Ties that Collide Embeddedness under Democratization and Neo-liberalization (original) (raw)
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Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
Beginning in the 1980s, market pressures informed a redefinition of state responsibilities regarding welfare policies and social justice. In this context, public policy became a mainstream political tool to safeguard a minimum of welfare policy. Especially in Latin America, which underwent structural market and state reforms in the wake of the fiscal crises of the 1980s, this process has been palpable in educational systems. The pressures of oligopolies and the expanded presence of private actors in public schooling, from elementary school to higher education, point not only to the incorporation of private management strategies into the public domain and the need for adaptation to how capitalism is reengineering learning environments, but also to the weakness of the public. As state and public responsibilities are transferred to private actors, education becomes a matter of training and profitability, its function narrowed to the development of “human capital” and the reproduction of the labor force. This chapter builds from Marxist and decolonial perspectives to critique human capital theories (especially Gary Becker) in light of the geopolitics of knowledge, and to argue the need for public policy to reverse the structural social asymmetries and class cleavages in peripheral societies of Latin America. Public policy in education, as a counterpart of redistributive policy, can be conceived as a prospect of social development and emancipation committed to the quest for dignity and the denunciations of the contradictions of the discourse of citizenship in liberal democracies.
The role of market and state in the provision of public goods: shared land or exclusionary domain
Public and private provision of public goods have long coexisted, along with volunteer and informal arrangements (Powell, 2007). However, although public goods have tended to be associated with state provision, the rise of globalization and other political and economic phenomena casts doubt on the sustainability of a large welfare state, and private sector tools are gaining momentum (Dean, 2012). The aim of this essay is to analyse whether there are reasons to argue against private provision of public goods. The paper first introduces the necessary concepts to frame the debate. It then reviews to what extent private sector is dominant today in the provision of public goods. After that, it analyses what reasons are given in favour of private provision, followed by an examination of the potential reasons to argue against it. The essay suggests that we can find reasons to state against the provision of public goods by the private sector, but that private arrangements also have benefits and cannot be merely discarded.
The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
Social Science Journal, 2022
In this age of academic specialisms thoughtful, wide-ranging books periodically appear that refresh or even redirect the mainstream of discourse in the social sciences. Here I include exceptional books like The condition of postmodernity by David Harvey (1989), Trust by Francis Fukuyama (1995), and Why nations fail by Daron Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). The third pillar could possibly become another one of those highly influential books. Raghuram Rajan-University of Chicago professor, former IMF chief economist, and former head of India's central bank-does a masterful job of demonstrating how, throughout history, dramatic changes in circumstances, often involving rapid changes in population or technology, can disturb the comfortable balance that evolves between the state, our various markets that allocate factors and resources, and the communities that we live in. This book digests a lot of material and the reader should be acquainted, at the very least, with the literatures of economics, political science, and sociology in order to fully appreciate his main concerns. Rajan has also produced a very eclectic volume: before now I can't recall ever seeing Aristotle, Charles Murray, and Taylor Swift mentioned on the same pages. However, it is clear from his opening remarks that Rajan has become disillusioned with mainstream economics: in fact, he recommends a transformation into socioeconomics (but not political economy), where research might better acknowledge that markets are embedded in a complex web of human relations that often stretch across both time and space. In his Preface and Introduction Rajan clarifies that he uses a somewhat restricted interpretation of community, which he views as any social group whose members reside in a known locality, who share the same government(s), and who have a common cultural or social heritage. He sees the (urban) neighbourhood as being the archetypical community unit of current times, functioning much like the manor in feudal times, or the tribe in even earlier times. The key attribute here is the physical closeness of members even though Rajan does not have the spatial bias of the geographer, human ecologist, or city planner. Certain popular uses of the term, as in electronic or religious communities, do not qualify because this condition of proximity is violated when members are so dispersed. As the subtitle of the book indicates, he sees that the state, on the one hand, and markets, on the other, have both steadily encroached on the community for nearly half a century, but especially so in very recent times. In fact, many activities once performed by members of the community-including the birth and schooling of children, the building of roads and houses, and the movement of people and materials-are now largely undertaken by markets although the rules and standards for those activities are initiated and monitored by the state. In any case, Rajan (pp. 10-11) not only sees the community as "contributing to our sense of who we are" but offering "a richer range of transactions … than would be possible if everything had to be contractual and strictly enforced by the law." While making this observation the work of Oliver Hart on the value of contracts in social interaction is recognized but, surprisingly, no mention is made of the extensive thought given to social capital either by sociologists like Robert Putnam (2000) or by regional scientists like Hans Westlund and Johan Larsson (2016). Consequently, Rajan seems to view the recent demise of
Latin American Politics and Society, 2015
Research directions on states and markets
A Research Agenda for Economic Anthropology, 2019
Which research trends promise to make the anthropology of states and markets particularly interesting during the years to come? What do these trends tell us about the nature of economic anthropology at a time when more and more of our scholarship is conducted within bureaucracies rather than local communities? In this chapter I attempt to answer both of these questions. I begin with a brief sketch of insights that result from treating states and markets as essentially different, albeit related, entities, drawing especially on recent work on the nature of neoliberal-ism and global inequality. The bulk of this chapter, however, will focus on those aspects of state and market institutions that show them to be largely collaborative, similar social formations. In doing so, I mean to suggest that future anthropologi-cal research should be more explicitly concerned with aspects that cut across the state-market division, including the study of financialisation and ritual. For each of the themes explored here, the methodological message is the same: economic anthropologists should continue their concern for disenfranchised social groups, continue to carry out research marked by long-term physical engagement and continue to develop concepts that can be applied across differences of time and space. This will allow us to provide analyses of states and markets that promise to be both distinctive to our discipline and relevant for society at large. States and markets as different entities For more than a decade, anthropologists approaching states and markets as fundamentally different have tended to describe their relationship with reference to neoliberalism. Drawing on a recent review by Tejaswini Ganti (2014: 91), we can distinguish at least four different meanings of neoliberalism. Firstly, it refers to a model of development with specific roles for labour, capital and the state, and since capital tends to be privileged in this model some have described neoliberalism as a class-based project (Harvey 2005). Secondly, the term denotes historically-situated economic policies including fiscal prudence, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalisation, precarious work regimes and privileging lenders over borrowers in times of debt default. Thirdly, it refers to treating notions linked to market exchange as central to interpreting and evaluating human action. Lastly, it denotes a mode of governance that fosters market-based values such
Public-Private Partnerships: The Trojan Horse of Neoliberal Development
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2004
This paper concerns the equity of partnerships between disadvantaged communities and local governments, and private sector firms to provide basic services and amenities. It examines the necessary conditions for fulfilling the expectation that such partnerships can serve the interests of the poor, and the critical role of state in intervention to level the playing field for such a partnership. In the context of decentralizing Third World governments, the paper highlights conceptual inconsistencies underlying public-private partnerships that lead them to deliver results opposite to those they claim. The paper points to the ambivalent and even deceptive core of such partnerships that enables their effective operation as a form of privatization, advancing the interests of the private sector and the market under the banner of sharing power with the poor and the state.