Discipline, debt and coercive commodification:Post-crisis neoliberalism and the welfare state in Ireland, the UK and the USA

Ireland, the UK and the USA are heterogeneous examples of liberal worlds of welfare capitalism yet all three countries were deeply implicated in the 2008 global financial crisis. Examining these three countries together provides the opportunity to further develop an international comparative political economy of instability in the context of the globalised and financialised dimensions of Anglo-liberal capitalism and disciplinary governance. Our analysis is guided by the concept of disciplinary neoliberalism (Gill, 1995) through which we explore: (i) the dynamics that have shaped the impacts of and responses to the Great Recession; (ii) the ways in which state-market relations, shaped by differentiated accommodations to market imperative or market discipline, have been used as disciplinary tools and how these have interacted with existing social divisions and iii) the implications for shaping conditions for resistance. We suggest that the neoliberal pathways of each country, whilst not uniform, mark a ‘step-change’ and acceleration in the operation of disciplinary neoliberalism, and is particularly evident in what we identify as the coercive commodification of social policy

Social Science Disciplines in Complex Development Contexts - the Professional Dimension of Reputation Management.

The chapter addresses the dynamics of reputation management at the operational level of universities, specifically the level of local organization of disciplines within departments. Through a comparative historical study of the political science and sociology departments, respectively, at the University of Oslo, covering a period of approximately 50 years (1965–2016), we disclose changing concerns and audiences between the local disciplines as well as within them when it comes to managing their professional reputation. We find that the dynamics of reputation management at the local operational level of university disciplines are contingent upon their local institutional environment, but also their disciplinary cultural and cognitive traits. However, we also find that the effect of the disciplinary cultural and cognitive traits fades in favor of the local institutional environment and specifically the institutionalized expectations of presenting themselves as organizations, as we move historically from the 1965–2016