promise of reconciling development and conservation proved difficult to deliver. In government attempts to enrol sympathetic actors, disputes emerged over the purpose and fine detail of the proposals. Deeper tensions were revealed in clashes between governmental emphasis on deregulation and advocates’ calls for strong mandatory rules and well-resourced oversight, while efforts to balance complex ecology with market demands for simplicity and certainty undermined the promise of objective biodiversity metrics delivering uncontroversial hard numbers. Though the English case is in many ways context-specific, the problems experienced raise wider political questions around establishing meaningful offsetting schemes in any part of the world.
Journal Article
The Intensification of Rankings Logic in an Increasingly Marketised Higher Education Environment
Rankings and online comparison sites have both facilitated and shaped the marketisation of higher education in England, the UK as a whole and elsewhere. They have facilitated marketisation by introducing greater competition between and within higher education institutions. Ultimately, they accomplish the transformation of qualities into quantities, which is both required by, and a consequence of, the commodification and privatisation of higher education. Rankings have also helped to embed the logic of the market within organisational structures and processes and within the minds and practices of organisational members. In some ways, in a highly regulated UK higher education market, rankings became a substitute for more authentic market mechanisms. However, these processes have intensified with the transfer (in England) of the majority of the cost of study to students and the emergence of more sophisticated websites presenting detailed statistics that enable prospective students to compare courses and institutions on indicators such as modes of student assessment and employment outcomes. This article seeks to understand how different types of university and college are responding to this intensification of rankings logic amidst the further marketisation of higher education in the UK. It employs the concepts of internalisation and institutionalisation to analyse how these responses evolve and vary between institutions at different places in the rankings, but eschews a completely Foucauldian interpretation which, in the author’s view, cannot fully explain the responses within institutions (and over time) to ‘data-driven technologies’.
Journal Article
Beyond Agriculture: Alternative Geographies of Rural Land Investment and Place Effects across the United Kingdom
Global land ownership patterns have been shifting in recent decades, as institutional and non-traditional investors redirect capital into rural areas. Such investment is a stimulating alternative for innovative profit-driven land uses that move beyond agriculture. This paper explores how ‘new money’ economies have created place effects in three rural case studies across the United Kingdom, through concepts of built, natural, social, and economic capital. The case studies are informed by secondary research, site visits, and interviews, providing snapshots of investment impact. They represent diverse transformations in rural land use via new forms of direct investment, active investment, and processes of financing rather than financialisation, with distinct spatial and temporal characteristics. The case studies include new wine production in Kent, England; transforming the Menie Estate into Trump International Golf Links Scotland (TIGLS); and farm diversification in Northern Ireland. The conclusions tell three investment stories, where place effects reflect the dichotomies, contestation, and symbiosis between investors and local contexts. New land uses create place effects where economic potential often conflicts with natural capital impacts, although they foster knowledge creation and exchange. The underlying values of the investors and their navigation of local politics also have key roles to play in shaping the built, natural, social, and economic place effects.
Journal Article
Lifecourse determinants and incomes in retirement: Belgium and the United Kingdom compared
In this paper, the impact of lifecourse family and labour market experiences on household incomes of older people in Belgium and the United Kingdom (UK) is analysed. To this end, panel data and life-history information from the Panel Study of Belgian Households and the British Household Panel Survey are combined. The results show that old-age income is indeed influenced by previous lifecourse experiences, and that differences between Belgium and the UK can be explained in terms of (the development over time of) welfare regime arrangements. Family experiences have a larger impact on old-age incomes in ‘male-breadwinner’ Belgium, while in Britain labour market events are more important. As social transfers in Britain are more aimed at poverty prevention and less at income replacement, a ‘scarring effect’ of unemployment persists even into old age. Also, the more of one's career is spent in blue-collar work or self-employment/farming, the lower the income in old age. A new finding is that, notwithstanding the high level of ‘de-commodification’ achieved by the Belgian welfare state, this effect turns out to be significantly stronger in Belgium than in the UK. Compared to the market, the welfare state is hence a more efficient ‘mechanism’ of stratification for incomes in old age.
Journal Article