Theoretical starting points: The field of emerging research universities

Efforts to prevent or persuade increased emphasis on academic research at state colleges and regional universities demonstrate how emerging fields of higher education can be influenced through various policies and incentives. Utilizing the concept of strategic action fields (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012), this paper explains changes in organizations by providing insight into how state policy influences constructed, meso-level social orders. Expanding on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1996) concept of fields, defined as the structured arena where practice occurs, strategic action fields extend the analysis to that of groups of actors competing for advantage and resources to increase their capabilities and reputations.Educatio

Neoliberalism’s Market Morality and Heteroflexibility: Protectionist and Free Market Discourses in Debates for Legal Prostitution

In August of 1999, not too long before narratives of sex trafficking began to dominate prostitution policy debates, the residents of a small town in Nevada debated closing the city’s legal brothels. Citizens crowded the hearing hall, holding signs about protecting family and community values. But instead of opposing prostitution, as one might have expected, most public commenters echoed a sign that read, “Pro Family, Pro Prostitution.” Drawing on an analysis of the testimony of the 51 citizens in attendance at that public hearing and ethnographic data gathered in four visits to Evenheart over a one-year period, this paper examines the arguments that framed support for, and opposition to, legal prostitution at this critical historic juncture. The research finds important differences in the ways particular neoliberal discourses can be deployed to the wide range of sexual, gender, and relationship values that constitute heterosexuality. Both supporters and opponents drew on market logics – defined for purposes of this paper as a neoliberal individualism and economic rationality of free trade, scarcity, competition, and self-regulation – as well as on discourses of morality and the family, but each side used them in strikingly different ways. Brothel supporters drew on market logics to defend and support individualized family values and a marketdriven morality, while brothel opponents deployed market logics that supported conservative heteronormative values and morals. I suggest that these deployments of market logics, particularly among brothel supporters, are instances of “heteroflexibility” in neoliberal governance, that is, flexibility in the various gender, sexual, and relationship norms that collectively make up heterosexuality as an institution. Key to the intensity of heteroflexibility’s challenge to heterosexuality, both then and today, is whether market logics use free choice or protection discourses in the neoliberal governance of sexuality

Capitalist Reproduction in Schooling: The social control of marginalized students through zero tolerance policies

Due to increasing media focus, there has been growing concern that U.S. students and the school environment are increasingly violent, leading the public to believe that school discipline should become more strict and punitive (Giroux 2003; Schept, Wall, & Brisman 2014). However, scholars argue that there is little evidence that current practices of school discipline have made the school environment safer, but instead have criminalized the school and are disproportionately targeting students of color and disabled students (Beger 2002; Civil Rights Project 2000; Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera 2010; Hirschfield 2008; McNeal & Dunbar 2010; U.S. Government Office of Accountability 2018). The expansion of zero-tolerance policies and the surveillance culture in schools have played a large role in the creation of the school-to-prison pipeline, in which students are increasingly being suspended and expelled from school and coming in contact with the juvenile justice system. This research explores the relation that zero tolerance policies function as the neoliberal social control mechanism to control students who are seen to have “no market value and [are] identified as flawed consumers because of their associations with crime and poverty, redundancy and expendability” (Sellers & Arrigo 2018, p. 66). Zero-tolerance policies function as the latest manifestation of capitalist reconstitution of educational institutions, through curricula, student conduct codes, disciplinary procedures, and the hidden curriculum, constructed of the language of capitalism, disproportionately targeting students of color (Bowles & Gintis 2011). A series of OLS regression analyses were conducted to analyze how community partners and school resource officer involvement impact the rate of suspension, expulsion, and combined school disciplinary measures using the School Survey on Crime and Safety Survey 2005-06 data. It was found that community partners and school resource officers have a positive and negative relationship with disciplinary rates. This research further substantiates that racial and ethnic minority students receive disproportionate rates of discipline

Consensus vs. freedom of consensus upon freedom? From Washington disorder to the rediscovery of Keynes

The paper retraces the history of the debate on the Washington Consensus according to the four-stage partition Consensus, Confusion, Contention, Conclusion, with particular attention to the criticisms evoked by the use of it as a tool for the “integrationist agenda” of the Nineties. We argue that the excessive shrinking in policy space available to developing countries is among the key factors explaining why the saga has rapidly come to a Conclusion, leaving room to the rediscovery of the “embedded liberalism” of Bretton Woods. It is our aim to show, however, that Keynes’s plan for a new international order inspired by a consensus on freedom rather than discipline, is still the most relevant model for a new system of national capitalisms enhancing member countries’ freedom to choose.